Sometimes I Don't Know WHAT to Think (Prequel)

Or, The Random Stuff That Fills My Brain Making It Impossible To Remember Names, Dates, Birthdays, and Anniversaries Without Online Assistance.

For those of you I didn't lose with Ass Goblins of Auschwitz (and the brief follow-up), well, here's another golden opportunity to remove me from your reading list...

The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad.


In this... peculiar... alternate history/faux critical edition, there's this guy, Adolph Hitler, who emigrated to the US from Germany soon after WWI and became a science fiction writer, editor, and illustrator, his career culminating with an epic fantasy/SF novel, Lord of the Swastika (Ursula K. LeGuin weighs in here).

I haven't read it. I don't even own it, though I almost did.

Back when I lived in Charlottesville, VA and spent waaaaay too much time and money at Heartwood Books* I stumbled across a copy. I thought the cover was insanely cool (interpret that as you will), but didn't buy it, settling instead for Bug Jack Barron (which, by the way, was an incredibly...prophetic...novel).

Enter the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. For the next twenty (!) years I kept banging into references to The Iron Dream** and, well, me being the dedicated little bibliomaniac that I am, decided to buy a copy a couple of weeks ago.

No dice. Out-of-print and used copies are commanding moon money.

You know what this means, right? Yep, the OCD will be kicking in, I'll be haunting every single grungy, moldy, mildewy hole-in-the-wall used bookstore I can find, and all of my conversations will revolve around The Quest.

Good thing I live alone.




*Heartwood Books, the Green Valley Book Fair, and amazon.com are the main reasons my apartment will soon be featured on Hoarders. I'm not quite at the level of the Collyer Brothers (though the parallels are scary), but I'm getting there.

**At one point I encountered a link taking me to, of all things, some neo-Nazi website. They missed the point entirely while I wondered whether I needed to wipe clean my entire hard drive.