History Literature / TheIronDream

* AfterTheEnd -- A nuclear apocalypse has tainted the human gene pool.

* AlwaysChaoticEvil -- The Dominators.
* AttackAttackAttack -- The Dominators' {{Mooks}} are mind-controlled to keep on fighting even though the hero's forces are cutting them down by the score.
* AuthorAvatar -- Feric Jaggar is an obvious avatar of Hitler.
* AwesomeMcCoolname -- Feric Jaggar! See also MeaningfulName, below.
* BodyHorror -- The descriptions of some of the mutated wildlife in the radiation jungles are just ''nauseating''.

* ContrivedCoincidence: No sooner does Jagger decide that the Black Avengers have [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness Outlived Their Usefulness]] when one of his men rushes in to breathlessly reveal that the leader of the group is conspiring with the Doms to launch a coup. Of course this mirrors the real-life Night of the Long Knives where the SA leadership was executed on trumped-up conspiracy charges.

* DropTheHammer -- The Steel Commander, aka the Great Truncheon of Held, is as light as a feather ([[OnlyTheChosenMayWield to its rightful bearer]]) but strikes with the mass of a mountain.
* EliteMooks -- As their last stand, the Dominators of Zind unleash special mutated warriors capable of fighting on independently.
* EvenEvilHasStandards
** Feric Jaggar is horrified by the prospect of using nuclear weapons against Zind (because the fallout would taint the gene pool of the true humans).
** TruthInTelevision in that Hitler was known to be very negative toward the idea of nuclear weapons. He was forced to conduct research into nuclear weaponry only because the Germans knew that the other Powers would do so. (Surprising? Likewise he was against police brutality and would not allow German police to carry guns or truncheons, which he considered demeaning to the public.).
** It is surprisingly obscure knowledge, but Hitler was for a short time a member of a secret police and was tasked with infiltration of political movements. (He attended his first German Workers' Party (later renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi Party) meeting as a police spy, liked what he heard, and joined up for real.) He quickly concluded, that brute force only causes the dissenters to hide and the covert intelligence operations are much more likely to yield good results. And his aversion to [=WMDs=] might have been caused by being wounded in a gas attack during Great War.
* FantasticRacism -- [[CaptainObvious A bit of that, yes.]]

* {{Gorn}} -- In spades. Battle scenes are [[SexIsViolence written like orgies]], with splashing fluids flying everywhere while Jaggar thrusts his truncheon every which way.
* GuiltFreeExterminationWar: Kill all mutants!
* HellBentForLeather -- The tight black leather uniforms of Jaggar and his army are repeatedly described in loving detail.

* InvincibleHero -- Jaggar's one of these. Every decision he makes is right, his army wins against forces which vastly outnumber him, and even a little thing like [[spoiler:a second nuclear holocaust]] can't stop him from creating his master race.
* KeystoneArmy -- The Warriors of Zind are all brutish mutants, but lack the brains to coordinate their own activities and rely on Dominator direction. Once Feric's forces kill the mutant masterminds, the Warriors begin attacking each other (and [[PottyFailure lose control of their bladders and bowels]] in their frenzy, and yes, this is usually described each time they do it).
* MeaningfulName
** Feric (or "ferric," for iron) Jaggar (or "Jaeger," German for "hunter"). Other characters, usually ones loyal to Feric, have vaguely Germanic names.
** The higher-ups in Jaggar's party also have names similar to those of their real-life Nazi counterparts: Joseph Goebbels becomes Seph Bogel, Rudolf Hess becomes Ludolf Best, and so on.
** The name of the country that is clearly meant to be Germany, Heldon, comes from the German "Helden" for "heroes".
** The [[SpaceJews Dominators']] country is called Zind, which could be meant to recall "Zion".
* MindControl -- How the Dominators dominate. Jaggar is the only one able to resist them.
* {{Mutants}} -- Quite a few distinct species exist (at least before {{the purge}}), such as [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Parrotfaces, Pinheads, and Toadmen]].

* OneGenderRace -- [[spoiler:Humanity, at the end. Since the Dominators' spiteful radiation bomb has ruined mankind's genome, cloning is used to create the next generation of {{ubermensch}}, who are all tall, blue-eyed, blond males.]]
* OnlyTheChosenMayWield -- Only Jaggar can wield the Truncheon of Held.
* PhallicWeapon -- The Great Truncheon of Held is described in unambiguously phallic terms. And then Feric Jaggar forces his new underling to kneel and kiss it.

* SchizoTech -- The book starts in a post-apocalyptic world where steam-powered buses are common transportation, but swiftly moves through World War II-level weaponry before ending with cloning and interstellar spaceships.
** DieselPunk technology: as Feric Jaggar ascends to power, the Held air force uses giant aircraft with ten gasoline engines each and just as big steam tanks. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dornier_Do_X Both]] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_tank existed]] in RealLife in the period between WorldWarOne and 1933 [[RealLifeWritesThePlot and performed poorly]], just as Jaggar himself admits. Reason for which our hero pushes the Helden industry to develop smaller, faster and more practical designs.
* TheSmurfettePrinciple
** There is not a single line of dialogue in ''Lord of the Swastika'' spoken by a woman. The words 'she' and 'her' simply do not appear at any point in the book.
** There is in fact an appearance by the fairer sex in this book! Specifically:
---> "a dozen or more naked females shrieking and moaning; these were not true humans but pleasure sluts of the sort the Dominators bred for themselves in Zind--mindless creatures with oversized hips and breasts motivated solely by a boundless need for copulation."
** A while after the last example, it is reported to Jaggar that nearly forty thousand pure human females have been found suitable for breeding with the SS.
** All of this is, of course, intentional, reflecting as it does both Hitler's general lack of interest in women and Nazism's simultaneous encouragement of traditional female roles and tendencies towards postering overbearing masculinity. It also reflects a general tendency within many works of HeroicFantasy to basically reduce women to scenery.
* SpaceJews -- The Dominators of Zind, intentionally.

* WeHaveReserves -- Millions and millions of them, in the Dominators' case.

* AuthorAvatar, MartyStu -- Feric Jaggar is an obvious avatar of Hitler.

** He also rejects the idea that Doms are an anti-semetic metaphor, as given the Soviet Union's persecution of their own Jewish population, no-one would seriously believe that Communism was a Jewish conspiracy.

* StrawmanPolitical
** [[{{Anvilicious}} Any and all enemies of Ferric Jaggar]].
** The author himself manages to ''strawman Hitler-as-author as a Nazi'' by the way he presents him as [[AxeCrazy an utter babbling lunatic]]. While real-life Hitler ''was'' emphatically a genocidal Nazi, his ramblings weren't usually ''quite'' this deranged. Although it is worth noting that one of the frequent criticisms of ''Mein Kampf'', Hitler's manifesto, is that on top of the reprehensible politics it's also very rambling and incoherent in places. Also, the alternate universe Hitler ''was'' dying from syphilis when he wrote the book.

** Notable instances include a reference to a "holocaust of fire" and the protagonists warming themselves by a "heap of burning [[StealthPun faggots.]]"[[hottip:*:The original meaning of "faggot" was a bundle of sticks, usually used for fuel.]]

** The author himself manages to ''strawman Hitler-as-author as a Nazi'' by the way he presents him as [[AxeCrazy an utter babbling lunatic]]. While real-life Hitler ''was'' emphatically a genocidal Nazi, his ramblings weren't usually ''quite'' this deranged. Although it is worth noting that one of the frequent criticisms of ''Mein Kampf'', Hitler's manifesto, is that on top of the reprehensible politics it's also very rambling and incoherent in places. Also, the alternate universe Hitler ''was'' dying from syphilis while he was writing the book.

** The author himself manages to ''strawman Hitler-as-author as a Nazi'' by the way he presents him as [[AxeCrazy an utter babbling lunatic]]. While real-life Hitler ''was'' emphatically a genocidal Nazi, his ramblings weren't usually ''quite'' this deranged.
*** Although it is worth noting that one of the frequent criticisms of ''Mein Kampf'', Hitler's manifesto, is that on top of the reprehensible politics it's also very rambling and incoherent in places.

** It is surprisingly obscure knowledge, but Hitler was for a short time a member of a secret police and was tasked with infiltration of political movements. He quickly concluded, that brute force only causes the dissenters to hide and the covert intelligence operations are much more likely to yield good results. And his aversion to [=WMDs=] might have been caused by being wounded in a gas attack during Great War.

** TruthInFiction in that Hitler was known to be very negative toward the idea of nuclear weapons. He was forced to conduct research into nuclear weaponry only because the Germans knew that the other Powers would do so. (Surprising? Likewise he was against police brutality and would not allow German police to carry guns or truncheons, which he considered demeaning to the public.).

** All of this is, of course, intentional, reflecting as it does both Hitler's general lack of interest in women and Nazism's simultaneous encouragement of traditional female roles and tendencies towards postering overbearing masculinity, coupled with a general tendency within HeroicFantasy to basically reduce women to scenery..

** All of this is, of course, intentional, reflecting as it does both Hitler's general lack of interest in women and Nazism's simultaneous encouragement of traditional female roles and tendencies towards postering overbearing masculinity.

* ANaziByAnyOtherName -- Inverted, having Hitler become a popular American science-fantasy novelist.

* ANaziByAnyOtherName -- Gee, ya ''think?''

** TruthInTelevision in that Hitler was known to be very negative toward the idea of nuclear weapons. He was forced to conduct research into nuclear weaponry only because the Germans knew that the other Powers would do so. (Surprising? Likewise he was against police brutality and would not allow German police to carry guns or truncheons, which he considered demeaning to the public.).

** TruthInFiction in that Hitler was known to be very negative toward the idea of nuclear weapons. He was forced to conduct research into nuclear weaponry only because the Germans knew that the other Powers would do so. (Surprising? Likewise he was against police brutality and would not allow German police to carry guns or truncheons, which he considered demeaning to the public.).

* ANaziByAnyOtherName -- [[CaptainObvious Well, ''duh''... ]]

''The Iron Dream'' is a 1972 HeroicFantasy / ScienceFiction novel by Norman Spinrad... sort of. The majority of the book is the full text of the brilliantly popular fantasy novel ''Lord of the Swastika'', written by famed SF author AdolfHitler; the rest of the book is a framing device setting up the world in which this alternate Hitler lives, and a concluding essay hammering the point home for those who didn't get it the first time through.

* {{Gorn}} -- In spades. Battle scenes are written like orgies, with splashing fluids flying everywhere while Jaggar thrusts his truncheon every which way.

** The author himself manages to ''[[BeyondTheImpossible strawman Hitler-as-author as a Nazi]]'' by the way he presents him as [[AxeCrazy an utter babbling lunatic]]. While real-life Hitler ''was'' emphatically a genocidal Nazi, his ramblings weren't usually ''quite'' this deranged.

* DeathOfTheAuthor
** Though Spinrad's stated intent was to expose the fascist undertones of heroic fantasy & SF, it's been argued that an equally valid interpretation is that it's a satire of Utopian fiction, specifically the ludicrous idea that you can [[AuthorTract "prove" your philosophy is correct with a work of fiction]].
** The two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, and indeed might well go hand-in-hand. The point Spinrad was ''trying'' to make is about ''fiction'', and writing fiction can prove things about fiction. By writing a convincing "pulp" HeroicFantasy[=/=]ScienceFiction work that is ''clearly'' based on Hitler's Germany, he makes it easier to find similarities with other works; he's critiquing what he sees as the rightist wish-fulfillment of many of his contemporary speculative fiction writers, and the FanDumb who gobbled it up. It's the ''real world'' that you can't prove points about by writing a work of fiction--and no doubt Spinrad would agree.

* WhoWouldBeStupidEnough -- The author analyzing Hitler's story notes that while some fans may yearn for such a decisive and iron-willed leader to save them from Soviet domination, he concludes that no rational person would ever stand such a clearly delusional, bloodthirsty tyrant.

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* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything?