Plot
The book's frame narrative and premise is that "after dabbling in radical politics," Adolf Hitler emigrated to the United States in 1919 and became a science fiction illustrator, editor and author. He wrote the science-fantasy novel Lord of the Swastika in six weeks in 1953, shortly before dying of cerebral hemorrhage (possibly caused by tertiary syphilis); Lord of the Swastika subsequently wins the Hugo Award and the "colorful uniforms" described therein become a regular feature of cosplayers at science fiction conventions. Hitler's other science fiction novels include The Master Race, The Thousand Year Rule and The Triumph of the Will.
In Whipple's review following the narrative, we learn more about the background of the alternate history in which Hitler emigrated to the United States. Without Hitler, the Nazi Party fell apart in 1923 and the Communist Party of Germany succeeded in a socialist revolution in 1930. As this alternate history continues, there is reference to a "Greater Soviet Union" which took over the United Kingdom in 1948, and whose influence is growing in Latin America by 1959. The fact that Whipple refers to World War I as "the Great War" several times implies that there was no equivalent of World War II in this world. Nevertheless, nuclear weapons seem to have been developed as a nuclear holocaust forms a major part of the backstory of Lord of the Swastika.
Whipple also discloses that the Empire of Japan has retained its militarist ascendancy, with reference to its bushido code of conduct, while the United States vacillates against the Greater Soviet Union's ascendancy. Due to the Greater Soviet Union threat, the United States and Japan have moved towards a closer military and strategic alliance. Japanese militarist values are much admired in the United States. Japan and the U.S. are the only two major powers standing between the Greater Soviet Union and total control of the globe—yet most Americans seem unable to be roused to deal with the Soviet threat. Whipple wonders what the emergence of an American leader like Feric Jaggar, the hero of Lord of the Swastika, could accomplish.
Finally, there is a casual mention of the fact that, while in this history Nazi Germany never came into being, it is the Soviets who undertake the systematic genocide of all Jews - and since this is perpetrated by the Soviets, there is no power left whose armies might stop it and save at least a remnant of the Jews from this version of the Holocaust.
Lord of the Swastika is lauded for its qualities as a great work of heroic fantasy. (To further hammer the point, in an early edition, actual science fiction writers wrote faux sincere "admiring" blurbs for Spinrad for the novel's back cover blurbs, praising "Hitler"'s writing skills.) Irony abounds in Whipple's review, as he singles out the mechanisms such as sheer force, midnight rallies, phallic symbolism and such like that in fact characterized Nazism's rise to power in Germany, blithely assuring us that such a rise would be quite ludicrous to contemplate in real life. "After all", Dr. Whipple says, "it can't happen here."
Read more about this topic: The Iron Dream
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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