The Iron Dream is a metafictional 1972 alternate history novel by American author Norman Spinrad. The book has a nested narrative that tells a story within a story. On the surface, the novel presents a post-apocalyptic adventure tale entitled Lord of the Swastika, written by an alternate-history Adolf Hitler shortly before his death in 1953. In this timeline, Hitler emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1919 after the Great War, and used his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp science fiction illustrator and later a successful writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed, pro-fascism stories under a thin science fiction veneer. The nested narrative is followed by a faux-scholarly analysis by a fictional literary critic, Homer Whipple, which is said to have been written in 1959.
Plot summary 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 his final science fantasy novel Lord of the Swastika in six weeks in 1953, shortly before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage perhaps caused by tertiary syphilis; Lord of the Swastika subsequently won the Hugo Award and the "colorful uniforms" described therein became staples of science fiction conventions. Hitler's other published works include the long-running fanzine Storm and novels such as The Master Race, The Thousand Year Rule, and The Triumph of the Will.
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