An amazing but not entirely entertaining book, Spinrad's Nabokovian turn sees him inhabiting an alternate history where Hitler emigrated to NY and bec...moreAn amazing but not entirely entertaining book, Spinrad's Nabokovian turn sees him inhabiting an alternate history where Hitler emigrated to NY and became an sf illustrator and writer; but The Iron Dream isn't the story of Hitler's alternative life -- rather, it's the science-fantasy novel that he would have produced in that alternative life, his Hugo-winning Lord of the Swastika (1953), which tells the story of Feric Jaggar's pure-blood crusade against mutants and mind-controllers in a post-post-apocalypse. That's the second, longest part of Spinrad's novel which also includes an "about the author" on Adolf Hitler, and a critical Afterword by Homer Whipple (1959), in which the state of the world without a political Hitler is revealed to be not particularly better than ours with a political Hitler.
On one hand, this book clearly takes sf as its target, pointing out that Hitler would have understood and enjoyed many of its power-fantasies and much of its wish-fulfillment violence. That's a cutting remark, one some readers missed (Spinrad reported that one fanzine review said they enjoyed the book, but wondered why Spinrad had to bring in that extraneous Hitler bit). But one of the difficulties in reading this book as a true artifact from a time that never was (as Jameson says in a different context, as if the Aztecs had developed their own forms of cinema) is that the book also takes our history as an obvious referent, with various characters showing up in veiled form (Goebbels becomes Bogel, Rudolf Hess becomes Ludolf Best); thus the second target of the book is the history that its hypothetical author could not have known. That somewhat spoils the imaginative purity of the book as an artifact that couldn't exist (as if the Aztec movie production just happened to make Gone with the Wind).(less)
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