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mrjim's review
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
0.5
david_agranoff's review
4.0
Episode of the Dickheads Podcast I was on about this book:
https://soundcloud.com/dickheadspodcast/dick-adjacent-9-the-iron-dream
This is a really weird book to review. This is a deeply weird and misunderstood book that is both a work of genius and a steaming pile of shit at the same time. I mean Norman Spinrad who wrote it is the underrated genius and he knew full well that he was was taking a literary dump.
It is one of those ideas punk rockers have all the time it is very much like when band dudes sit around and say "wouldn't be hilarious if we did this insane band that pissed people off". Some remain jokes like the Anthrax guys doing Stormtroopers of Death sometimes they become serious bands like Vegan Reich and Racetraitor. (Look them up ) Anyhoo Norman Spinrad if you don't know is a progressive anarchist science fiction writer who in the early '70s was living in England. He and his friend editor and author Michael Moorcock were talking about how you construct a Sword and Sorcery novel. It occurred to Spinrad that the very nature of pulp sci-fi in the era was in need of a little satire, well a very big satire.
The really weird thing is that most satires are funny, they operate with tongue in cheek and are fun. Sci-fi has a long tradition of the humorous satire from Pohl and Kornbluth's Space Merchants, Vonnegut, and probably most famous in Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy. Plenty of Sci-fi satire is laugh out loud funny but this satire is played very seriously. The idea was what if Hitler wrote a space opera?
Spinrad once said "There is something deeply disturbing in the congruence between the commercial pulp action-adventure formula and the Ubermensch in jackboots" It is a deeply serious story in the eyes of the author Adolf Hitler, you see inside the Iron Dream is an experiment of alternate history with a novel inside it called Lord of the Swastika and Spinrad wrote it imagining that Hitler had become a pulp Sci-fi writer and not an evil dictator.
How interesting for a Science Fiction writer, who would twice serve as the president of SFWA to blister the genre with such a scathing meta commentary but it is genius in many ways. The problem is the Hitler novel is a slog and tough read. Hitler even with help from Spinrad is a terrible sci-fi author. As interesting as the meta-commentary is the Hitler novel is damn awful. I mean it was meant to be a fascist fantasy of a dying madman. In this history, the Nazi party fell apart and Adolf like many Germans immigrated to New York where he became an illustrator and a sci-fi writer with a cult following. In this fake history, Hitler died soon after writing the novel and was given the 1954 Hugo award (That in our reality that went to Bradbury for Farahenheit 451), and fans cos-played his thousand-year Reich at sci-fi cons.
So yeah Lord of the Swastika is a terrible novel but the Iron Dream is a complicated work of genius bound to confuse those who don't look past the surface. It is purple prose dialed to 11 on the juvenile fascist machismo scale. The thing is it is intentional and Spinrad commenting on the genre of pulp adventure like Robert Howard is totally savage and great.
Spinrad said "What drew me to write it was that the economic and political reasons for the rise of Nazi Germany never convinced me. Hitler was a media genius, and Nazism a psychosexual phenomenon. … Like a certain species of “heroic fantasy.” Hitler was a big fan of Wagnerian Opera at a time when “Space Opera” had a big fandom too."
So you see The Iron Dream is 2-star read, a 5-star experiment of political satire and that leaves me feeling it should get a 4-star average. The novel ends with a fictional afterword about Hitler and a very critical review of the novel. In many ways that is all you need to read. This message would probably have worked better as a novella or a short story - with Fictional biographical parts of Hitler's alternative life mixed in.
That would have been easier on the reader but it would have hurt the point Spinrad was trying to make. This is a bitter pill and it is going to taste bad going down. It has too. There is a key point on the last page of the essay it is the most important point.
“For Feric Jaggar is essentially a monster: a narcissistic psychopath with paranoid obsessions. His total self-assurance and certainty is based on a total lack of introspective self-knowledge. In a sense, such a human being would be all surface and no interior. He would be able to manipulate the surface of social reality by projecting his own pathologies upon it, but he would never be able to share in the inner communion of interpersonal relationships. Such a creature could give a nation the iron leadership and sense of certainty to face a mortal crisis, but at what cost? Led by the likes of a Feric Jaggar, we might gain the world at the cost of our souls. No,”
Dickheads Podcast episode recording soon, so stay posted here. Or follow the Dickheads PKD podcast on soundcloud, Facebook, twitter and what have you.
https://soundcloud.com/dickheadspodcast/dick-adjacent-9-the-iron-dream
This is a really weird book to review. This is a deeply weird and misunderstood book that is both a work of genius and a steaming pile of shit at the same time. I mean Norman Spinrad who wrote it is the underrated genius and he knew full well that he was was taking a literary dump.
It is one of those ideas punk rockers have all the time it is very much like when band dudes sit around and say "wouldn't be hilarious if we did this insane band that pissed people off". Some remain jokes like the Anthrax guys doing Stormtroopers of Death sometimes they become serious bands like Vegan Reich and Racetraitor. (Look them up ) Anyhoo Norman Spinrad if you don't know is a progressive anarchist science fiction writer who in the early '70s was living in England. He and his friend editor and author Michael Moorcock were talking about how you construct a Sword and Sorcery novel. It occurred to Spinrad that the very nature of pulp sci-fi in the era was in need of a little satire, well a very big satire.
The really weird thing is that most satires are funny, they operate with tongue in cheek and are fun. Sci-fi has a long tradition of the humorous satire from Pohl and Kornbluth's Space Merchants, Vonnegut, and probably most famous in Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy. Plenty of Sci-fi satire is laugh out loud funny but this satire is played very seriously. The idea was what if Hitler wrote a space opera?
Spinrad once said "There is something deeply disturbing in the congruence between the commercial pulp action-adventure formula and the Ubermensch in jackboots" It is a deeply serious story in the eyes of the author Adolf Hitler, you see inside the Iron Dream is an experiment of alternate history with a novel inside it called Lord of the Swastika and Spinrad wrote it imagining that Hitler had become a pulp Sci-fi writer and not an evil dictator.
How interesting for a Science Fiction writer, who would twice serve as the president of SFWA to blister the genre with such a scathing meta commentary but it is genius in many ways. The problem is the Hitler novel is a slog and tough read. Hitler even with help from Spinrad is a terrible sci-fi author. As interesting as the meta-commentary is the Hitler novel is damn awful. I mean it was meant to be a fascist fantasy of a dying madman. In this history, the Nazi party fell apart and Adolf like many Germans immigrated to New York where he became an illustrator and a sci-fi writer with a cult following. In this fake history, Hitler died soon after writing the novel and was given the 1954 Hugo award (That in our reality that went to Bradbury for Farahenheit 451), and fans cos-played his thousand-year Reich at sci-fi cons.
So yeah Lord of the Swastika is a terrible novel but the Iron Dream is a complicated work of genius bound to confuse those who don't look past the surface. It is purple prose dialed to 11 on the juvenile fascist machismo scale. The thing is it is intentional and Spinrad commenting on the genre of pulp adventure like Robert Howard is totally savage and great.
Spinrad said "What drew me to write it was that the economic and political reasons for the rise of Nazi Germany never convinced me. Hitler was a media genius, and Nazism a psychosexual phenomenon. … Like a certain species of “heroic fantasy.” Hitler was a big fan of Wagnerian Opera at a time when “Space Opera” had a big fandom too."
So you see The Iron Dream is 2-star read, a 5-star experiment of political satire and that leaves me feeling it should get a 4-star average. The novel ends with a fictional afterword about Hitler and a very critical review of the novel. In many ways that is all you need to read. This message would probably have worked better as a novella or a short story - with Fictional biographical parts of Hitler's alternative life mixed in.
That would have been easier on the reader but it would have hurt the point Spinrad was trying to make. This is a bitter pill and it is going to taste bad going down. It has too. There is a key point on the last page of the essay it is the most important point.
“For Feric Jaggar is essentially a monster: a narcissistic psychopath with paranoid obsessions. His total self-assurance and certainty is based on a total lack of introspective self-knowledge. In a sense, such a human being would be all surface and no interior. He would be able to manipulate the surface of social reality by projecting his own pathologies upon it, but he would never be able to share in the inner communion of interpersonal relationships. Such a creature could give a nation the iron leadership and sense of certainty to face a mortal crisis, but at what cost? Led by the likes of a Feric Jaggar, we might gain the world at the cost of our souls. No,”
Dickheads Podcast episode recording soon, so stay posted here. Or follow the Dickheads PKD podcast on soundcloud, Facebook, twitter and what have you.
smcleish's review
4.0
Originally published on my blog here in September 2001.
Most alternate histories are simply narratives set in a world which differs from our own because an event in the past is supposed to have had a different outcome. The Iron Dream is, so far as I know, unique in science fiction because it purports to be a novel written in an alternate universe.
For The Iron Dream is supposed to present a posthumously published novel by an Adolf Hitler who emigrated to the States in the twenties to make a living as an artist for science fiction magazines before writing himself. Published in 1953, Sons of the Swastika (under which title no publisher would have touched Spinrad's novel) won the Hugo award for 1954, when in reality no award was made. The Iron Dream is a reprint, complete with scholarly commentary.
As a fantasy written by Hitler, Sons of the Swastika is pretty much what you might expect, displaying obsessions with racial purity and uniforms, and hatred for Communism thinly disguised as the Dominators who enslave millions telepathically. It manages to be exciting and readable, despite misgivings about its politics which are initially raised by the name of its author.
And this is surely the point that Spinrad wanted to make with The Iron Dream. It is not particularly about Hitler, revealing nothing about its supposed author other than what is part of the popular consciousness. Instead, it is a commentary on the appearance of right wing politics and disturbing psychological obsessions in the science fiction of the period. Sons of the Swastika may be more exaggerated than what has survived, but that is of course how satire makes its point.
There is a great deal of ironic parallel between the career of Feric Jaggar, hero of Sons of the Swastika, and the real Adolf Hitler, which is brought out by the commentary (even though this is supposed to be a product of the same alternate world). It refers several times to the unlikelihood of Jaggar's rise to power and the impossibility that Jaggar's demagoguery could unite a nation behind him in the way that it does. This is not very subtle, but it is quite effectively disturbing.
Most alternate histories are simply narratives set in a world which differs from our own because an event in the past is supposed to have had a different outcome. The Iron Dream is, so far as I know, unique in science fiction because it purports to be a novel written in an alternate universe.
For The Iron Dream is supposed to present a posthumously published novel by an Adolf Hitler who emigrated to the States in the twenties to make a living as an artist for science fiction magazines before writing himself. Published in 1953, Sons of the Swastika (under which title no publisher would have touched Spinrad's novel) won the Hugo award for 1954, when in reality no award was made. The Iron Dream is a reprint, complete with scholarly commentary.
As a fantasy written by Hitler, Sons of the Swastika is pretty much what you might expect, displaying obsessions with racial purity and uniforms, and hatred for Communism thinly disguised as the Dominators who enslave millions telepathically. It manages to be exciting and readable, despite misgivings about its politics which are initially raised by the name of its author.
And this is surely the point that Spinrad wanted to make with The Iron Dream. It is not particularly about Hitler, revealing nothing about its supposed author other than what is part of the popular consciousness. Instead, it is a commentary on the appearance of right wing politics and disturbing psychological obsessions in the science fiction of the period. Sons of the Swastika may be more exaggerated than what has survived, but that is of course how satire makes its point.
There is a great deal of ironic parallel between the career of Feric Jaggar, hero of Sons of the Swastika, and the real Adolf Hitler, which is brought out by the commentary (even though this is supposed to be a product of the same alternate world). It refers several times to the unlikelihood of Jaggar's rise to power and the impossibility that Jaggar's demagoguery could unite a nation behind him in the way that it does. This is not very subtle, but it is quite effectively disturbing.
peterseanesq's review
5.0
My Amazon review -
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1Y0RQYLT9HJV6/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1Y0RQYLT9HJV6/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
timstretton's review
3.0
The Iron Dream is brilliant idea let down by a flawed execution. The conceit is Adolf Hitler emigrates to the United States in the 1920s, despairing of his political vision ever being realised in Germany. Instead, he becomes a pulp sf writer, and The Iron Dream reproduces his "Hugo-Award winning" novel "Lords of the Swastika". This trashy novel satirises both sword and sorcery stories and Fascist iconography. At 80 pages it would have been a triumph; at 250 the carpet wears very thin.
The problem is that "Lords of the Swastika" is not a very good novel. That's kind of the point, of course: a novel written by Hitler sublimating his Nazi visions could only ever be terrible. What at first is engaging as satire rapidly becomes wearing.
The Iron Dream has some interesting things to say about fascism, and neatly draws the parallel with Conan the Barbarian-style fiction. But in the end, it's all too reminiscent of a Nuremberg Rally, with the unfortunate reader exposed at length to a wearying and tedious rant.
The problem is that "Lords of the Swastika" is not a very good novel. That's kind of the point, of course: a novel written by Hitler sublimating his Nazi visions could only ever be terrible. What at first is engaging as satire rapidly becomes wearing.
The Iron Dream has some interesting things to say about fascism, and neatly draws the parallel with Conan the Barbarian-style fiction. But in the end, it's all too reminiscent of a Nuremberg Rally, with the unfortunate reader exposed at length to a wearying and tedious rant.
dovid's review
challenging
dark
funny
fast-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
Spinrad's excellent response the the alraming prevalence and acceptance of fascist themes and ideas in pulp sci-fi literature.
Uncomfortable, thrilling, and uncompromising.
Uncomfortable, thrilling, and uncompromising.
oleksandrrr's review
5.0
Amazing book.
What does make typical science fiction (and fantasy) racist book? This is one of hundreds questions that I ask myself after reading this book.
What does make typical science fiction (and fantasy) racist book? This is one of hundreds questions that I ask myself after reading this book.
philippurserhallard's review
2.0
Blog review from 2007, imported to Goodreads 10 years later:
Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream is a novel that requires some explanation, and a certain amount of apology. It's the epitome of high concept,being the novel Adolf Hitler would have written if he'd given up on radical politics, emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1919 and become a hack author turning out pulp S.F. by the yard.
To be strictly accurate, though, that novel -- Lord of the Swastika -- comprises about 95% of The Iron Dream, the rest being a minimalist framing narrative consisting of a blurb, an author biog and a deliberately fatuous critical essay dissecting "Hitler"'s work. It's the latter which delivers the allohistorical punchline: in the absence of German expansionism, the Greater Soviet Union has risen to unquestioned dominance over Eurasia, and Hitler's novel -- not to mention the colourful eye-catching swastika iconography which he created for it -- has become an inspiration for a generation of Americans desperate to resist the Red menace.
"Hitler"'s narrative is a full-on psychotic foaming-at-the-mouth power-fantasy, where blond, muscular Trueman Feric Jaggar returns from the mongrelised mutant state of Borgravia to his ancestral fatherland of Heldon, seizes power through petty political thuggery (nobly described, of course), and then proceeds to cleanse his post-apocalyptic Earth of every nuclear-spawned mutant (especially the loathsome, insidious psychic parasites known as Dominators) to deviate from the true (and, it implicitly appears, exclusively Aryan) human genome.
Spinrad's aim is to highlight the inherent fascism -- the racism, the sexism, the militaristic fetishism, the sublimated homoeroticism -- of a good deal of ancestral pulp S.F. I certainly found myself overwhelmingly reminded at times of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman heptalogy, whose hero, eugenically bred by the noble godlike Arisians to rid the universe of the loathsome demonic Eddorians, rises to dominance over... well, you can probably fill in the rest.
I admit I found Spinrad's point a little... well, obvious... but that may be down to my having been born at around the time he was writing the thing, and having lived through a generation's worth of deconstruction surrounding these early texts and archetypes.
My real problem with The Iron Dream is that Lord of the Swastika is, of necessity, a very bad book indeed. There's a certain amount of fun to be had with stylistic pastiche, with phallic symbolism and Hitler's leather obsession, but this -- I promise -- palls very, very quickly. The reader gets the joke -- that this is alt-Hitler's fantasy of how his long-abandoned plans for political domination might have played out -- within the first few pages, and is left facing chapter after chapter dealing with a protagonist with no sense of irony or self-doubt, written by a "writer" equally devoid of both qualities, in which violent boorishness and unthinking kneejerk bigotry are elevated to the status of moral absolutes.
Someone with a monomania about racial and genetic purity may be capable of causing far more harm to the world than someone obsessed with train timetables, but they're not noticeably more interesting to read about.
Since Spinrad's "Hitler" controls the narrative, there aren't even any of the setbacks or "unexpected" twists which make a genuinely unironic adventure story palatable. A genuine pulp S.F. novel with this premise would at least have built up to a revelation that -- shock! -- Feric Jaggar, who controls an entire nation of Truemen with the force of his will is in reality (and unbeknownst to himself) not a Trueman at all, but a vile Dominator! ...Or that -- horror! -- despite their beliefs the Helder are not in fact unmutated humans, but are themselves mutants of some eventually-revealed kind, the true True Human Genome having vanished generations earlier.
Any decent pulp S.F. author would have seen the need for these or something similar, but "Hitler"'s utter confidence in Jaggar's divinely-ordained rightness rules out any such possibility. And so we slog through 235 pages of dreary, soul-pounding thuggery and self-aggrandisement to reach the (admittedly clever) punchline. Spinrad's novel could have worked so much better as a short story -- a lengthier critical essay, say, giving more historical and biographical background for the alternative Hitler and his world, and quoting frequent extracts from Lord of the Swastika to back up its points.
The actual existence of those 235 pages achieves nothing whatsoever that couldn't have been achieved by simply telling us about them. By writing them out in full, Spinrad has wasted hours of my time and I dread to think how much of his own.
The central conceit of The Iron Dream is, ultimately, quite a neat one, but it's nowhere near enough to power a novel. The book's also somewhat embarrassing to read on the train, emblazoned as it is with a swastika and the legend "A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL BY ADOLF HITLER!"
Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream is a novel that requires some explanation, and a certain amount of apology. It's the epitome of high concept,being the novel Adolf Hitler would have written if he'd given up on radical politics, emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1919 and become a hack author turning out pulp S.F. by the yard.
To be strictly accurate, though, that novel -- Lord of the Swastika -- comprises about 95% of The Iron Dream, the rest being a minimalist framing narrative consisting of a blurb, an author biog and a deliberately fatuous critical essay dissecting "Hitler"'s work. It's the latter which delivers the allohistorical punchline: in the absence of German expansionism, the Greater Soviet Union has risen to unquestioned dominance over Eurasia, and Hitler's novel -- not to mention the colourful eye-catching swastika iconography which he created for it -- has become an inspiration for a generation of Americans desperate to resist the Red menace.
"Hitler"'s narrative is a full-on psychotic foaming-at-the-mouth power-fantasy, where blond, muscular Trueman Feric Jaggar returns from the mongrelised mutant state of Borgravia to his ancestral fatherland of Heldon, seizes power through petty political thuggery (nobly described, of course), and then proceeds to cleanse his post-apocalyptic Earth of every nuclear-spawned mutant (especially the loathsome, insidious psychic parasites known as Dominators) to deviate from the true (and, it implicitly appears, exclusively Aryan) human genome.
Spinrad's aim is to highlight the inherent fascism -- the racism, the sexism, the militaristic fetishism, the sublimated homoeroticism -- of a good deal of ancestral pulp S.F. I certainly found myself overwhelmingly reminded at times of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman heptalogy, whose hero, eugenically bred by the noble godlike Arisians to rid the universe of the loathsome demonic Eddorians, rises to dominance over... well, you can probably fill in the rest.
I admit I found Spinrad's point a little... well, obvious... but that may be down to my having been born at around the time he was writing the thing, and having lived through a generation's worth of deconstruction surrounding these early texts and archetypes.
My real problem with The Iron Dream is that Lord of the Swastika is, of necessity, a very bad book indeed. There's a certain amount of fun to be had with stylistic pastiche, with phallic symbolism and Hitler's leather obsession, but this -- I promise -- palls very, very quickly. The reader gets the joke -- that this is alt-Hitler's fantasy of how his long-abandoned plans for political domination might have played out -- within the first few pages, and is left facing chapter after chapter dealing with a protagonist with no sense of irony or self-doubt, written by a "writer" equally devoid of both qualities, in which violent boorishness and unthinking kneejerk bigotry are elevated to the status of moral absolutes.
Someone with a monomania about racial and genetic purity may be capable of causing far more harm to the world than someone obsessed with train timetables, but they're not noticeably more interesting to read about.
Since Spinrad's "Hitler" controls the narrative, there aren't even any of the setbacks or "unexpected" twists which make a genuinely unironic adventure story palatable. A genuine pulp S.F. novel with this premise would at least have built up to a revelation that -- shock! -- Feric Jaggar, who controls an entire nation of Truemen with the force of his will is in reality (and unbeknownst to himself) not a Trueman at all, but a vile Dominator! ...Or that -- horror! -- despite their beliefs the Helder are not in fact unmutated humans, but are themselves mutants of some eventually-revealed kind, the true True Human Genome having vanished generations earlier.
Any decent pulp S.F. author would have seen the need for these or something similar, but "Hitler"'s utter confidence in Jaggar's divinely-ordained rightness rules out any such possibility. And so we slog through 235 pages of dreary, soul-pounding thuggery and self-aggrandisement to reach the (admittedly clever) punchline. Spinrad's novel could have worked so much better as a short story -- a lengthier critical essay, say, giving more historical and biographical background for the alternative Hitler and his world, and quoting frequent extracts from Lord of the Swastika to back up its points.
The actual existence of those 235 pages achieves nothing whatsoever that couldn't have been achieved by simply telling us about them. By writing them out in full, Spinrad has wasted hours of my time and I dread to think how much of his own.
The central conceit of The Iron Dream is, ultimately, quite a neat one, but it's nowhere near enough to power a novel. The book's also somewhat embarrassing to read on the train, emblazoned as it is with a swastika and the legend "A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL BY ADOLF HITLER!"
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