Norman Spinrad

Really enjoyed the world and backstory, and found the characters interesting.
The problem is, the plot was completely unbelievable...

I don't know how to critique a plot line without filling this with spoilers, so I'll just leave it at this - I can suspend belief to get into a story, I can suspend belief to keep a story going. I can swallow FTL and talking dragons if you do it well enough - but this was just so full of it in spots I really had trouble holding my nose and soldiering on. Only the relationships kept it from a two or less..… (more)

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.
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I had four stars worth of fun reading this, but it has enough thematic and story problems that I should really give it less.

The female characters are treated pretty shoddily (by the author, I'd say, moreso even than Jack Barron), and good ol' Jack is waaaaay too slow on the uptake in figuring out things that are obvious to the reader as soon as they come up.

But the language is a riot, the rough racial content is for good ends, and it's a good moral outrage romp in a "Network" kind of way.

Plus I always enjoy outdated futurism.… (more)