• Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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    15 days ago

    [off topic]

    One of the biggest mind fuck novels I ever read was "The Iron Dream’ by Norman Spinrad.

    On one level it’s a ‘hero’s journey’ story about an exiled prince who returns to his homeland and defeats a bunch of evil mind controlling wizards. Lots of excitement and adventure and terrific battles.

    The fucked up part is that it’s the last novel Adolph Hitler wrote after migrating to America in 1921.

    Hitler was a popular illustrator who eventually felt confident enough to start writing in English. He was a popular figure at conventions and had a huge fandom.

    https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-iron-dream-norman-spinrad/7751155?ean=9781490439457

    • roscoe@startrek.website
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      15 days ago

      I’m very confused, but I have to go into work. Can someone summarize for my lazy ass what the fuck is going on here?

      • Woht24@lemmy.world
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        15 days ago

        From wiki

        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.