Book Review!

And it's sci-fi (sorta) and unsubtle satire rolled into one!

Very, very unsubtle.

After all, it comes from Norman Spinrad, about whom I have very mixed feelings. To the good, he can be a genuinely-talented writer and world-builder. 

To the bad, he has usually has A Message or two in his works, and he's not shy about trying to get the point across. Which, hey, you do you. But the problem is, he too often doesn't trust his readers' ability to get the point and feels the need to repeatedly jab his literary elbow into your ribs and say "Get it? Get it? GET IT?" 

It nearly ruins a climactic scene in his pro-EU paean Russian Spring, with one of the characters literally shouting out spoilers for another character's big surprise for the bad guys.

Yes, Norm--I got that something good was going to happen with your character's poker-playing buddy who always has a hole card or two. That's why I wear the martial arts torso armor when I pick up one of your books.

The same thing nearly happened in Journals of the Plague Years, a pro-sexual-liberation-in-the-age-of-AIDS tract that created an orwellian "Sex Police" making sure folks didn't get busy inappropriately. But happily, Spinrad threw a welcome curve ball by making a pivotal Christian fundamentalist character a good guy without the character--a major US government leader--"growing up" and abandoning his beliefs. 

Short version: don't go to Spinrad if you are looking for the light touch.

However, in The Iron Dream, Spinrad's lack of subtlety works to good advantage. And, given the reports that readers still missed the point, breaking out a rhetorical board of education was necessary, I suppose.

Basically, the conceit of the story is that the book is the late Adolf Hitler's Hugo Award-winning science-fiction masterwork. Which, if you know how woke the Hugos have become over the past decade, now works humorously at multiple levels. Not least of which is the reality that if The Iron Dream were published today, the current Hugo commissariat wouldn't touch it with a sequoia-sized pole, no matter that it is an anti-fascist satire.

In the world that led to the book, Hitler emigrated from Germany after the First World War and set up shop in New York as a fiction writer. Soviet Russia went on to swallow Eurasia and by the end of the 1950s only Japan and America are independent.

In the meantime, Hitler mastered English (more or less) and became a very popular science-fiction writer. His magnum opus, "Lord of the Swastika," was published posthumously, and inspired a Nazi-like legion of fans to follow the book rabidly, right down to forming clubs which follow the book's ethos ("Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude...")

Spinrad is trying to do three things: (1) zing Hitler's genuine weirdness and mediocrity, (2) note the effectiveness of fascist imagery, and (3) most imporantly to him, zing what he regards as Freudian-fascist undercurrents in sci-fi/fantasy. 

It works, for the most part, with the reader finding himself (however loathingly in retrospect) rooting for Hitler's protagonist, Ferric Jaggar, who wants to free a post-nuclear True Humanity from mutants and Dominators. Spinrad throws brickbat after brickbat, pummeling hypermasculinism, fetishism, lack of female characters, military gear worship and probably most tediously, homoeroticism. 

Yes, Norm, Jaggar's legendary weapon is A Really Big Steel Dick. That occasionally throbs and awes his Inner Circle of Deeply (?) Closeted Heroes.

Again: Spinrad and subtlety live on separate continents and their correspondence is sparse and strained.

Given how many shots he fires, he scores plenty of hits even as he becomes painfully repetitive and exaggerates past the point of no return. Especially for readers who have embraced the science fiction and fantasy genres since the 70s.

I think it's safe to say modern sci-fi and fantasy have broadened considerably from their levels of development in the before times, and the pathologies he perceived then--exaggerated to ludicrous levels--are nowhere near as prevalent. Still, it's worthwhile and a handy corrective to bad writing tendencies, and it will leave an indelible impression.