The Man in the High Castle (1962) is Dick's most popular novel, and one of his best. Along with Time out of Joint (1959), this novel examines the split between the scene of ordinary life and the scene of power politics that is often featured in the short stories, though in this case it is not the suburbs and the national security state that are in troubled relation, but two kinds of experience of history. As in the stories and in Time out of Joint, The Man in the High Castle simultaneously engages with the possibility that the ordinary person can make a difference, and questions what it is that he might make a difference to—questions the boundaries of the material and the textual. Humanism and postmodernism are, again, enhanced and in conflict.

The novel's extrapolation of an alternative history in which Germany and Japan are imagined to have won the SecondWorldWar and occupied most of the United States is detailed, specific and stimulating. By contrasting the details of our own world, of The Man in the High Castle, and of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (the novel of alternative history that figures in the story), the reader can take part in an intelligent game of ‘what if?’. At the same time the action of the novel arouses strong sympathy, because it climaxes in an incident in which the Japanese official Tagomi, the most convincingly virtuous person in Dick's novels, saves the life of another sympathetic character, the Jewish-American Frank Frink. All this might mean that The Man in the High Castle is a successful humanist novel, and, if so, this would be significant. Many of Dick's statements in interviews and occasional pieces (see for instanceWilliams 1986: 64) suggest that it is the capacity for empathy that makes us human, a vital matter when the whole project of the novels can be seen as the defining of what true humanness is—an interpretation which the author encouraged and which critics have taken up. Dick's own writing often exemplifies this capacity for empathy —in this instance, in its intelligent understanding of mean and unpleasant characters such as Robert Childan and Joe Cinnadella.