by tertiary syphilis, Martin Bormann is the acting Chancellor of Germany, and the inner-circle Nazis—Joseph Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Hermann Göring, Arthur Seyss-Inquart—vie to succeed Hitler as the Führer of the Greater Germanic Reich. Technologically, the Nazis have drained the Mediterranean Sea for lebensraum and farmland, developed and used the hydrogen bomb, developed rockets for travelling throughout the world and into outer space, such as the colonization missions to the Moon, and to the planets Venus and Mars. Plot The principal setting of The Man in the High Castle is the city of San Francisco in the Pacific States of America, where Japanese judicial racism has enslaved black people and reduced the Chinese residents to second-class citizens; secondary settings are in the Rocky Mountain States. In 1962, fifteen years after Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany won World War II, in the Pacific States of America, the businessman Robert Childan owns an antiques shop that specializes in Americana for a Japanese clientele who fetishize cultural artifacts of the former United States. One day, Childan receives a request from Nobusuke Tagomi, a high-ranking trade official, who seeks a gift to impress a Swedish industrialist named Baynes. In fact, Childan can readily fulfill Tagomi's request because the shop is well-stocked with counterfeit antiques made by the metal works Wyndam-Matson Corporation. Recently fired from his job at a Wyndam-Matson factory in San Francisco, Frank Frink (formerly Fink) is a secret Jew and war veteran who agrees to join a former co-worker to start a business making and selling jewelry. Meanwhile, in the Rocky Mountain States, Frank's ex-wife, Juliana Frink, works as a judo instructor in Canon City, Colorado, and, in her private life, has entered a sexual relationship with Joe Cinnadella, an Italian truck driver and ex-soldier. Throughout the story, the characters make important decisions based upon their interpretations of prophetic messages from the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination. Some characters also secretly read The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel of speculative fiction that presents an alternative history of World War II, wherein the Allies defeat the Axis. The Nazis ban the novel in the United States, but the Japanese allow its publication and sale in the Pacific States of America. Threatening to expose the Wyndam-Matson Corporation's supplying counterfeit antiques to Childan, Frink blackmails Wyndam-Matson for money to finance his jewelry business. Tagomi and Baynes meet, but Baynes repeatedly delays conducting any real