The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a novel by Hawthorne Abendsen inside the novel "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K. Dick.
The Map of the Allied Victory according to "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy"
Story[]
The novel is about several persons in both Nazi Germany and the United States. In this timeline, the German troops are defeated in Stalingrad near the Caucasus. The British troops defeated Rommel's Afrika Korps in Egypt and stopped the Nazis, invading Malta. Then the British marched towards Turkey and met the remaining Soviet forces in Stalingrad. The Germans are pushed back to Berlin which at last falls to Britain in a daylong streetfight. The novel mentioned a tank attack in Tiergarten-Bezirk; Berlin.
Churchill's Germany
After Germany's defeat, it was split according to Winston Churchill's plans. Germany was split north to south. East Prussia was split between the USSR and Poland. South Germany annexed Austria, Hungary and Carpathian Ruthenia.
And now, the world is split between two respective spheres of influence; The British Commonwealth and the US-Free Trade Association. The Soviet Union collapses between 1950-1960. The remainders in Europe joined Britain, while Karafuto and the Kuril Islands are returned to Japan and the Siberian-Far Eastern Republic joins the US-FTA. China is heavily influenced by the U.S. and turned into a federal republic, led by Chiang Kai-shek, excluding Tibet which is a British-Commonwealth member. The U.S. (under FDR and Rexford Tugwell) and Britain enacted reforms that make them wealthier. Racism ceased to exist in the U.S., but Britain rules an apartheid-like separation system. This and the massive Chinese minority (which is pro-American) in Singapore and Malaya start a conflict between the USA and Britain. The tensions between the superpowers even lead into a war, which Britain (still under Churchill) wins.
Reactions on the book in Japan and Germany[]
The Japanese let the book circulate in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and the Rocky Mountain States (which is in loose connection with the Pacific States of America in the novel). They don't see anything dangerous in the novel and even Japanese likes reading the book.
However, the Nazis banned the novel for every race and individual in the Reich and started plans to assassinate the author Hawthorne Abendsen, which lives in or near to Cheyenne, WY. This failed and there are no other known plans in this direction. But even in the American Reich the book is, on the one or other way, available.
Trivia[]
- According to Hawthorne Abendsen, the novel was heavily influenced by his questions on the I Ging (I Ching, Yi Jing), an ancient Chinese oracle book. Everything in the novel, such as characters, timeline, etc, was written "as the I Ging said"
- Some fans of the novel "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K. Dick, where this novel is mentioned see this as the way, Dick could had written his story of an Axis Victory.