The Man in the High Castle (1962)

The Man in the High Castle is a 1962 alternate history novel by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The novel is set in the former United States in 1962, fifteen years after the Axis Powers defeated the Allies in World War II and after the U.S. surrendered to Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan.

The Man in the High Castle's point of divergence from our own world occurred when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was assassinated in 1933 by Giuseppe Zangara. He was succeeded by Vice President John Nance Garner, who was subsequently replaced by John W. Bricker. Neither man was able to surmount the Great Depression, and both clung to an isolationist policy regarding the approaching war. This meant that the United States lacked sufficient military capabilities to assist Great Britain and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, or itself when the Japanese Empire entered the war in 1941 in this world.
The USSR collapsed in 1941 and was occupied by the Nazis, while most of the Slavic peoples were exterminated. The Slavic survivors of the war were confined to "reservation-like closed regions". The Japanese, on the other hand, entirely destroyed the United States' Pacific fleet in a much more expansive attack on Pearl Harbor. Due to Japan's expanded military capabilities, it was able to invade and occupy Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and the Southwestern Pacific in the early 1940s. Afterwards, the United States fell to the Axis, with many important cities suffering great damage.
By 1948, Allied forces had surrendered to Axis control. The Eastern Seaboard fell under German control, while California, Washington, Oregon, and parts of Nevada were ceded to Japanese rule. The Rocky Mountain States, the Midwest and much of the South West remained as a buffer between the Axis powers. The South was resurrected as a quasi-Nazi puppet state, much like Vichy France. The German Reich and Japanese Empire became the chief superpowers, and entered a Cold War of their own as a result.
After Adolf Hitler was incapacitated by syphilis, the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann, assumed the leadership of Germany. The Nazis created a colonial empire and continued their mass murder of races they considered inferior, murdering Jews in the puppet United States and other areas they controlled, and also carrying out massive genocide in Africa.
Nazi Germany continued its rocketry programs, so that by 1962, it has a working system of commercial rockets used for intercontinental travel and has also pursued space exploration, by sending rockets to the Moon, Mars and Venus (as mentioned early in the book, the Germans were able to send men to Mars at the end of the fifties). In a remarkable presage of later, real-life NASA concepts, PKD describes the Nazis' "...bustling robotic factories across the solar system". The novel mentions television as a new technology in Germany. The Japanese Empire is portrayed as behind the Third Reich in technological development. However, the novel mentions that there are severe supply shortages in Germany, owing to the sums invested in space exploration, and that the economy is on the brink of collapse.
During the novel, Martin Bormann dies and other Nazis, such as Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich (whose real-life assassination was foiled in the novel), fight to become the Reich Chancellor (German: Reichskanzler). Various factions of the Nazi party are described as either seeking war with Japan or as being more interested in colonizing the solar system.