A young man steps off a ship into a crowd of aliens. He’s an exile, raised in another land but finally returned home with his dead father. All is not right in the futuristic country to which Feric Jaggar has returned. Psychic enemies weave plots, breed terrible mutant armies in their far off fortresses, and it looks like the few remaining “true” humans may never recover from the nuclear holocaust that left them facing the monstrous hordes. Ahead, Feric will gather comrades, find a legendary weapon, crash through enemies, face treachery and survive plot twists as he remakes the world to ensure a future for humanity.

In 1972, Norman Spinrad wrote a novel, The Iron Dream, which begins just like this. The prose is a bit purple, but not in a way unusual for sci-fi, especially of a particular time now dubbed “classic.” It won’t win any nods from the literati, and the gore gets a bit much, but it’s a page-turner — all in all, the sort of book that, if penned in the ‘50s or early ‘60s, would’ve won praise for its “imagination” and “controversial politics.”

Before Star Wars, before The Lord of The Rings movies, before first-person shooters full of exploding bodies, professional HALO players and drone strikes, Spinrad nailed a very, very dark strain in the way we view heroism, conflict and enemies. Regrettably,The Iron Dream was forgotten, and while it won plenty of acclaim in its time, Spinrad’s work slipped out of print for decades. This was unfortunate, because it has one important kicker, one key element that adds a blood-cold shiver to the usual pulp antics even critical media consumers have become so accustomed to: It reads “By Adolph Hitler.”

“My Commander, look!” Best suddenly shouted, pointing up the avenue with the barrel of his submachine gun. A rude barricade of beams, crates, and all manner of garbage and rubbish had been thrown across the street up ahead to bar the passage of motorcycles. Behind this stood a mindless horde of filthy, pathetic Dom-controlled rabble, armed with clubs, cleavers, knives and whatever else came to hand; these wild-eyed wretches choked the street ahead as far as the eye could see. Fluttering above this sordid mob were greasy, tattered blue rags bearing the yellow star-in-circle—the battle flag of the Dom-controlled Universalists.

“Don’t worry, Best,” Feric said, “we’ll make short work of these vermin!”

— The Iron Dream

Much science fiction, indeed much of the best science fiction, openly addresses questions of social morality, but unfortunately the majority of science fiction novels published are action-entertainment formula stuff in which the major moral conflict is simply between the good guys (us) and the bad guys (them), itself a paradigm that does not exactly promote peace and understanding.

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

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

We’ve now got a name warning writers away for what Spinrad was doing — Godwin’s law — because comparisons to the Third Reich have always been a tricky business. Godwin’s bit exists for good reason; when it’s the go-to insult for even garden-variety political differences, Nazi comparisons are appropriately used in exceedingly rare circumstances.

But Nazism and similar movements the world over didn’t spring from nowhere, and it’s important to occasionally break the rule and break it hard. I recently interviewed Spinrad for The Old Iron Dream, my project on the influence of the far-right on sci-fi, and he noted that he wrote The Iron Dreamin part because he never entirely believed purely economic rationales for the rise of fascist dictatorships.

The conceit is simple, but creative. The Iron Dream is presented as a 1956 sci-fi novel, The Lord of the Swastika by Hitler. It’s from a world in which he, like many of his countrymen, left Germany after World War I, finding work in pulp sci-fi as an illustrator, then as a writer. Spinrad pounds his points home with an additional fictional academic essay by Homer Whipple dissecting Hitler’s novel and noting that sci-fi cosplayers have adopted both the symbolism and aesthetics of the book. UponThe Iron Dream’s publication, Spinrad played up the point further with quotes from sci-fi notables lauding the work of alternate-universe Hitler; “If Wagner wrote science fiction this is the way he would do it,” blurbed sci-fi author Harry Harrison (ostensibly).

This was 1972, when Vietnam was still ablaze and Nixon was still in office. The Iron Dream was part of a massive wave of science fiction taking a hard look at the old, enshrined customs of the genre’s ancestors. The “gookification” of enemies, in Spinrad’s words, drew an ugly connection from the slaughter of faceless Orcs to the willingness of a populace to root for brutal war politics.

KEEP READING …