Yes, I *did* pick the most absurd cover I could find for The Iron Dream!
So the other day I read Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (which somehow managed to be the SECOND speculative fiction satire I’ve read in my life in which Adolf Hitler is a main character), and while this article isn’t really a review, if you want my opinions on the matter: Pretty funny and worth a read, but not without its flaws.
The main problem I had with it is that while I can obviously see what he was trying to say (he makes it plainly obvious), I don’t quite agree with it, nor do I think that pointing it out is helping genre fiction. Indeed, as there are many people in this day and age have taken Spinrad’s ideological torch and decided to run with it, one could argue that it’s making speculative fiction worse.
The bulk of The Iron Dream is the wildly popular fantasy novel Lords of the Swastika written by an alternate universe Hitler, who immigrated to America in 1920 and worked as a commercial illustrator and eventually a pulp fiction writer. Lords details the exploits of the valiant Ferric Jagar, a true human who forms the Knights of the Swastika to fight against the vile mutant nation of Zind and the psychic-powered Dominators that control those vast wastes. Struggling through earth-rending battles and eventual nuclear holocaust, the true humans (all of whom are distinctly Aryan in phenotype), eventually prevail and take their rightful place as rulers of the world and, in the very end, embark into outer space to attempt to conquer the rest of the universe.
Spinrad’s point is clear: Ferric Jagar and the Knights of the Swastika are deliberately written to be an idealized depiction of Hitler and the Nazi Party, the nation of Zind is written to be the Nazi’s conception of the Soviet Union (dumb, muscular brutes enthralled by conniving, rodent like Jews Dominators), and overall the point of the story is to claim that speculative fiction is inherently written with the same base desires and emotions that lead to fascism. This is reflected in both the depictions of the good guys (stirring martial imagery, a focus on obnoxious hyper-masculinity, and history being driven by a few “great men”) and the bad guys (the bad guys being totally evil and dehumanized entities or monsters that you feel no guilt in killing en masse).
But how accurate is this, really? In other words, how many fantasy/science fiction works truly ARE written with these, well, fascist undertones? Being a big fan of speculative fiction, I decided to look at a few of the heavy hitters of the genres and judge whether or not Spinrad is right:
Tolkien: Undoubtedly one of the two biggest forces in creating the modern fantasy genre, JRR Tolkien scarcely needs introduction to my readers. And, importantly to this discussion, he has been pilloried in recent years for the alleged “Racism” of his works. The charges of racism in his works center around both the depiction of the swarthy and distinctly non-European “Men of Darkness” that fight for Sauron, and (to a greater extent) the fact that Sauron’s armies are predominantly made of the brutish, humanoid, but distinctly non-human Orcs and Uruk-Hai. These examples are often cited by hack commentators as wartime propaganda-esque dehumanization, providing a hateable enemy that one can slaughter without guilt. Except that reading in-depth will show that Tolkien was far too good a writer to write so simplistically.
In Tolkien’s Legendarium (if not the Lord of the Rings, then definitely the associated works), he makes it explicitly clear that the Men of Darkness only sided with Sauron due to generations of conflict and oppression from the descendants of Numenor (ie: the distinctly European Rohirrim and Gondoreans), and were able to bury the hatchet and live in peace with them after the War of the Ring.
If that weren’t enough, Tolkien’s letters make it abundantly clear that as a devout Christian, he was very uncomfortable with the notion of a people that were irredeemably evil, but sadly noted that such a thing had to exist for the narrative of his story. With that being said, he does give the Orcs distinct personalities and SOME virtue (valor and other military virtues predominantly), and a few passages imply that there were, in fact, some Orcs fighting on the side of good:
“…during the Siege of Barad-dûr, All living things were divided in that day, and some of every kind, even of beasts and birds, were found in either host, save the Elves only. They alone were undivided and followed Gil-Galad. Of the Dwarves few fought upon either side; but the kindred of Durin of Moria fought against Sauron” —The Silmarillion
Add to this his strong portrayal of women, and it’s clear that Tolkien was about as “woke” as somebody born in the 1890s could have been.
Howard: The other guy who created modern fantasy as we know it, Robert Howard would, at first, seem to be the “Racist dead white man” writer that we’re al supposed to hate. And indeed, his writing does seem to be, if not white supremacist, then “white advocate”: stories of strong and valiant white men often set against non-whites. But, while he undoubtedly would be racist by modern standards, I think his racial portrayals have a bit more depth than his detractors would care to admit:
On several occasions he wrote stories in which non-whites were the heroes, in many other stories he depicted non-whites as valiant and essential partners (and occasionally even the mentors/superiors) of the white hero, and on a few occasions will depict the white hero being surprised at how his pre-held stereotypes of a non-white people are wrong:
“Twenty: then the spears of the [black] pirates had taken toll of the pack, after all…”—The Queen of the Black Coast
Indeed, Conan is even capable of seeing a non-human as, if you’ll pardon the expression, a man worthy of respect:
“Black, hairy, abhorrent, the monster lay, grotesque in the tatters of the scarlet robe; yet more human than bestial, even so, and possessed somehow of a vague and terrible pathos…Even the Cimmerian sensed this, for he panted: “I have slain a man tonight, not a beast. I will count him among the chiefs whose souls I’ve sent into the dark, and my women will sing of him.”—Rogues in the House
He also portrayed women very positively, something he held in common with Tolkien.
Lovecraft: Arguably the most overtly racist of the writers I’ll be discussing here, Lovecraft’s detractors are not entirely wrong. Many of his stories are overtly racist, showing its tragic heroes dying due to a past of miscegenation or other inherited failings. With that being said HP Lovecraft is still more than just the snarling WASP caricature that he’s often mocked as. For example, while he does portray some non-whites (in particular black people) as an animalistic other, let it not be forgotten that he portrays poor white people as equally, if not MORE degenerate, and shitting on poor white people is, of course, right in sync with what we’re supposed to believe in now.
It is also worth pointing out that for SOME non-white races Lovecraft shows a great deal of respect for them (while also portraying them as distinctly OTHER than white cultures). Indeed, Lovecraft’s writing does on occasion portray noble and heroic (or at least sympathetic) POC. And much like his good friend Robert Howard, he was capable of portraying non-humans as men worthy of respect:
“ They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them — as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste — and this was their tragic homecoming… Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn — whatever they had been, they were men!” —At the Mountains Of Madness
Overall, Lovecraft’s work seems to indicate a fear of the unknown and the overwhelming insignificance of humanity on a cosmic level, rather than just being the simple minded HURR DURR I HATE NIGGERS racist that he is often portrayed as today.
Herbert:
Frank Herbert’s Dune chronicles would, in its first incarnation, seem to be the sort of heroic story that The Iron Dream is taking the piss out of. A destined hero leads a wildly outnumbered army of fanatics against the evil tyranny and seizes his rightful place as a master of the universe. And surely Herbert was aware of this—which is why the other 5 Dune novels go out of their way to subvert and take the piss out of the first novel!
Upon seizing and consolidating power, Dune Messiah tells us that Paul Atreides and his Fremen horde, despite all of Paul’s efforts to prevent it (indeed, having explicit knowledge that it will happen and doing everything in his power to prevent it),…proceed to commit a pan-galactic jihad, slaughtering hundreds of billions of people in what is undoubtedly the largest genocide in human history, explicitly showing that Paul’s superpower of prescience is more of a curse than a blessing.
They also terraform Arrakis to be more hospitable…a move that is explicitly shown to be a bad thing that kills off the vital sandworm population (another example of something the lefties constantly preach at us).
Each successive Dune book shows people slowly and inevitably realizing the horror of their fate, Paul’s son Emperor Leto II becoming increasingly tyrannical while simultaneously mutating himself into a sandworm (a gruesome predecessor to an even more severe sacrifice he has to make), and all in all showing that the great heroes of humanity will become conquerors and tyrants at worst (and most commonly) and at best, be well intentioned tyrants who commit brutalities as part of an overarching plan for humanity to regain its lost greatness (a plan that only those who can see thousands of years into the future can possibly be privy to, which is to say, almost nobody).
The overarching theme of the Dune Chronicles seems to seriously criticize many of the same trends that The Iron Dream criticizes humorously, in other words!
Burroughs:
The oldest of the writers profiled here, Edgar Rice Burroughs will often be cited as an archetypical racist speculative writer as well. And he is another example of one who is “as woke as he could have been”—most overtly, Tarzan of the Apes explicitly calls out the brutalities going on in the Congo Free State, and John Carter of Mars could even be said to have a multicultural message, as the eponymous Virginian unites all the multicolored races of Mars under his banner and this is explicitly shown to be a good thing.
But then again, it has a former Confederate soldier as the hero, so it’s automatically awful and racist, never mind that he explicitly is shown overcoming his own prejudices! </sarcasm>
Campbell:
John Campbell is an unsung pioneer of the science fiction genre, a man who, as the editor of Amazing Stories, demanded scientific accuracy in all his stories, inarguably doing more than anybody to pull the genre out of its hacky roots.
With that being said, he was probably even more overtly racist than Lovecraft, explicitly demanding that his writers never write any stories in which white men were not the pinnacle of humanity, and that aliens never be shown as superior to humanity on the whole.
He would seem to be the closest writer to Spinrad’s depiction of Hitler the pulp writer, but even then the comparison falls flat because Lords Of the Swastika has wildly impractical leaps in science and technology, which Campbell would undoubtedly have hated.
It seems to me that while each of these writers I described has one or two elements of Spinrad’s negative depiction of speculative fiction, each of them will also have at least one element in their writing that explicitly subverts that, and none of them write with all of those blatantly fascist elements. While I have always argued that the grain of fascism is essentially an unhealthy exaggeration of natural human impulse, these talented and intelligent writers probably recognized that as well, and could modulate that with intelligence and rationality.
It may be true that hack fantasy and science fiction writers are more overtly “Fashy”, but then I don’t pollute my brain with hack writing, so I will just speculate that those are what Spinrad was taking shots at.
It seems that Spinrad was not the only one who noticed this alleged trend, as in recent years it has been a trend in its own right lto excoriate old speculative fiction for its lack of “wokeness”, and revamp it to make it more “woke”—and such is the problem with deconstructive works. While they are often pointing out real problems, they never seem to have an answer for what the rebuilt edifice should be. And to tie it back to what I said in the first paragraph, speculative fiction nowadays is…objectively pretty terrible.
Hence the proliferation of the almost unreadably bad “woke Lovecraft” works, anti-Trump and anti-entertainment Lord of the Rings pastiches , and other derivative crap that nonetheless gets feted for toeing the party line. None of these works are really saying anything that Spinrad didn’t say decades ago, and they do it with much worse prose. Because, hey, rather than writing new works that posit the values they want to posit, it’s so much easier to write half-assed parodies of much better writer’s works!
And given the choice of reading any of the pre 1950s sci-fi or fantasy, even the hacky stuff, versus reading some nonsense about rollercoasters that are also dragons having sex with people, what speculative fiction do YOU want to read?