Norman Spinrad

Bantam Spectra, 1991, 567 pages, C$27.50 hc, ISBN 0-553-07586-1

Read this:

“The United States… had let the dollar drop like a stone against the ECU in order to try to devaluate its enormous external debt, was reinvesting its capital and excess military capacity in Latin America… and loud voices in the American Congress and elsewhere had started clamoring for debt renunciation and even expropriation of Common European holdings in the States, none of which exactly assured Americans a warm welcome in the metropoles of Common Europe. Besides which, with the dollar so far down against the ECU and all the currency restrictions on American tourists…” [p.86]

Replace ECU with Euro and Latin America with Middle East, and the above sure reads like a news headline, doesn’t it? Then how about the fact that it was written sometime in 1990-1991?

Norman Spinrad may have had guessed a number of details wrong, but the future described in his 1991 family epic Russian Spring is a great deal more familiar today than anyone would have guessed at the time. In this novel, America turns its back on the world and on civilian high technology, invades most of Latin America, blocks its borders and indulges in xenophobia. Meanwhile, Europe -led by a post-communistic Russia- takes the lead in space technology and personal freedom.

As I said; creepy foreshadowing, isn’t it? Spinrad may not have been aiming for much more than a contrarian reversal of roles, but our reality has a way of being even stranger than we can imagine. It’s not a perfect one-to-one correspondence but it’s close enough to be unnerving. (In Russian Spring, the ex-Soviet republics haven’t yet seceded in independent countries, a fact that plays heavily in its conclusion –even though it also features Ukrainian election heavily influenced by Americans!)

The real protagonist of Russian Spring is Jerry Reed, an engineer courted by Europe to lead an ambitious aerospace project. There’s one catch, though; America won’t stand for his defection and demands Reed’s passport, stranding him outside the US. Things are resolved, somewhat, by the arrival of a Russian girl, Sonya Gargarin, who is in a position to make a complex deal to allow them both to stay in Paris.

But that’s not the end of the story. Russian Spring evolves over thirty years, as tensions rise and fall between Europe, America, Russia and the rest of the world. Four main characters over three decades barely qualify for the title of “family epic”, but Spinrad’s novel has an ambitious sweep that has the feel of a big big story. Jerry Reed’s dream is to get into space, but at what cost?

There are many thing to love and admire about Russian Spring, but perhaps the best is the combination of political complexity with good old-fashioned SF spirit. The post-cold-war balance of powers and forces between old allies and enemies is skillfully developed through characters with a lot to lose from even the slightest power shifts. Readers of political fiction ought to find something worthwhile in this novel, especially today.

But at the same time, you have thank Spinrad for using SF’s traditional fixation on space exploration as a way to bring all of humanity together and rise above petty squabbles. This is high-grade techno-optimism and Russian Spring, fourteen years later, offers a suitable prism through which we can see a way out of this crazy “war of terrorism”.

I have my own reservations about the book (the rise of a character named Wolwowitz -of all names!- is dicey, and so is the way two gratuitous accidents precipitate the entire conclusion), but there’s a lot more good than bad in this unexpected, largely forgotten gem. Read it today, because it’s never been more relevant. Still not convinced? Read this:

“President Carson… is a schmuck. If it talks like a schmuck, runs the country like a schmuck, and surrounds itself with other schmucks, it probably is a schmuck, even if it wasn’t cruising this poor screwed-up country for another international bruising like the biggest schmuck of all.” [P.397].

Hmmm.

Timescape, 1972 (1982 reprint), 256 pages, US$3.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-44212-0

Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream has attracted its share of controversy in the twenty-five years since its original publication. And for good reasons: You see, The Iron Dream‘s nothing more that a repackaging of “Lord of the Swastika: Adolph Hitler’s best Science-Fiction Novel!”

Interested, yet?

Spinrad takes one premise and runs with it: What if Hitler, instead of staying in Germany and taking control of the Nazis, had emigrated to America and become an pulp-SF author? What kind of novel could have been written by Hitler?

So we get Lord of the Swastika: A 240-page epic in which perfect-hero Feric Jaggar goes from a humble exile to becoming Master of the World. The plot is straight power fantasy stuff: The introduction of a good-but-powerless hero, his acquisition of a mighty weapon, his rapid ascension to the throne, etc… This is pulpish stuff at its most extreme, consciously pastiched by Spinrad: The intent is to ridiculize the Nazi mystique, and he goes at it with big guns. The prose is suitably bombastic:

“The victory of Lumb had buoyed the spirits of the Helder race, while the realization that it was only a matter of time before the Dominators would once more unleash their ghastly minions against sacred human soil moved them to incredible feats of fanatic self-sacrifice and unprecedented energy.” (Page 168)

I started smirking on page one, and chuckling on page two.

The novel’s afterword is a delight in itself: written in tedious academic jargon, it makes most of the points I wished to enumerate in this review: The obvious phallic symbolism, the ridiculously repetitive imagery, the absence/irrelevance of female characters, the Dom/Jew analogy, the classic heroic fantasy structure, etc… At the same time, the afterword presents a nice little piece of irony in its picture of the alternate world in which Lord of the Swastika was written. Even without WW2, history isn’t necessarily better…

This book can, and should be read on many levels: As a ridiculous send-up of power fantasy, as a warning of the appeal of totalitarism, as an alternate history, as self-conscious macho trip and -my favourite- as an insidious satire of Science-Fiction itself.

Because frankly, I thoroughly enjoyed the adventures of Feric Jaggar. He might be a mysoginistic, racist, totalitarian bastard, but nothing stands in his way. Realistic heroes might have flaws, but flawless heroes are far more fun. And there lies the lesson of The Iron Dream, as banal as it is: Power fantasies are amusing, as long as they remain fantasies. It’s when they ooze into the Real World that people start to be hurt.

It’s frightening to see how easily I, as a reader, was seduced by the omnipotence of heroes like Feric Jaggar. There’s a solid lesson there about the appeal of SF, and how even bad fiction can start re-writing your brain without your permission. Other pulp-era SF stories may have been more benign in intention, but an awful lot of them relied on the same levers than Spinrad’s straight-faced satire.

As a powerful but one-note gotcha!, The Iron Dream doesn’t get my highest commendation… but it’s certainly a classic SF novel for none-too-obvious reasons.