Last year, a friend of mine mentioned he planned on rereading Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream without irony. Synchronicity as I had been thinking of doing the same thing.

Norman Spinrad wrote one of the greatest Star Trek episodes, “The Doomsday Machine” from Season 2. He wrote a couple competent space operas in the 60s, but more associated with the “New Wave” movement of the late 60s. His iconoclastic novel Bug Jack Baron has its fans.

The Iron Dream was first published by Avon Books, September 1972. A supposed work of satire set in an alternate history where Adolph Hitler emigrated to the U.S. after WWI and became first a science fiction pulp magazine illustrator and then writer. His last novel Lord of the Swastika won a Hugo Award in 1954 after Hitler had died in 1953. There is a list of fictional novels by Hitler: Emperor of the Asteroids, The Builders of Mars, Fight for the Stars, The Twilight of Terra, Savior From Space, The Master Race, The Thousand Year Rule, The Triumph of the Will, Tomorrow the World. The first five titles sound like 1950s Robert Silverberg space operas.

The Iron Dream starts with young Feric Jaggar leaving degenerate Borgravia to genetically pure Held. It is one thousand years after a nuclear war. Large portion of the planet are uninhabitable. Other areas inhabited by various sorts of mutants: Parrotfaces, Lizadrmen, Blueskins, Harlequins, Bloodfaces etc. Jaggar is a pure human. His parents were political refugees from Held to Borgravia, therefore Jaggar is entitled to become a citizen of Held.

He passes a couple perfunctory genetic tests to enter Held though noting a mutant Dominator has taken over the border post. At a beer hall, Jaggar comes across a political speech from a rep of the Human Renaissance Party. Getting caught up in the heat of the moment, Jaggar leads a mob who kills the mutant Dominator, an agent of Zind.

Spinrad follows history with Jaggar becoming head of the Human Renaissance Party. He takes over a motorcycle gang who become his body guards and street fighters.

He is elected to the national council, makes a deal with the army. Zind attacks to the east the neighboring nation of Wolack. Held’s new army defeats Wolack and a Zind army. There are whirlwind campaigns against other mutant nations surrounding Held.

There is a final showdown with the hordes of Zind and the Dominator mutant overlords. The Dominators have a few old nukes that they blow up to contaminate the pure human armies of Held. Luckily, scientists have cloned Jaggar and others and create a new race to travel in starships to find other planets.

Spinrad can write decent action sequences. He is over the top with the use of truncheons. Jaggar’s armies use lots of submachine guns and have new tanks. I do have some problems as alternative history. Nuclear war is a very 1950s concern. A good portion of Philip K. Dick’s output is about effects of nuclear war. The Iron Dream is not so depressing as PKD. In this alternate timeline, the communists have taken over Europe and much of Asia. Only the United States and the Japanese Empire (allies) stand against the communist threat. Nuclear war paranoia set in after spies handed the technology for atom bombs to the Soviets. With no WW2, there is no atomic bomb.

As to winning a Hugo. Novels like Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man were winning the Hugo at this time, not faux-Ace Double novel fare.

Mutants as described by Spinrad would not have lasted long. Nature is eugenic. Genetic freaks are not going to thrive without beneficial changes. The novel is actually very early 1970s, not late pulp early 1950s. Thriller novels backed off the Cold War in the 70s and became obsessed that there was a Nazi under your bed. What caused the Nazi resurgence obsession of the early 70s? That seemed to be an ideology with little appeal outside of Germany and very effectively destroyed.

The motorcycle gang is also not something of the 1950s but the 1970s.

Spinrad does not confront the worst aspects of national socialism. Mutants are sterilized, not exterminated as Held conquers other nations. Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen following the front line troops piled up mounds of corpses in Poland and the Soviet Union.

The prose really does not read like Adolph Hitler.

Spinrad as “Adolph Hitler”:

“Soon the forward line of SS reached the Wolacks. Feric himself drew up on a partially demolished pillbox, from which scuttled about half-a-dozen Wolcaks– a hunchbacked dwarf, a Parrotface, a brace of Toadmen, and other assorted monstrosities – all fleeing mindlessly from the fray like the craven dogs they were.”

The real Adolph Hitler from Mein Kampf:

“Such a dispensation of Nature is quite logical. Every crossing between two breeds which are not quite equal results in a product which holds an intermediate place between the levels of the two parents. This means that the offspring will indeed be superior to the parent which stands in the biologically lower order of being, but not so high as the higher parent. For this reason it must eventually succumb in any struggle against the higher species. Such mating contradicts the will of Nature towards the selective improvements of life in general.”

The writing styles are not alike.

Spinrad followed the text of the novel with an academic afterword to the second edition. A professor expounds on the truncheon as phallic symbol.

“Lord of the Swastika is at least schematically a typical pulp sword-and-sorcery novel. The hero (Jaggar) receives the phallic weapon as a symbol of his rightul supremacy and then triumphantly fights his way through a series of gory battles to final victory.”

In “Psychopolitics and Science Fiction: Heroes—True and Otherwise,” Spinrad said:

“There is something deeply disturbing in the congruence between the commercial pulp action-adventure formula and the Ubermensch in jackboots ….”

So Spinrad, equates action-adventure fiction with fascism. We have seen that one before.

Sam Lundwall (Science Fiction: What Its All About):

“There was a similar interest in heroes and mighty deeds in Hitler’s Germany. Richard Wagner’s Der Ring der Nibelungen, a heroic Sword & Sorcery fantasy of no mean qualities, was not the only work of its type popular at the time.”

The back cover of the Avon paperback of The Iron Dream has some blurbs by science fiction authors.

Michael Moorcock:

“To compare this novel with the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Leiw, G.K. Chesterton, and Sir Oswald Mosely is not, I fel, say too much. This exciting and tense fantasy adventure is quintessence of sword and sorcery. It is bout to earn Hitler the credit he so richly deserves.”

Moorcock had to get in a dig at Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton, and sword-and-sorcery fiction associating it with Oswald Mosley. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. You read it here, Elric is fascism.

I like to divide baby boomers into two groups: Bob Dylan boomers and Aerosmith boomers. Two different animals. This is a book for Bob Dylan boomers. It has aged as well as week old bong water. There were multiple printings from Jove, Pocket Books, and Bantam Spectra in the 70s into the 80s. The last mass market paperback edition in the U.S. was in 1986. There was an e-book from Gateway/Orion in 2014. Maybe newer readers would not get the supposed joke and publishers don’t want to touch it now.