High Castle

Current Year: 1962

''“Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined... or one great figure... or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.”''

-Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

 The Current Year in this universe is 1962.

The United States Constitution has been rescinded and the government completely replaced by that of foreign powers, dividing the country in two along the Rocky Mountains. Owning firearms or even heterodox media (which includes things like A Farewell to Arms, the published scientific papers of Albert Einstein or the Christian Bible) is now punishable by death in Western countries. Big Ben no longer stands after being destroyed in the Blitz and landmarks like the Statue of Liberty have been demolished by the government as symbols of “impotent defiance”.

Ethnic Jews, Poles and several other racial minorities have almost ceased to exist, and those that survive continue to do so under assumed names and fabricated life stories.

Members of the secret police carry portable “torture kits” in their cars for on-site information-extraction from suspected subversives and are completely authorized for extrajudicial execution when the need arises. If not immediate execution, slave-labor, death-marches or human medical experimentation might await those that government wishes to make disappear.

Traces of Christianity and its imagery are nearly impossible to find in Western countries where they were once a defining cultural force. Where religion is still practiced, it’s largely replaced with mysticism such as the I Ching in Pacific regions or secularist dogma based on Darwin and other venerated, government-approved scientists in the western sphere, punctuated by the odd vague admiration but still secular reverence of Norse mythology. Vatican City has been plundered and demolished by the Italian government. Religions like Islam and Hinduism are now largely exclusive to territories controlled by Palestine and India, respectively, which are kept on tight leashes by the ruling global powers and are really only nominally free to function on their own.

Washington, D.C. is a desolate, uninhabited, radioactive graveyard for thousands of civilians and many members of the former American government. The Soviet Union, along with Communism in general, has ceased to exist, with Russia left a smoldering testament to total war.

Italian troopers are raiding sub-Saharan Africa for resources in a completely one-sided military conquest, and there are rumors of genocide being perpetrated with chemical or even nuclear weapons.

The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere dominates the Pacific and dictates trade between the nations, backed up with unbeatable navy and air force prowess. The flag bearing the Imperial Rising Sun flies over Beijing, Sydney and San Francisco while Swastika banners hang in Paris, Madrid, London and New York.

Los Angeles is preparing for a visit from their ruling monarchs, Prince Morihiro Higashikuni and Princess Shigeko. In Berlin, Rudolf Hess and Joseph Goebbels are locked in a covert power-struggle for the right to succeed the 73-year-old Führer when he eventually dies. The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still stand. The technologically advanced and utilitarian Greater Nazi Reich (which has partially absorbed Fascist Italy after the recent death of Benito Mussolini) and the traditionalist, highly spiritual Japanese Empire are now engaged in a tense cold war with one another with the threat of global thermonuclear war looming in the future. So called Axists in both the Japanese Empire and the Reich seek to forestall the potential of war, believing that stability benefits from or even relies on two empires keeping each other in check, while Contra-Axists are calling for their own empires to dominate the entire Earth and for the destruction of all else.

This is a world that has become the totalitarian nightmare hypothesized in our universe during the middle of the 20th century where fascism has triumphed over democracy. This is a world where 10 years ago the Axis Powers achieved complete and total victory over the Allies in the Second World War and came to be the dominate forces of the Earth.