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Books like The Man in the High Castle

Philip K. Dick · 1962 · US · science fiction
★ 3.58 Goodreads · 245,734 ratings

In an alternate 1962 where the Axis won WWII, a Japanese official and an American antique dealer discover a novel that imagines the Allies victorious.

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12 books for readers of The Man in the High Castle

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick · 1968 · US 95% match ★ 4.09 Goodreads · 537,562 ratings
shares: San Francisco, paranoid, philosophical · idea-driven, plain prose

In a radioactive, half-abandoned San Francisco, bounty hunter Rick Deckard hunts escaped androids who are almost indistinguishable from humans, while dreaming of owning a real animal.

VALIS

Philip K. Dick · 1981 · US 94% match ★ 3.91 Goodreads · 34,056 ratings
shares: paranoid, philosophical, cerebral · uncanny, idea-driven

Horselover Fat, a California science fiction writer who is also the narrator Phil Dick, believes a pink beam of light from a vast living intelligence has fired knowledge into his head, and sets out with his friends to find out what it wants.

The Separation

Christopher Priest · 2002 · UK 94% match ★ 3.69 Goodreads · 1,402 ratings
shares: alternate history, WWII, alt history, war · unhurried, cold

The historian Stuart Gratton comes across a puzzle in Churchill's memoirs, a J. L. Sawyer who seems to have been at once a bomber pilot and a conscientious objector, and the answer lies with Jack and Joe Sawyer, identical twins who rowed for Britain at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The Lathe of Heaven

Ursula K. Le Guin · 1971 · US 94% match ★ 4.12 Goodreads · 96,446 ratings
shares: Taoist, philosophical · uncanny, idea-driven

A man in a near-future Portland discovers he can reshape reality through his dreams, and a psychiatrist tries to exploit the power to fix the world.

Biography of X

Catherine Lacey · 2023 · US 92% match ★ 3.81 Goodreads · 17,497 ratings
shares: alternate history, cerebral, metafictional, alt history · unhurried, cold

After the death of her wife, a famous and secretive artist known only as X, a journalist sets out to write her biography, in an alternate America that was split apart after World War II.

The Plot Against America

Philip Roth · 2004 · US 92% match ★ 3.82 Goodreads · 72,057 ratings
shares: alternate history, paranoid, WWII, alt history · idea-driven, little action

An alternate history where Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in 1940 and steers America towards fascism, told through a Jewish family in Newark watching their country betray them.

The Peripheral

William Gibson · 2014 · US 90% match ★ 3.89 Goodreads · 34,424 ratings
Book 1 of 2 in The Jackpot
shares: cerebral · low-key, uncanny

A young woman in near-future rural America takes a gig testing what she thinks is a video game and witnesses a murder in a London seventy years ahead.

The Memory Police

Yoko Ogawa · 1994 · Japan 87% match ★ 3.68 Goodreads · 164,004 ratings
shares: totalitarian, Japanese · unhurried, plain prose

On a nameless island, objects and memories disappear one by one under the eye of the Memory Police, and a young novelist hides a friend who still remembers.

Timescape

Gregory Benford · 1980 · US 86% match ★ 3.73 Goodreads · 11,784 ratings
shares: cerebral · unhurried, plain prose

In 1998, with the world dying of ecological collapse, Cambridge scientists try to warn the past using tachyons, and in 1962 a young physicist in California picks up the strange noise in his experiment and tries to make sense of it.

All the Birds in the Sky

Charlie Jane Anders · 2016 · US 86% match ★ 3.59 Goodreads · 49,516 ratings
shares: San Francisco · plain prose, uncanny

A witch and a scientist grow up as best friends, then find themselves on opposite sides of a war between magic and technology.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Claire North · 2014 · UK 85% match ★ 4.03 Goodreads · 105,038 ratings
shares: philosophical, cerebral · low-key, cold

Harry August, born in 1919, lives his life, dies and is born again in the same year with all his memories, and at the end of his eleventh life a little girl brings him a message from the future.

The Years of Rice and Salt

Kim Stanley Robinson · 2002 · US 85% match ★ 3.77 Goodreads · 16,211 ratings
shares: alternate history, alt history · idea-driven, unhurried

When the Black Death kills nearly everyone in Europe, history runs on without it, and over seven hundred years a small group of souls are reborn again and again across Asia, Africa and the Americas, meeting in the bardo between lives.