Hachette India

The Iron Dream

Norman Spinrad

Norman Spinrad's 1972 alternate history, gives us both a metafictional what-if novel and a cutting satire of one of the 20th century's most evil regimes . . .

In 1919, a young Austrian artist by the name of Adolf Hitler immigrated to the United States to become an illustrator for the pulp magazines and, eventually, a Hugo Award-winning SF author.

This volume contains his greatest work, Lord of the Swastika: an epic post-apocalyptic tale of genetic 'trueman' Feric Jagger and his quest to purify the bloodline of humanity by ruthlessly slaughtering races of the genetically impure - a quest Norman Spinrad expertly skewers through ironic imagery and over-the-top rhetoric.

Spinrad hoped to expose some unpalatable truths about much of SF and Fantasy literature and its uncomfortable relationship with fascist ideologies - an aim that was not always apparent to neo-fascist readers. In order to make his aims clear to the hard-of-understanding, Spinrad added an imaginary critical analysis by a fictional literary scholar, Homer Whipple, of New York University.

Norman Spinrad

Norman Spinrad (1940 - )Norman Richard Spinrad was born in New York City in 1940. He began publishing science fiction in 1963 and has been an important, if sometimes controversial, figure in the genre ever since. He was a regular contributor to New Worlds magazine and, ironically, the cause of its banning by W H Smith, which objected to the violence and profanity in his serialised novel Bug Jack Barron. Spinrad's work has never shied away from the confrontational, be it casting Hitler as a spiteful pulp novelist or satirising the Church of Scientology. In addition to his SF novels, he has written non-fiction, edited anthologies and contributed a screenplay to the second season of Star Trek. In 2003, Norman Spinrad was awarded the Prix Utopia, a life achievement award given by the Utopiales International Festival in Frances, where he now lives.