Reception
The Iron Dream won critical acclaim, including a Nebula Award nomination and a Prix Tour-Apollo Award. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in a review that: "We are forced, insofar as we can continue to read the book seriously, to think, not about Adolf Hitler and his historic crimes—Hitler is simply the distancing medium—but to think about ourselves: our moral assumptions, our ideas of heroism, our desires to, lead or to be led, our righteous wars. What Spinrad is trying to tell us is that it is happening here."
Leslie Fiedler proposed that Spinrad be considered for the National Book Award in 1973, but apparently won no support from his fellow award judges.
In 1982, the book was "indexed" (i.e., de facto banned) in West Germany by the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien for its alleged promotion of Nazism; Spinrad's publisher, Heyne Verlag, challenged this in court and, until the ban was overturned in 1990, the book could be sold, but not advertised or publicly displayed.
The American Nazi Party put the book on its recommended reading list, despite the satirical intent of the work. In Spinrad's own words:
To make damn sure that even the historically naive and entirely unselfaware reader got the point, I appended a phony critical analysis of Lord of the Swastika, in which the psychopathology of Hitler's saga was spelled out by a tendentious pedant in words of one syllable. Almost everyone got the point... And yet one review appeared in a fanzine that really gave me pause. "This is a rousing adventure story and I really enjoyed it," the gist of it went. "Why did Spinrad have to spoil the fun with all this muck about Hitler?"
Read more about this topic: The Iron Dream
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