THE EDGE magazine | Book Reviews | Norman Spinrad | Bug Jack Barron

Bug Jack Barron
Norman Spinrad
Toxic Avenger paperback, 254 pages, £6.99
Published December 1999
ISBN 1902002180
The Iron Dream
Norman Spinrad
Toxic Avenger paperback, 253 pages, £6.99
Published September 1999
ISBN 1902002164
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)

It’s always disconcerting looking at the future from, well, the future. Their future. Now. It’s never right – never reportage – even if it’s not all robots and silvery suits and flying cars. The future – any future – is never so bright we need shades. Funny how no one ever noticed. Mind you, Norman Spinrad chanced his arm. And there is something remarkably prescient about the infamous Bug Jack Barron which, while distance has lent it a quaint air, makes its return at the turn of the century quite startling.

Jack himself is a TV shock jock some thirty years before the fact. His show – the eponymous Bug Jack Barron – is there to air gripes; for you to, literally, bug Jack Barron. And no current topic is hotter than immortality. Are you or a loved one knocking on Heaven’s door? Then go get yourself deep-chilled and wait it out. If you have the money, the connections and ain’t black. Appalled, Barron establishes himself up as a one man wrecking crew, out to stop those intent on wresting control of the future at any price.

Remind yourself that Spinrad actually predated the likes of Chayefsky’s flawed, cynical Network, Bogosian and Stone’s mouthy Talk Radio and Robin Cook’s transplant thriller Coma, and this taster for the medical/corporate shenanigans, political marketing and media tsunami to come make his 1969 Mystic Meg act look frankly astonishing.

The other volume in this welcome and important double-header is a whole other beast. The Iron Dream (1972) is a novel within a novel, purporting to be itself a reissue – of the 1954 Hugo award-winning Lord of The Swastika by one Adolf Hitler. This Adolf – Spinrad’s Adolf – emigrated to the US in 1919 instead of fulfilling his warring destiny. He was the author of nine other books – among them The Thousand Year Rule and The Triumph of The Will – and died in 1953, shortly after completing this, his jaw-dropping masterpiece.

An emptily monumental work, set in the aftermath of a post-apocalyptic future, it’s the onanistic fantasy of one Feric Jaggar, pure bred Trueman, who returns from exile to lead his beloved race in a glorious struggle against the mongrels and mutants that stand between the master race and its rightful ascendancy. Insane and wearying, The Iron Dream is part SF, part heraldic sword and sorcery, all ludicrous blood and fire Boy’s Own wish-fulfilment. The novel fights its own war of attrition against the reader as the hack Hitler’s Nazi wank-fantasy fetishes – ‘shiny black leather,’ ‘high steel-soled boots’ – expand like gas-filled balloons. The final seeding of the galaxy with Jaggar clones, fortunately, never spawned the obvious sequel.

Toxic’s reprints sensibly contextualize Spinrad’s polemic with terrific new afterwords by his New Worlds contemporaries Jim Sallis (who calls Dream, ‘a high comic novel in low comic relief’) and Michael Moorcock, who rightfully recognises his old comrade as ‘one of the most politically engaged writers of his generation.’ •

Read Michael Moorcock’s Introduction to Bug Jack Barron

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