The Iron Dream

The book's frame narrative and 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 his final science fantasy novel Lord of the Swastika in six weeks in 1953, shortly before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage) Whipple identifies Hitler's book as the product of several orthogonal and likely unconscious psychological impulses. First, the "obsessional consistency and intensity of the phallic symbolism" — the protagonist's truncheon, the "outstretched-arm salute," the rocket — "in a sense, the entire novel is a piece of sublimated pornography." == History ==

Norman Spinrad was intent on demonstrating just how close Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces and much science fiction and fantasy literature can be to the racist ideology of Nazi Germany. Reception The Iron Dream won critical acclaim, including a Nebula Award nomination and a Prix Tour-Apollo Award. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in a review that: "We are forced, insofar as we can continue to read the book seriously, to think, not about Adolf Hitler and his historic crimes—Hitler is simply the distancing medium—but to think about ourselves: our moral assumptions, our ideas of heroism, our desires to lead or to be led, our righteous wars. What Spinrad is trying to tell us is that it is happening here." Le Guin also stated that "a novel by Adolf Hitler" cannot "be well-written, complex, (or) interesting", as this "would spoil the bitter joke", but also asked why anyone should "read a book that isn't interesting", arguing that the bad prose of "Hitler's" book may have been due, in part, to the poor quality of Spinrad's own prose. In 1982, the book was "indexed" in West 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 1987, the book could be sold, but not advertised or publicly displayed. The American Nazi Party put the book on its recommended reading list, despite the 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... 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?" ==See also==