I admit to being a sucker for books and films that conjure up a world in which WWII had a different outcome. SS-GB by Len Deighton, recently made into an exciting TV series, is a fine example in book form, from a writer whose work I enjoy. Fatherland by Robert Harris is another very readable novel on this theme: it has also been made into a TV film (which I haven't yet seen), but I am surprised it hasn't become a Hollywood blockbuster; can you imagine CGI conjuring up the Berlin Albert Speer might have built (like the ancient Rome recreated in that splendid film, Gladiator).
I also had the privilege this year of seeing 'It Happened Here', the 1960s film that portrays with scary realism what London life might have been like if Hitler had conquered the UK. Some of the amateur actors playing roles as British people working for the Nazi state send shivers down your spine. However, the book I have just re-read is The Man in the High Castle by the legendary American SF writer, Philip K Dick. In this book the re-writing of history is taken to a new level; most of these imagined alternative scenarios simply involve Germany conquering Europe, but here President Roosevelt is assassinated, the US remains in depression and takes no part in the war, eventually being invaded jointly by Germany and Japan, who end up carving up the US, governing the East and West Coast respectively, leaving a neutral zone in between. But Dick doesn't leave it there, one theme of this short but complex novel is about a book which describes another alternative history in which the Allies won, but in a very different way from our history books. Dick seems to be trying to tell us that many outcomes were in fact possible; several of his characters use the ancient Chinese I Ching or Book of Changes to predict their future, there is a sense of randomness about the way the plot develops, supported by evidence that Dick himself used the I Ching to decide how events should unfold. This is a beguiling, hard to get your head round book, that makes you think and I like that. It has been made into long-running TV series by Amazon: sadly I couldn't watch past the first episode as I felt this was going to turn Dick's interesting scenario into a kind of soap opera!
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