Norman Spinrad

He Walked Among Us
Norman Spinrad
Tor Books
2010
Hardcover
540 pages
ISBN: 0765325845

“The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.”
-Robert A. Heinlein

Imagine for a moment that the future existence of the planet balanced on your ability to travel back in time and explain the costs and concepts of the depletion of the ozone layer to a subsistence farmer in rural Mesopotamia. Could you do it? Enter Ralf, stand-up comic from about as far up the show more time-line as you can get. And he comes bearing terrifying news. The future planet is in disarray, biodiversity is as extinct as the carrier pigeon, the air is thick and un-breathable, almost unusable without heavy filtration scrubbers and to make matters worse, the last generations of humankind have taken refuge in pressurized shopping mall domes. Humanity clings to the last remnants of life on a scourged planet that could not be saved.

Now take an aging Science Fiction writer named Dexter D. Lampkins who is a flawed but intelligent individual (and Spinrad’s pseudo- literary double) with designs of writing the next great social Science Fiction Transformation of mankind, mingle with Amanda Robins, a New Age Wunderkinds seeking total Zen spiritualism, and mix in a whole lot of Ralf “the comic from the future.” Blend them all together on the same late-night television show and what do you get? Well, Monkey-Men, let’s just say that you may want to read this one yourself to discover all the gory details.

Ralf’s message is simple and crude. Start cleaning up the environment right now or the future world is going to suffer. Quit mucking up Mother Habitat so the deprived people of the future can take a break from living in constant fear of complete extinction.

Whether by accident or design Spinrad does reveal a plethora of Science Fiction Convention lore, anecdotes, behavior, and attitudes. And surprise, the Sci-Fi geeks are no less real than you or I. For some reason the Cons were the most enjoyable scenes in the book for me. Though Spinrad served up many unflattering and sometimes harsh depictions of Science Fiction conventioneers his descriptions lent realism to the story that may have otherwise been lost. Perhaps I felt so close to those scenes because, like Lampkin, I too identify with the weird and geeky, slightly askew, adoring, star-struck fans. I’m one of them!

Spinrad’s prose and dialogue is superb, humorous, enticing, and real and scans with perfect pace. If there is any real flaw with the story it is with the character known as Loxy Foxy and her strange companion the “machine-rat- from-the-depths-of-the -subway. Not so much the content itself but how long and drawn out it became in the middle of the book. It seemed like we revisited the same scenes over and over again which cluttered up the story line and served no real purpose. I suspect the novel would have stood well on its own in the absence of those characters. [I’m still unsure of what the confrontation between Loxy, the rat, and Ralf meant! Perhaps someone would care to enlighten me?]

Much like James Cameron’s “Avatar” Spinrad’s “He Walked Among Us” is social commentary with a message concerning the current state of our eroding world and until we can, as Heinlein eschewed, figure out a way to distribute our eggs more evenly someone up the stream of time is going to suffer. We need to learn to sustain what we have and become more pro-environmental. Stories like “He Walked Among Us” and “Avatar” can only make us more socially aware of our actions and surroundings. If civilization collapses due to resource depletion we’ll have only ourselves to blame for it and our children’s children will be made to suffer. Can our collective conscience survive that burden?

3 ½ out of 5 Stars

The Alternative
Southeast Wisconsin show less

Think Atlas Shrugged but instead of objectivism, the subject is fascism. Also, the story is not written by Ayn Rand but rather, by Adolf Hitler. What?!? Read on for a few mild spoilers...

In this alternate-history tale, Hitler served in WWI and then briefly joined the National Socialist Party before quitting in disgust at their ineffectiveness. He then decides to emigrate to the United States where he becomes a celebrated science-fiction author. His most successful book being 'Lord of the show more Swastika', which won him a posthumous Hugo.

This is a great premise for a story so imagine my disappointment as I found myself reading another lengthy and heartfelt rant in the same vein as Atlas Shrugged; repetitious, bombastic, fetishistic, racist, and nearly unbearably tedious. From around the halfway point I skimmed to the end. I'm sure I missed nothing of importance because the outcome was never in question and none of the details really matter much to the fervent ideals splashed across each and every page.

By contrast, the afterword brilliantly deconstructs Hitler's strengths and failings as an author. Unflinchingly exposing and expanding on every single issue I had with the preceding meta-tale. Spinrad essentially rips the book - and its author - to shreds. Yet he does it in the most backhanded complimentary fashion imaginable. Spinrad has accomplished an interesting thing here; He writes as Hitler, expanding on many known aspects of his personality but translated from a powerful and influential national leader that united most of the world against him, to a frustrated author expounding those same ideas via his fictional writings. I have much admiration for how well Spinrad constructed and executed the idea of this novel. It's unfortunate that "Hitler's" fascist ramblings don't make for very compelling fiction. show less

Lord of the Swastika - Like a thick layer of stinking hot asphalt poured out on a driveway, a thick layer of racism and jingoism coats every single page of this appalling novel spun from the cramped, warped mind of an upstart writer of science fiction, a scribbler by the name of Adolf Hitler. What the hell was this clown thinking?!! To write such garbage is an act of complete irresponsibility and an insult to the reading public. We can only raise our eyes to heaven and give thanks Adolf show more Hitler’s vision never became reality.

I trust it is abundantly clear the above paragraph is what an outraged reviewer might have written in the alternative world author Norman Spinrad created in his 1972 novel within a novel. And what a novel! The Iron Dream was banned in Germany for eight years, from 1982 to 1990, prompting Spinrad to report how both the political left and right railed against his book – the left claiming it promotes fascism and the right asserting the novel was denigrating to a great man (Adolf Hitler). Now there’s an author who can’t win!

Turning to Spinrad's The Iron Dream itself, on the surface we are given a kitschy bit of pulp, post-apocalypse melodrama entitled Lord of the Swastika written as alternative history by one Adolf Hitler, an illustrator and hack science fiction writer who emigrated from Germany to the United States after World War 1.

Lord of the Swastika opens more than a thousand years following global nuclear war, a cataclysm which brought about the end of civilization as we know it. The gene pool of nearly all forms of human life are corrupted by radioactive fallout - humans possessing complete physical and mental health are rare; most of humanity have blue skin, lizard scales or parrot beaks, or, even more insidious, are wizened half-breed mutants or subhuman "Dominators" desiring to hold sway over the earth by their powerful mind-controlling psychic powers.

What this sorry world needs is a charismatic leader who will ruthlessly eliminate all those malignant subhumans and rid the planet forever of their odious, subversive stench. Enter Ferric Jagger. The tall, blonde, robust Jaggar takes on the role of Führer and Heldon, the land of genetically pure humans, begins to bear a striking resemblance to Nazi Germany.

Why write such a novel? Norman Spinrad tells us he wanted to demonstrate the close connection ideology of the fascist Nazi variety has with archetypal hero myths and much science fiction and fantasy - created worlds where good guys courageously combat evildoing bad guys, where the shining light of truth and justice eventually overcomes all the loathsome forces of darkness no matter where they are found - Middle Earth, Mars, or the middle of one's very own country.

And to make absolutely, positively sure even the least sophisticated, unlettered clod of a reader understood his intent, Norman informs us: “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.” Unfortunately, even with this laborious literary effort to reach the lowest possible readerly denominator, a number of those muddleheaded clods didn’t get it – one reviewer even took the book as an exciting action story and complained how Spinrad spoiled all the fun by adding a whole bunch of crap about Adolf Hitler.

Alas, this has always been the risk for an author of satire - even a number of jaws dropped in stunned disbelief back in the 1700s after reading Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Sad fact: masterfully constructed satire requires a degree of subtle understanding beyond the capacity of many readers. And I can assure you The Iron Dream is one such satire masterfully constructed. And much of the pleasure in reading Spinrad’s novel is to suspend critical judgement and wholeheartedly support Ferric Jagger in his quest to conquer the world.

The Iron Dream is an intensely aesthetic dream, where every pore of Helder purebred skin tingles with excitement beholding the immense power, speed, dash and style of their new society, a land where every true human vows fanatical allegiance to Ferric Jagger. Here’s an example of the glowing rhetoric enlivening nearly every page: “Behind this elite guard were first the ranks of Knight motocyclists, and then the massed might of thousands of Knights of the Swastika, all heroic figures swaggering grandly in their uniforms of brown leather, most of which were liberally spattered with the blood of the enemy.”

But, but, but . . . similar to other more famous tales of adventure and conquest from Iliad and Odyssey to Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, at some point we are obliged to close the book and return to the everyday. How much do we really want our own world to resemble that of a conquering superhero forever in the right, taking aim to blast away the forces of darkness? Is life so simple? In my modest view, The Iron Dream is a key novel for our time. Highly recommended.



"The base of the tower was a circular grandstand of steps fifty feet high upon which stood a thousand SS purebreds, the absolute cream of the elite: none under six and a half feet tall, all with flaxen hair and piercing blue eyes, and decked out in spotless tight black leather uniforms, the chrome fittings of which had been polished to the point where the setting sun flashed orange fire off thousands of diamondlike facets. Each of these superhuman specimens held a flaming torch, the crimson brilliance of which matched the hue of their flowing swastika capes." - Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream


Norman Spinrad, Born 1940, American critic, essayist and author of more than two dozen science fiction novels. show less

"Norman Spinrad presents Adolf Hitler's Hugo Award-winning SF classic" proclaims the packaging, and that is what you get. This is one of the more outrageous alternate universes the genre has to offer: one where a disillusioned Hitler gives up radical politics after the failure of the Munich Putsch and emigrates to the USA in 1919. After eking out a precarious living as a commercial illustrator in New York, eventually he starts doing work for the science fiction pulp magazines, and then turns show more to writing.

This book, then, purports to present Hitler's last novel, 'Lord of the Swastika', published posthumously in 1954. It is a bad pulp-sf mixture of post-nuclear war survivalism, a racist fantasy of messily exterminating a race of mutant 'Dominators', culminating in a mighty military crusade for Aryan supremacy, foillowed by a Freudian fantasy of ejaculatory expansion to the stars.

If this were a serious novel, we would consider its writer to be an extremely sick person. Reading the text of 'Lord of the Swastika', the reader is transported into a world where this was indeed the wish-fulfillment fantasy of a seriously disurbed person. Many do consider that the real Hitler was not at all disturbed, that he knew exactly what he was doing and why, and so the idea of Hitler as just a madman as portrayed here through his fantasy writings does the man a disservice, and his victims a worse one. For saying that Hitler was mad is little more than an excuse, and it makes the victims of the Holocaust just unfortunate bystanders who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This cannot be true. Once we accept that Hitler was fully the master of his own mind, his own plans and his plans for Germany, we realise that the Jews and all the others who suffered as a consequence of his political actions were the victims of murder, no more and no less.

So the premise of this book is on shaky ground already, as it suggests the 'Hitler as madman' hypothesis. Perhaps in 1972, a science-fiction writer could be excused for jumping to this conclusion. Take, for example, Anthony Shaeffer's 'Amadeus', which relies for its drama on the fiction that the composer Antonio Salieri slowly poisoned his rival Mozart. That that was not true does not diminish the play; so the fact that Hitler was not mad does not diminish the horror and strangeness of the world suggested by the existence of 'Lord of the Swastika' as a piece of metafiction. But then we get to the academic afterword to the novel, presented as by a New York history professor, and things take on a different tone.

For the afterword presents an analysis of Hitler based on the evidence of his writings; and then it gives away facts about the world the book was written in, one where by 1959 the Soviet Union is the dominant power in the world and America is weakened and indecisive. Quite what Spinrad was trying to achieve is unclear. It's unlikely that he is indulging in mere Red Menace rhetoric, although it can be read in that sense. I rather imagine instead that the whole work is an exercise in considering the perils of the unintended consequence, and indeed in subverting the science-fictional sub-trope of 'What if I got a time machine and went back and assassinated X? Wouldn't the world be a better place?' Obviously, Spinrad intends the answer to that question to be 'No'.

In Hitler's case, I have to agree. I would not be here if it were not for Hitler, as my parents met during the Second World War and most likely would not have done if that war had not happened. This is not to say that I think Hitler was A Good Thing, or that I have any sense of gratitude to him. (Strangely, I do have only four degrees of separation from Adolf Hitler - see my reviews of 'The Jew of Linz' and 'Wittgenstein's Vienna' - but I take that as a sign of the curiosity of human life.)

So in 'The Iron Dream' we see one possible way that history could have turned out very differently. It may be that in adapting this very extreme way of demonstrating that fact, Spinrad has used a sledgehammer to crack a nut and given us a rather objectionable piece of pulp writing into the bargain. But Spinrad is no stranger to controversy, so perhaps we should expect nothing less. show less