Bring on the tough stuff - there’s not just one right answer.
- How much actual history do you need to know to get this story? For instance, do you need to know who Doctor Todt is or does this book tell you all you need to know about him?
- Do you think this book has a happy ending or a sad ending? Or a mixed ending? Which character has the happiest plot? Do you feel the book's ending was a climax or an anti-climax? (Put another way: was the ending exciting?)
- Who changes the most? Who gains and loses the most? Who faces the biggest moral dilemma? Who is the protagonist in this book? Why do you think so?
- If you were going to write a sequel, what would happen next?
- How does the "POV" affect your reading? What do you think this book would be like if it were told from an omniscient POV, a POV that could tell us what everyone thought all the time, or that could give us views that were separate from the characters? What if it were written from a single, first-person POV?
- The book has a pretty big cast of POV characters (Japanese official, American businessman, Jewish forger, German naval official, American woman, etc.). All the same, is there any other POV that would help fill out this story? What would that POV say? For instance, we get Tagomi, but not his assistant—what does he think of all this?
- How does the location of the setting affect your reading? We hear about Europe and Africa, but we never see those places. How do you think it would affect your reading if the book gave a global view instead of focusing on San Francisco and the Rocky Mountain states?
- How does the time of the location affect your reading? What do you think this book would be like if it took place right after the war's end in 1948? What would it be like to read this sort of book about your time period? Like, if the Nazis won in the 1940s, what would the 2010s look like?
- If you took the I Ching out, how would that change the book? What if Hawthorne Abendsen wrote a book that had our history? And what would you think if he wrote that book without the I Ching?
- Does this book ultimately support a particular philosophical point—or is it just one big question mark? Does this book have something to tell us about history and truth?
- Do you think that alternate history is interesting or useful? If you had to write an alternate history, what would be your "what if…" question?
- This question requires some outside reading or watching: if you've read or seen some alternate history, how does Man in the High Castle compare? Are there any big similarities between different alternate histories? (For some help, check out the TV Tropes page on Man in the High Castle and our "Best of the Web.")