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- Title
In the Year of Our Lord Hitler 720: Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night.
- Authors
Pagetti, Carlo
- Abstract
Swastika Night is in many ways the 1930s' equivalent of The Man in the High Castle. It is not simply Burdekin's focus on the problematics of history, of reconstructing the past, that brings her closer to Dick than to Huxley and Orwell, but also her promotion of values which still do not have the ideological currency of 1984's or Brave New World's. This estranged fiction of hers anticipates Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in its depiction of a future wherein the triumph of Nazism has meant the brutalization of women (as well as Jews) for being an ‘inferior race.’ It is in that context that von Hess, Herman, and Alfred attempt to piece together the fragments of history and thereby recover the historical ‘truth’ that the Night of the Swastika would deform. Yet even Alfred, the most sympathetic of these (would-be) ‘heroes,’ sadly fails to make the values that women represent integral to himself—the values of pacificism and non-domination that alone promise a possible end to the Night of the brutal violence of male aggression.
- Subjects
LITERARY criticism; SCIENCE fiction; SWASTIKA Night (Book); BURDEKIN, Katharine; NOVELISTS; FICTION writing; NATIONAL socialism &; literature; VIOLENT men
- Publication
Science Fiction Studies, 1990, Vol 17, Issue 3, p360
- ISSN
0091-7729
- Publication type
Literary Criticism