You know how I mentioned October would have a nod to German history, and maybe combine it with horror? …this is not now I expected that to happen. This will surely be my strangest book read for 2025.

There I was, innocently browsing Substack, when lo! I spotted an outlandish title: WHEN ADOLF HITLER WROTE SCIENCE FICTION. Well, color me clickbaited! The post was about this book, The Iron Dream, which contains a satire of pulp-fiction action-fantasy bookended by a fictional academic analyzing it from a literary perspective. The academic and the satire are both composed in an alternate history: the framing scenario is one in which Adolf Hitler immigrated to the United States after World War 1 and developed a career for himself as a pulp writer, something in the realm of Robert E. Howard. His Hero is larger than life, his antagonists grotesque monsters who are as revolting as cockroaches. Hitler’s most famous work, the one that inspired his following, was Lord of the Swastika.

There, a man (Ferric Jagger) in a post-apocalyptic landscape secures a future for humanity by joining a bicycle gang and creating an army to destroy all the mutant half-men races lumbering around. This task is made considerably easier once the Hero discovers The Steel Commander, a magic truncheon that has been waiting for the Heir of Slytherin to show up and claim it. I haven’t read much, if any of the fantasy-adventure pulps — a bit of John Carter of Mars, but that’s it — so I don’t know how successful this book is in aping the style. It’s certainly delivers enough risible bombast, but with ubiquitous Nazi imagery (swastikas and heavy use of red/black) to unsettle the reader. Feric’s “Sons of the Swastika” are even more flamboyant than the IRL Nazis: Feric, the Commander, wears an SS uniform with a red cape, and SS boots all have lightening bolts emblazoned on them.

Spinrad also weaves in some more subtle Hitler references, like the Hero’s preference for a vegetarian diet: contagions from the Fire that destroyed civilization are more concentrated the higher one moves up the food chain. There are also possible historical connections, with an evil empire obviously modeled after the Soviet Union, and another race who play the same antagonistic role in the story that Jews did for Nazis in real life .As morbidly amusing as the premise and execution are, they go on for far too long: half the book is a long, unbroken chain of ogre-slaughtering and bombastic speeches delivered atop piles of bodies. The ending was not what I expected, though. It’s hard to recommend this book on anything other than the absurd premise, though fans of the pulp styles might find additional interest, particularly since Spinrad was allegedly attacking the power fantasies of those works and labeling them as fascistic.

I’m Stag Stopa, and we’re the Black Avengers, and if you don’t know what that means, you’re about to find out. We like riding our bikes and getting drunk and wenching and a good fight and stomping mutants and big mouths and not much else.

Related:
Ursula LeGuin’s review