Redemption in Philip K. Dick'S The Man in the High Castle

Man in the High Castleis not a systematic theological tractate on the order of VALIS. It does, however, encompass significant amounts of basic Taoist and Christian theology. On the one hand, none of Dick's other novels comes close to containing the number of explicit references in MHC to Taoism, and the importance of these to the understanding of the novel has not been overlooked. On the other hand, the role of Christian theology in MHC has been almost completely ignored, and especially the vital part played by Dick's conflated comprehension of gnostic Christian dualism and fundamental Pauline theology. In MHC, Dick employs the standard terminology and categories of dualistic cosmologies to frame the redemptive journeys undertaken by each of the novel's five major characters-Robert Childan, Frank Frink, Nobosuke Tagomi, Rudolf Wegener, and Juliana Frink. These journeys towards personal (and sometimes corporate) salvation sit at the heart of MHC, and therefore to grasp the theological and philosophic content in which they are expressed is to apprehend better the meaning of the novel itself. MHC thus represents an important stage in an aspect of Dick's philosophy that has its origins no later than Time Out of Joint (1959) and that continues, in different manifestations, to its full flowering in the VALIS trilogy of the early 1980s. (LDT

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• The very idea of place”

  Andrew Lison, Andrew Lison Andrew Lison•Science Fiction Studies•2014

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