What if Adolf Hitler had written The Lord of the Rings? That’s the crazy concept of this SF novel

News culture What if Adolf Hitler had written The Lord of the Rings? That’s the crazy concept of this SF novel

The Lord of the Rings by Adolf Hitler

For Larousse editions, the term “uchrony” refers to a “fictitious reconstruction of history that represents the facts as they could have happened,” and this fits perfectly with the novel by Normann Spinrad, published in the United States in 1972 and a year was later published in France. Rêve de fer (original title “The Iron Dream”) is a book that tells the alternative life of Adolf Hitler.

In this uchronistic world, the latter would have fled Germany after the rise of communism and emigrated to the United States after the First World War. He then became an illustrator, then a writer, and was successful with his pro-fascist literary works under the guise of science fiction.

His writing career ended in 1953 with a groundbreaking work about this alternative Earth. Written in six weeks, The fictional novel “Lord of the Swastika” won the Hugo Prize (American literary prize) in 1954 and established itself as an important science fantasy text. Rêve de fer has the peculiarity of presenting in its entirety “The Lord of the Swastika,” whose French title comes from that other Adolf Hitler. The remainder of The Iron Dream from the original title consists of a presentation of the fictional work and a criticism of it.

What if Adolf Hitler, disgusted by Germany’s defeat in 1918, had emigrated to the United States? What if he had discovered a calling as a science fiction writer? What if he had dreamed of becoming the master of the world and let his racist and warlike fantasies inspire him to write The Lord of the Swastika, a novel that won prestigious literary awards? Rêve de fer is an astonishing uchrony and frightening parody and a clear and unequivocal condemnation of Nazism. -Amazon

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The Soviet version of The Lord of the Rings.

The Lord of the Swastika is not the only alternative version of the literary trilogy conceived by JRR Tolkien. A Russian author has taken a similar approach by reinterpreting the Chronicles of Middle-earth from the perspective of the orcs. The Last Ring is a novel by Kirill Eskov that presents a very different story than the original and can be seen as a reaction to American exceptionalism. In the English title, The Last Ring Bearer criticizes Tolkien’s conservative vision and the ban on technical progress.

Kirill Eskov, paleontologist from the Russian Academy of Sciences, shows us the Lord of the Rings as a geologist and reimagines him. He comes to the conclusion that the story told by the victors is far from reality. He then begins to tell us what really happened, from the point of view of the Orocuen people, who had the misfortune of starting their industrial revolution and challenging the rule of beings from another dimension, the elves. .. This surprising, irreverent and exciting parody, already translated into seven languages, is finally available in French. -Amazon

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