The Iron Dream
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The Iron Dream is an alternate history/science fiction novel written in 1972 by Norman Spinrad. In it, Spinrad tells a fairly standard sf action story as a way of showing just how close Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" - and much science fiction and fantasy literature - can be to the racist fantasies of Nazi Germany.
The book's premise is that "after dabbling in radical politics," Adolf Hitler emigrated to the United States in 1919 and became a science fiction illustrator, editor and author. He wrote the science-fantasy novel Lord of the Swastika in less than a month in 1953, shortly before dying of tertiary syphilis; Lord of the Swastika subsequently won the Hugo Award. The majority of The Iron Dream consists of a "reprint" of Lord of the Swastika, accompanied by a scholarly analysis by a fictional "Homer Whipple" of New York University.
In Lord of the Swastika, "Trueman" Feric Jaggar returns from the outlands of Borgravia to his ancestral land of Helder, only to find it overrun by half-breed mutants and normal-seeming but inhuman "Dominators". As the long-lost descendant of the last true King of Helder, Sigmark IV, he is the only one capable of wielding the legendary Great Truncheon of Stag Held. He embarks on a violent crusade for genetic purity, drawing a massive following, staging outdoor rallies and raising an army personally loyal to him.
It is a pastiche of Hitler's own life filtered through a fantasy lens, ending not in defeat but in global dominion: the Dominators represent the Jews (or communists, depending on your interpretation), Helder represents Germany, and Jaggar's initial return from Borgravia mirrors Hitler's own birth in Austria.
Critical reaction
The Iron Dream won critical acclaim, including a Nebula Award nomination. In 1982, the book was "indexed" (i.e., de facto banned) in Germany by the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien for its alleged promotion of Nazism; Spinrad's publisher, Heyne Verlag, challenged this in court and, until the ban was overturned in 1990, the book could be sold, but not advertised or publicly displayed.Ironically, the American Nazi Party put the book on its recommended reading list, despite Spinrad's intent of satirizing and mocking Nazi ideology.#redirect
In Spinrad's own words:
- "To make damn sure that even the historically naive and entirely unselfaware reader got the point, I appended a phony critical analysis of Lord of the Swastika, in which the psychopathology of Hitler's saga was spelled out by a tendentious pedant in words of one syllable.
- Almost everyone got the point...
- And yet one review appeared in a fanzine that really gave me pause. 'This is a rousing adventure story and I really enjoyed it,' the gist of it went. 'Why did Spinrad have to spoil the fun with all this muck about Hitler?'"
References
- Spinrad, Norman. "On Books: The Emperor of Everything". Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction, January 1988, pp. 173-186.
External link
- [The Iron Dream] publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
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