I’ll be honest: it’s been a bad week for reading books for me. Although I’ve spent a few days rereading Norman Spinrad’s intensely insane The Iron Dream (which is written as if it was a lurid and somewhat alarming 1950s American novel written by longtime artist and pulp SF novelist Adolph Hitler*). It’s an interesting book on the meta-narrative level, and I plan to do a critique of Spinrad’s message once I’ve finished with the intensely lurid prose – but Book of the Week it ain’t.
Moe Lane
*In that timeline, he emigrated. As I said: intensely insane.
I remember finding a copy while working in the library at college. Weird book especially with the “academic” commentary section at the end. Most people I knew wouldn’t try to read it just based on the “author”.
BTW the cover I remember didn’t have the real author featured prominently and was covered in swatikas, probably didn’t help when I suggested people read it because I thought the book was hilarious.
The trade paperback edition from Orbit? With the enormously phallic spaceships in the background and Adolf on a motorcycle in the foreground? That *was* hilarious!
If you wanna go even FURTHER out past where the buses don’t run, I have a copy of Task Force Games’ “4th Reich”, a wargame set in the future world of the book-within-a-book. I don’t think they had the rights, as a few names have been changed (and, full disclosure, I’ve completely read neither _The Iron Dream_ nor this game), but the description on the game box is dead-on.
Related note: Spinrad’s _Journal of the Plague Years_ is a novella from the ’80s forecasting a near-future in which AIDS is ravaging the world. An engaging story, even though the AIDS hysteria now looks mercifully overblown and dated. I appreciated that one of the main characters who is pretty much a caricature of Evangelicals turns out to have surprising depth in the end.