The Iron Dream

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.