The Iron Dream is a metafictional 1972 alternate history novel by Norman Spinrad.
The book has a nested narrative that tells a story within a story. On the surface, the novel presents an unexceptional pulp, post-apocalypse science fiction action tale entitled Lord of the Swastika. However, this is a pro-fascist narrative written by an alternate-history Adolf Hitler, who in this timeline emigrated from Germany to America in 1919 after the Great War, and used his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp-science fiction illustrator and later a successful science fiction writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed adventure stories under a thin SF-veneer.
Spinrad was intent on demonstrating just how close Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces — and much science fiction and fantasy literature — can be to the racist fantasies of Nazi Germany. The nested narrative is followed by a faux scholarly analysis by a fictional literary critic, Homer Whipple, of New York University, which it is said to have been written in 1959.
Famous quotes containing the words iron and/or dream:
“When I say artist I don’t mean in the narrow sense of the word—but the man who is building things—creating molding the earth—whether it be the plains of the west—or the iron ore of Penn. It’s all a big game of construction—some with a brush—some with a shovel—some choose a pen.”
—Jackson Pollock (1912–1956)
“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)