Hello all!

I don't remember whether this topic was raised before, maybe about 2 years ago...

I hope many of you read Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle". I reread it yesterday, and my first impression is that Dick inserted "Yi Jing" (or I Ching, while this spelling is more commonly used in English-speaking countries) in his book mechanically, so to say. His characters use the Book rather primitively and get very clear answers. Yes, on the one hand this causes an interest in I Ching among fans of SF, but on the other - Dick didn't give some "exit", some more global picture behind the Book of Changes.

In a review I read also that there are 6 storylines in "The Man in the High Castle", but I counted only five main:
1. Frank Frink (or Fink) - creator of contemporary American art (bracelets, pins etc.);
2. Robert Childan - seller, owner of "American Artistic Handcrafts Inc.";
3. Mr. Nobosuke Tagomi - high official in "Nippon Times".
4. Mr Baynes, or Rudolf Wegener - an agent of Abwehr;
5. Juliana Frink - the former wife of Frank Frink.

But who is the sixth? Hugo Reiss, a German consul in San Francisco? Hawtorn Abendsen (but I doubt it because he appears only in the end of the book)? Or maybe his book "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" itself?

I'd like to read your impressions and opinions on this book.

Also, I'd be very glad to know some other books that base (so to say) on I Ching.

Peter

Hi Peter-
This is the only other I know of:
Lulla Rosenfeld, Death and the I Ching.
A Novel, with Yijing readings. Haven't read it.
Of course, the must-read novel for correlative thought in general is Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi or the Glass Bead Game.

Hi Peter, I was about to mention Rosenfeld's book but was having difficulties connecting to Clarity. That book is a thriller and written OK.

There is another recent book that uses the I Ching as a vague background for the plot. It is called "The angle quickest for flight" by Steven Kotler (a writer-at-large for GQ Magazine). It is also a thriller and quite good at that, at least for me. In it, one of the characters, who is almost obsessed with the Yi, is on a personal quest to find the elusive "65th Hexagram". He's not the main character of the book though.

Cheers,

Luis

There's a book called "Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street" by Payne, David, in which apparently the main character uses I Ching, but things don't turn out the way he expects. Haven't read it myself yet, I just got it from Amazon used books.

Um, I truly love Man in The High Castle, but it's too late for me to say anything clever.

It's a truly wonderful book, and that apparently, as per the bio by E. Carrere, it was really written rather like the description of Hawthorne Abendsen's way of writing. And I believe this. It was without question written using a different procedure than any other PKD novel.

Also, it's interesting that you think the way that the character's use it is sort of crude. It is, isn't it? PKD characters are like that, they're like , um? Very lopsided people, caricatures. And yet oddly real and deeply felt. I like the way they come up with these awful, intense, overwrought, even sometimes wrongheaded,readings. But note that if you really look carefully at the passages, it's the *character*'s reading that is lopsided or wierd, and the Author's understanding of Wilhelm's is almost always pretty good.

Kudos on remembering The Glass Bead Game, B! I truly loved that book too, and it has been like this controlling metaphor or touchstone for thinking about a lot of things.

FC