Well he’s correct in a way - in 1962 Philip K Dick wrote a novel called Man In The High Tower - several of his books have already been made into movies and television shows. He was mainly into extremely speculative, futurist Science-Fiction - Total Recall, Bladerunner, A Scanner Darkly - all from his pen.
He dealt heavily with Gnostic ideas, hidden knowledge and spiritual notions of early christianity, the divine veil - he wrote some very strong material. There are reports that he had "mental health issues” though who knows what that means - I don’t know anyone who doesn’t, but he was definitely not a neo-NAZI, philosophically - you can gather this from his writing, particularly in his
Exegesis where he describes his contact with VALIS - Vast Active Living Intelligence System - he had other things on his mind.
In short, i think the described proliferation of the alternate histories in the early 60s, and again now coincide with release and re-release of his novel - which was inspired by Ward’s novel using the same idea, that the other side had won the war, with the American Civil War…
PKD was a great mind and singular poet, his loss is sad for artists.
Hope you don’t mind me replying personally, don’t want to cause anyone to splash noise on the list because they feel compelled to disagree with me out of spite or annoyance or whatever,
hope you’re well,
JC
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Joshua Case
“International tensions. Mounting international tensions. First there were states of precautionary alert, then there were enhanced readiness centers. This was followed by maximum arc situational preparedness. We can measure the gravity of events by tracing the increasingly abstract nature of the terminology. One more level of vagueness and that could be it."
SS-GB: why the renewed obsession with alternative Nazi histories?