The Iron Dream refracts social reality from several angles. As Lord of the Swastika, a novel purportedly authored by Adolf Hitler in an alternate timeline universe, its massive violence and obsession with genetic purity remind us of the horrors of World War II.

Although the plot does not exactly duplicate the real Hitler's rise and his subsequent acts, the parallels are quite close. Even readers unfamiliar with the history of that era cannot miss the Nazi miasma of racism and will-to-power that infests the story's events.

It was published during a late stage of the Cold War. In a pseudo-scholarly afterword by fictional professor Homer Whipple, the other premises of its alternate universe are made clear. The National Socialist movement flickered out after a few years as a fringe political party. Instead, Communists took over Germany by a coup in 1930. Britain fell to them in 1948. The...