Un livre qui a plusieurs fois failli me tomber des mains mais qui a le mérite de tenter une expérience intéressante, voire gratifiante : en s'imaginant à la place d'un Hitler confiné dans sa médiocrité et porté par des rêves de grandeur dans un monde qui n'a pas connu le IIIe Reich, Spinrad tente un coup totalement bluffant, d'une portée assez éloquente. Cependant, en essayant de coller au style putatif de cet écrivaillon refoulé, il n'hésite pas à plomber ses phrases d'une litanie de propositions et d'adjectifs à la gloire d'une humanité pure, eugénique et victorieuse des rebuts mutants. Les parallèles avec toute la philosophie nazie dont les exactions emplissent nos livres d'Histoire sont tels qu'on a du mal à ne pas mentalement vomir devant de tels immondices ; tout est tellement absurdement auréolé de cette mouvance nauséabonde qu'on peut difficilement se passionner pour les exploits de Feric Jaggar, le super Aryen sauveur de l'humanité face aux hordes bâtardes venues de l'Est. Seul le questionnement sur l'utilisation du nucléaire militaire peut éventuellement relever le niveau, le roman se situant dans une Europe parallèle se relevant péniblement après une apocalypse atomique.

Grandiosement abject, un livre qu'il faut avoir lu tout en méritant l'autodafé. ( )

The Iron Dream is definitely an interesting read though not particularly good. I guess the intention was to get across that Hitler as a fiction writer would definitely not be quality work, especially for those who have read Mein Kampf. The novel itself is supposed to be a hacky sci-fi-fantasy pulp story and a bad example at that extolling the perverted psychology of an unrealized fascist in pulp tropes. The premise of the book is what if Adolf Hitler had emigrated from Germany after WWI and found work in the pulp fiction industry. The novel consists of a paragraph synopsis and brief About the Author preface setting up the alternate history of the piece and an Afterword to the Second Edition framing the fictional final magnum opus of A. Hitler, titled Lord of the Swastika.
The book felt too long although I know it was meant to mimic the known quantities of Hitler’s writing. Although clever, the premise itself is a drawback in a variety of ways. The frequent type-o’s that appear throughout also seem to be deliberate as they are always of the letter swap variety. These kicked me out of the fictional world like speed bumps, maybe the reader should not be enjoying this story enough to get lost in it and remember that it is the sick fantasy of Adolf Hitler. Anyway, that was my impression.
There are a few bits, very few, of the story that describe a very interesting and very repulsive world especially as seen through the eyes of the fascist protagonist. My favorite passage in the book being:
Indeed, the countryside was rapidly becoming a putrid sinkhole of residual radiation and genetic contamination. Mutated crows cawed overhead through their grossly deformed pink beaks, their eyes bursting like the orbs of deep-sea fish. In the distance here and there, Feric spied the first patches of radiation jungle: great twisted mazes of purplish, reddish, and bluish vegetation, caricatures of grass the size of small trees, tangles of outsized vines like poisonous serpents, giant bloated cancerous flowers. Lurking in these puss pockets of radiation were creatures that defied description: wild dogs that dragged their intestines behind them in translucent sacs, multiheaded swine, featherless birds covered with running sores that oozed noxious venom, all manner of mutated vermin that bred ever-more-revolting variations from generation to generation.
There is also a description of a “troll” as “a gigantic mound of formless protoplasm, a pulsating amoeba of greenish translucent flesh” its surface “seethed with scores of huge lipless sucking mouths filled with rows of knifelike teeth”. These are just two of the three bits of this book that I actually liked as chunks of pulp beyond the premise. These do seem to be either inspired by or aimed at H.P. Lovecraft or at least his racially rooted paranoia. I did appreciate the psychological approach to deconstructing the pulp novel in the afterword section as well.
The first one hundred pages did hold my interest fascist feelings were bubbling all over the narrative already. The second batch of one hundred pages read like a Robert Heinlein novel, infatuated with zero-sum politics and military splendor and hierarchy. The next one-hundred pages after that were filled with repetitive battles one after the other. The remainder concluded with a devastating victory and apocalyptic imagery including the final image of outgoing perpetually produced spaceships.
The purpose of this novel seemed to be a jab at certain trends (and maybe authors) in the science-fiction field at the time as well as a direct mocking of sword & sorcery type heroes as directly stated in the afterword. Even though this was not the most entertaining or easiest read, I would still recommend this book to certain readers.
( )

Historical fiction taking place in 3000-something C.E., where Hitler's wypipo campaign is taking place in what's left of habitable land after nuclear war 1000-some years ago. Radioactivity has created a lot of mutants and the wypipo want to get rid of them. ( )

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. ( )

Lord of the Swastika - Like a thick layer of stinking hot asphalt poured out on a driveway, a thick layer of racism and jingoism coats every single page of this appalling novel spun from the cramped, warped mind of an upstart writer of science fiction, a scribbler by the name of Adolf Hitler. What the hell was this clown thinking?!! To write such garbage is an act of complete irresponsibility and an insult to the reading public. We can only raise our eyes to heaven and give thanks Adolf Hitler’s vision never became reality.

I trust it is abundantly clear the above paragraph is what an outraged reviewer might have written in the alternative world author Norman Spinrad created in his 1972 novel within a novel. And what a novel! The Iron Dream was banned in Germany for eight years, from 1982 to 1990, prompting Spinrad to report how both the political left and right railed against his book – the left claiming it promotes fascism and the right asserting the novel was denigrating to a great man (Adolf Hitler). Now there’s an author who can’t win!

Turning to Spinrad's The Iron Dream itself, on the surface we are given a kitschy bit of pulp, post-apocalypse melodrama entitled Lord of the Swastika written as alternative history by one Adolf Hitler, an illustrator and hack science fiction writer who emigrated from Germany to the United States after World War 1.

Lord of the Swastika opens more than a thousand years following global nuclear war, a cataclysm which brought about the end of civilization as we know it. The gene pool of nearly all forms of human life are corrupted by radioactive fallout - humans possessing complete physical and mental health are rare; most of humanity have blue skin, lizard scales or parrot beaks, or, even more insidious, are wizened half-breed mutants or subhuman "Dominators" desiring to hold sway over the earth by their powerful mind-controlling psychic powers.

What this sorry world needs is a charismatic leader who will ruthlessly eliminate all those malignant subhumans and rid the planet forever of their odious, subversive stench. Enter Ferric Jagger. The tall, blonde, robust Jaggar takes on the role of Führer and Heldon, the land of genetically pure humans, begins to bear a striking resemblance to Nazi Germany.

Why write such a novel? Norman Spinrad tells us he wanted to demonstrate the close connection ideology of the fascist Nazi variety has with archetypal hero myths and much science fiction and fantasy - created worlds where good guys courageously combat evildoing bad guys, where the shining light of truth and justice eventually overcomes all the loathsome forces of darkness no matter where they are found - Middle Earth, Mars, or the middle of one's very own country.

And to make absolutely, positively sure even the least sophisticated, unlettered clod of a reader understood his intent, Norman informs us: “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.” Unfortunately, even with this laborious literary effort to reach the lowest possible readerly denominator, a number of those muddleheaded clods didn’t get it – one reviewer even took the book as an exciting action story and complained how Spinrad spoiled all the fun by adding a whole bunch of crap about Adolf Hitler.

Alas, this has always been the risk for an author of satire - even a number of jaws dropped in stunned disbelief back in the 1700s after reading Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Sad fact: masterfully constructed satire requires a degree of subtle understanding beyond the capacity of many readers. And I can assure you The Iron Dream is one such satire masterfully constructed. And much of the pleasure in reading Spinrad’s novel is to suspend critical judgement and wholeheartedly support Ferric Jagger in his quest to conquer the world.

The Iron Dream is an intensely aesthetic dream, where every pore of Helder purebred skin tingles with excitement beholding the immense power, speed, dash and style of their new society, a land where every true human vows fanatical allegiance to Ferric Jagger. Here’s an example of the glowing rhetoric enlivening nearly every page: “Behind this elite guard were first the ranks of Knight motocyclists, and then the massed might of thousands of Knights of the Swastika, all heroic figures swaggering grandly in their uniforms of brown leather, most of which were liberally spattered with the blood of the enemy.”

But, but, but . . . similar to other more famous tales of adventure and conquest from Iliad and Odyssey to Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, at some point we are obliged to close the book and return to the everyday. How much do we really want our own world to resemble that of a conquering superhero forever in the right, taking aim to blast away the forces of darkness? Is life so simple? In my modest view, The Iron Dream is a key novel for our time. Highly recommended.



"The base of the tower was a circular grandstand of steps fifty feet high upon which stood a thousand SS purebreds, the absolute cream of the elite: none under six and a half feet tall, all with flaxen hair and piercing blue eyes, and decked out in spotless tight black leather uniforms, the chrome fittings of which had been polished to the point where the setting sun flashed orange fire off thousands of diamondlike facets. Each of these superhuman specimens held a flaming torch, the crimson brilliance of which matched the hue of their flowing swastika capes." - Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream


Norman Spinrad, Born 1940, American critic, essayist and author of more than two dozen science fiction novels. ( )