• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Ryan's Reviews: The Iron Dream, by Norman Spinrad

Good stuff.

And good lord, that cover! Annoyingly, my copy was the Gateway Essentials and they went with the below one - this seems to undercut the satire, it's too obviously 'this is a book about grim Nazi stuff' and this story cries out to have the sort of bombastic covers that 'classic adventure' sci-fi would have. Look at the original one in the article, or this 2013 paperback. With a book that's deliberately making us uncomfortable by how much it reads as a normal genre work, we need a cover that does as well. (Probably these days, one using the CG-spaceships-and-photomodel-soldier military sci-fi kindle aesthetic)
 

Attachments

  • cover-small.jpg
    cover-small.jpg
    15.8 KB · Views: 0
Another reviewer enters the scene!

Glad you've taken on a classic rather than the dross I fight through, @RyanF and it's a brilliant review to boot!
 
Nice review.

I read The Iron Dream myself, and while it was good, I still went "Ok, I get it. I GET IT!" less than halfway through (not that I blame Spinrad in the least for trying to hammer his point home).
 
Good stuff.

And good lord, that cover! Annoyingly, my copy was the Gateway Essentials and they went with the below one - this seems to undercut the satire, it's too obviously 'this is a book about grim Nazi stuff' and this story cries out to have the sort of bombastic covers that 'classic adventure' sci-fi would have. Look at the original one in the article, or this 2013 paperback. With a book that's deliberately making us uncomfortable by how much it reads as a normal genre work, we need a cover that does as well. (Probably these days, one using the CG-spaceships-and-photomodel-soldier military sci-fi kindle aesthetic)

Thanks!

The biker Hitler one goes back before 2013, I got the book whilst it was out of print in the UK and it has that image expanded across the full cover. I'll check the publication date on it.

Another reviewer enters the scene!

Glad you've taken on a classic rather than the dross I fight through, @RyanF and it's a brilliant review to boot!

Cheers mate!

Nice review.



I read The Iron Dream myself, and while it was good, I still went "Ok, I get it. I GET IT!" less than halfway through (not that I blame Spinrad in the least for trying to hammer his point home).

Thanks. It's amazing how even though it could not have been hammered home more if he was wielding mjolnir there were still plenty who didn't get the joke, including the American Nazi Party and the West German censors.
 
Thanks. It's amazing how even though it could not have been hammered home more if he was wielding mjolnir there were still plenty who didn't get the joke, including the American Nazi Party and the West German censors.

To be fair, the ANP were never that hot on common sense and the West German censors took a very strict approach. Understandably really.
 
Absolutely, perhaps a better example would be the fan who enjoyed the story but didn't like all the stuff about Hitler.
It's a great example of Poe's Law, although it also occurs to me that a lot of the people who unironically liked Lords of the Swastika were probably 13 and hadn't been taught the concept of satire yet.
 
Back
Top