SO different from TV! 
 I bought this because I had been addicted to the Amazon television series of the same title, and wanted to read the original. To my amazement, I discovered that no more than about 5% of what I saw on television comes directly from the novel Which makes my task as a reviewer unusually difficult--to describe the book as though I had no idea of the film. But I'll try. 
 ====== 
 The setting is San Francisco in 1962, with some scenes in Colorado and Wyoming. Germany and Japan have won WW2 and divided the USA between them, with Nazi Germany taking the Atlantic seaboard and Midwest and Japan ruling the Pacific states; the Rockies are neutral territory. We have half-a-dozen major characters: Mr. Tagomi, the Japanese trade minister; Mr. Baynes, the pseudonym of a German Abwehr officer who flies over to see him; Robert Childan, a dealer in shady Americana prized by the Japanese market; Frank Frink, a craftsman who makes some of the things that Childan says; Juliana, Frank's ex-wife, visiting Colorado; and Joe Cinnadella, a delivery man from New York who hooks up with her. 
 This is the only book by Dick that I have read, though I gather he was primarily a science fiction writer. But you can forget that for nine tenths of this novel. Solely as alternative history, it is plausible and detailed. I must admit that I am filling in much of the visual detail from the television series, which is astounding in its consistency. But Dick does something else: he shows how people think, and he reinforces it by an extraordinary freedom of syntax, imitating the native language of each character. I found this especially effective with Mr. Tagomi, whose long interior monologue in the penultimate chapter is the novel's true climax. 
 Yes, there are secret police and spies and shady dealers and political rivalries galore in Dick's book, but its main level is that of ideas, not action. The title character, who is not glimpsed until the very end, is a writer, Hawthorne Abendsen, from Cheyenne, Wyoming. He has written a book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, that has been banned in Nazi-controlled states, because it offers a different alternate history, one in which the Allies won the war. The science fiction element comes from the slight suggestion that this outcome, similar but not identical to our own, might exist in parallel with that of an Axis victory. It is all the more effective for being little more than a whisper. 
 Had I read the book on its own, I would have given it high marks for historical ingenuity. I might have wished it longer, though, with the characters more fully fleshed out. And although I appreciate that Dick was not primarily interested in action, I might have liked the story lines brought to a more concrete conclusion. Let's say four stars, but a solid four. 
 ====== 
 Reading the book leaves me astonished at what the series developer Frank Spotnitz did with it on television. You can't call it an adaptation of the book, nor even based on the book. Rather, Spotnitz has taken Philip K. Dick's text as a launching pad from which he has fired a rocket going far into outer space. Rather magnificently so, in fact. The show is magnificent in its detail, and full of incident and action. It is crammed with secondary characters that are memorable in their two dimensions, and numerous major ones filled in to three or four. Abendsen's book has become instead a series of newsreel films, but Spotnitz plays even more brilliantly with Dick's idea of parallel universes. 
 Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Trade Minister Tagomi, a leading character in Dick's novel. The shot also shows the attention to detail that the series shares with its original. 
 But so much has been changed. Other than his work as a craftsman, practically nothing that happens to Frank Frink follows the book, and he is given a significant extended family. Tagomi, the most full realized character in the novel, is given even more dimensions on television; he is also set off by fascinating subplots involving his alter ego in the Japanese police, Inspector Kido. Juliana is similarly a far more complex character, as well as having a charisma that I missed in the novel. Her relationship with Joe, especially, takes an entirely different turn, indeed several of them. Most significantly of all, Spotnitz sets about a third of his scenes in New York, which Dick does not visit at all, and introduces a significant major character in the American SS chief, Obergruppenfuhrer Smith, brilliantly played by Rufus Sewell. It goes without saying that later seasons will depart more significantly from their source, so we should not look to Dick to give us the scenes in Germany itself that have been so effective in recent episodes... 
 Rufus Sewell gives a mesmerising performance as Obergruppenfuhrer John Smith, a major role that has no equivalent in the original book. 
 ...although there is a brief glimpse near the end of Dick's novel that suggests how these things might have developed.