The Man in the High Castle: what if the Axis had won?

On this day, 8 May 1945, the world exhaled in relief. Nazi Germany signed its unconditional surrender. Squares in London, New York and Paris overflowed with people celebrating — Victory in Europe Day, VE Day. It was the end of six years of war in Europe. Eighty-one years ago.

It's a very good day to watch a series that imagines, with cold and unsettling detail, what would have happened if it had gone the other way.

Philip K. Dick and the impossible question

In 1962, Philip K. Dick published The Man in the High Castle — a science fiction novel set in an America where the Axis won the Second World War. The following year the book won the Hugo Award for best science fiction, the genre's most important prize. It was a rare honour for an author who spent most of his time on the margins of the publishing industry.

Dick was the sort of writer who couldn't leave a question alone. Blade Runner is based on one of his books. So is Minority Report. And Total Recall. His obsession was always the same: what is real? What defines us as human? In The Man in the High Castle, he brought that obsession into a historical setting and built something that feels at once like a cold intellectual exercise and a very specific nightmare.

In the book, the United States of 1962 is split into three parts: the west coast, occupied by the Japanese Empire; the east, absorbed into the Greater Nazi Reich; and a neutral strip in the middle, the Rocky Mountain States, where something resembling freedom still exists — precariously. The tension between the two victorious powers is the engine of the plot. And inside that world there is a mysterious writer named Hawthorne Abendsen, who lives in a castle high on a hill and has written a banned book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy — a work of alternate fiction in which the Allies won the war.

It's Philip K. Dick writing about a character who writes real history. No wonder the book still ties heads in knots.

The Amazon series: four seasons of discomfort

In November 2015, Amazon Prime Video released the series adaptation. It ran until November 2019, across four complete seasons. The show keeps the book's central premise — a divided America, a victorious Axis, 1962 as an alternate present — and expands the universe with new characters and parallel storylines.

The protagonist is Juliana Crain, played by Alexa Davalos, a woman living in San Francisco under Japanese rule who begins to question the established order after coming into contact with banned films. Not just any films: footage showing a different world, one where the Allies won. It's those films — and whoever is keeping them — that drive the whole plot. The man in the high castle exists in the series too, and the mystery around him sustains the tension through the first two years.

On the opposite side of the country, in Nazi territory, is Joe Blake, played by Luke Kleintank — a young American raised inside the Reich's system. The series uses these two characters to map the two poles of a defeated society: those who resist and those who collaborated. And every shade of grey along the way between them.

Rufus Sewell and the banality of evil on screen

I can say without much hesitation that John Smith is one of the most disturbing characters I've seen in a science fiction series. Rufus Sewell plays an American who embraced Nazism after the defeat, rose through the ranks of the regime and became Obergruppenführer — one of the most powerful men in the Reich's American territory.

What makes Smith unbearable isn't explicit brutality. It's his normality. He's a present father, loyal to his family, strategic, intelligent. And he is all of that while wearing the SS uniform and taking decisions that result in death without so much as a blink. Sewell refuses the easy shortcut of the Machiavellian villain — he finds the character's humanity and uses precisely that humanity to make everything more disturbing.

Hannah Arendt described Nazism as "the banality of evil" — horror that comes not from monsters, but from ordinary people who, through inertia, ambition or fear, normalise the intolerable. Smith is that idea in the form of a character. And that's why he stays with you.

Why The Man in the High Castle still unsettles in 2026

The series is ten years old. But the questions it asks haven't aged.

How does a society normalise the absurd to the point where it looks like routine? What leads a person to collaborate with a system they know to be wrong — and to keep collaborating even when there's an option to walk away? Where does resistance live when the regime has been entrenched for two decades and growing up inside it is the only thing you've ever known?

Dick wrote the book in 1962, at the height of the Cold War, when humanity was living two buttons away from a nuclear ending. Amazon released the series in 2015, at a moment of rising political polarisation across the Western world. Both versions found their audience at a point when the questions made immediate sense. In 2026, they still do.

The first two seasons are the strongest. The show loses its footing a little in the later ones — which is almost inevitable once you start pulling on the threads of such an elaborate mythology. But the universe it builds is rich enough to hold your interest to the end.

Worth the binge in 2026

If you've never seen it, it's available on Amazon Prime Video. It opens with two pilot episodes the platform released ahead of the full series — the audience response was strong enough to guarantee the order for the following seasons. Start there and see whether the universe hooks you.

If you want to go deeper, Dick's book is a stranger, more diffuse read than the series — it's less concerned with plot and more with existential ambiguity. They're two distinct objects that work in distinct ways. Both are worth it.

Today, 81 years after VE Day, is a good day to remember what was won on 8 May 1945 — and to watch a story that shows, very carefully, what might have been. Leave a comment if you've seen the series, and what you made of John Smith. I want to know whether he unsettled you in the right way.

For more science fiction that uses history as a mirror, there's the post on Metropolis from 1927 and what Fritz Lang already knew about robots and power. And if you want the best sci-fi of 2026 so far, the post on Project Hail Mary is up there — two films, different worlds, the same bet on the human being at the centre of the story.