Friday, July 9, 2010




 
The Iron Dream is a metafictional 1972 alternate history novel by Norman Spinrad.
The book has a nested narrative that tells a story within a story. On the surface, the novel presents an unexceptional science fiction action tale entitled Lord of the Swastika. This is a pro-fascist narrative written by an alternate history version of Adolf Hitler, who in this timeline emigrated from Germany to America in 1919 after the Great War, and used his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp-science fiction illustrator and later a successful science fiction writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed adventure stories under a thin SF-veneer. The nested narrative is followed by a faux scholarly analysis by a fictional literary critic, Homer Whipple, of New York University.

One of the key visual elements in the book with in a book (and often used by the various cover artists of the novel) features a Nazi motorcycle gang called the Black Avengers and their leader Stag Stopa.
The (life-hating halfwits) of the American Nazi Party put the book on its recommended reading list,...despite the obvious satirical intent of the work.  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..."

1 comment:

LittleInsect said...

I read this back when it first came out (and still have a copy kickinfg around somewhere). Excellent read