I’m planning in the next couple days — probably tomorrow — to do the first in a series of posts on Forgotten Comics Characters, beginning with mid-nineties footnote Blackwulf. But until then, here’s something to hold you over.

Science fiction and fantasy are particularly derivative genres. It’s very hard to get away with anything original in either without people challenging its right to be included among the ossified pantheon of Heinlein and Robert Jordan. Both have their standard tropes, their impassable mountains, their ancient laws, and God help you should you transgress them. Fans of fantasy want brutal orcs, standoffish, isolated centaurs, Elvish archers and knights who become kings. They want the Single Horrifying Evil That Must Be Stopped Lest Free Men Suffer The Yoke Of Slavery, and as a result, they want villains who are easy to kill. No, not villains that die easily, but villains that make on you no moral demands.

It’s the same in science fiction. Regardless of the overall plot, the aliens you kill must be reptilian monsters or giant spiders, something inhuman that demands a violence because it cannot be otherwise dealt with. Their war must always be Like No War Before It, and the stakes must demand the utmost brutality and vigor in prosecuting man’s vengeance. Sometimes, the aliens are violent expansionists, Nazis who would crush a free universe, or they’re the Borg, acting with a single mind and undermining everything we hold dear.  I say “we” because we always sympathize with the protagonists’ faction.

In fantasy, our enemies are evil people affiliated with dark, warmaking gods, to which we only respond with violence because they’ve provoked us. But every time, our actions are justified and celebrated. Humanity destroys the troll armies or the Cylon base ship, and we toss their agents out the airlock. Such things are necessary, we say. Their brutality demands a brutality of our own.

Doesn’t this sound like a romp? Imagine a once-pure and holy kingdom overwhelmed with a degenerate mutant population which actively tries to destroy it from within. These mutant scum have wormed their way into positions of power from which they can easily devastate the good people under them, destroying them, beating them into submission. They are also the servants of a false and vile religion, and their practices are the sickest you can imagine, offering young girls in sacrifice and committing ritual rape. But the people cannot stop them without a hero.

And so a hero rises, up from a forgotten line of ancient kings, the true rulers of the land. With his holy weapon and his devoted band, he drives the wicked from the land and kills all who resist him. He is dashingly handsome, sexually virile, the ideal man. Sounds like a fun book!

And I’ve read it. I’ve read it time and again. It’s a popular trope, a casual narrative that has wormed its way into our subconscious and props up so much of both fantasy and science fiction. It has elements of Star Wars, The Matrix, and Lord of the Rings. And we root like hell for that strong, young king.

And it never occurs to us that he’s Hitler.

That basic story was the narrative holding up Nazism. Call the kingdom “Germany” and the mutant degenerates “Jews, Homosexuals, and Gypsies,” and it should all be clear. Nazism was replete with the same imagery of teutonic folklore that permeates traditional fantasy, with the same hero-king, and both were informed by the same elemental fascism.

I read Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream when I was in high school. It is not an especially good book. It’s a stereotypical pulp, with overwrought writing, an “a-b-c” plot progression, and an idealized hero. The story is roughly the generic plot I sketched out earlier, and it really only has one thing going for it: it purports to be a fantasy novel written by Adolf Hitler.

It is what’s called a “false document,” an artifact of its own fictional world, alongside Robert Sobel’s For Want of a Nail. In the world of The Iron Dream, Hitler moved to the United States after the First World War and became a pulp illustrator and writer. The Russians conquered Europe and the US is allied with Imperial Japan in the 1970’s, and in 1953, he wrote The Lord of the Swastika. It had a strong affect on much of the US, becoming wildly popular and affecting the political arena, where the swastika has become a symbol of those advocating strong, efficient government and a vigorous military policy to combat the Greater Soviet Union.

Spinrad writes:

To make damn sure that even the historically naive and entirely unselfaware reader got the point, I appended a phony critical analysis of Lord of the Swastika, in which the psychopathology of Hitler’s saga was spelled out by a tendentious pedant in words of one syllable.

Almost everyone got the point…

And yet one review appeared in a fanzine that really gave me pause. “This is a rousing adventure story and I really enjoyed it,” the gist of it went. “Why did Spinrad have to spoil the fun with all this muck about Hitler?”

I read this book in my formative years, and it’s informed most of my work since then. I’ve made real effort to avoid these Hero With A Thousand Faces stories and tell little speculative fiction and historical fiction stories with a Catholic sensibility, like my “The Ways of Things,” which is about resurrection, and “Bolingbroke,” about man’s ability always to escape oppression even without a mighty military effort (it’s also about a dragon).

But it’s everywhere, isn’t it?