Norman Spinrad
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Norman Richard Spinrad (born September 15, 1940) is an American science fiction author.
Norman Spinrad, born in New York City, is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. In 1957 he entered City College of New York and graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Science degree as a pre-law major. In 1966 he moved to San Francisco, then to Los Angeles, and now lives in Paris. He married fellow novelist N. Lee Wood in 1990; they divorced in 2005. They had no children. Spinrad served as President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) from 1980 to 1982 and again from 2001 to 2002.
One of his most famous works, Bug Jack Barron (1969), a pre-cyberpunk tale of a cynical, exploitative talk-show host who gradually uncovers a conspiracy concerning an immortality treatment and the methods used in that treatment, was serialised in the British magazine New Worlds during Michael Moorcock's editorship. It was this novel, with its explicit language and cynical attitude to politicians, that aroused an English Member of Parliament's ire at the magazine's partial funding by the British Arts Council. Memorable quote from this novel: The saddest day of your life isn't when you decide to sell out. The saddest day of your life is when you decide to sell out and nobody wants to buy.
His 1972 novel The Iron Dream is an unusual alternate history novel; the bulk of the text is a reprint of a (fictional) fantasy classic, Lord of the Swastika, written in a couple of weeks by Adolf Hitler, a famous fantasy writer and not a dictator in this alternate reality. The remainder of the book is a commentary on the text, pointing out the elements of fetishism, phallic imagery, and paranoia in this most famous and beloved of fantasy epics. As a commentary on and parody of the fascistic undertones in popular fantasy fiction, Spinrad's book was not enjoyed or understood everywhere.
Both communism and Nazism, of course, have their utopian and even SF dimensions: an eternal happy state for the "proletariat", a Thousand-Year Reich for the "Aryans". There are, in fact, elements of Nazism in some SF works, and of SF in Nazism. Spinrad magnifies and examines in brilliant, post-Freudian detail precisely such. This is a book which shows what a true Nazi would do if he could do absolutely everything he wished.
According to an article attributed to Spinrad[1] the book was banned for eight years in Germany, but was finally exonerated after appeals. Actually, the sale of the book as such was not prohibited, because that ban would have been contrary to the freedom of speech, but the public display of the book or its covers was prohibited, because of the swastika symbol, which is banned in Germany. So the book was sold "under the counter", to those buyers who specifically asked for it.
Contents |
[edit] Selected works
[edit] Novels
- The Solarians (1966)
- Agent of Chaos (1967)
- The Men in the Jungle (1967)
- Bug Jack Barron (1969)
- The Iron Dream (1972)
- Passing through the Flame (1975)
- Riding the Torch (1978)
- A World Between (1979)
- Songs from the Stars (1980)
- The Mind Game (1980)
- The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
- Child of Fortune (1985)
- Little Heroes (1987)
- Children of Hamelin (1991)
- Russian Spring (1991)
- Pictures at 11 (1994)
- Journals of the Plague Years (1995)
- Greenhouse Summer (1999)
- He walked among us (2003)
- The Druid King (2003)
- Mexica (2005)
[edit] Collections
- The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (1970)
- No Direction Home (May 1975)
- The Star-Spangled Future (1979)
- Other Americas (1988)
- Vampire Junkies (1994)
[edit] Teleplays
- "The Doomsday Machine" (Star Trek: The Original Series)
- "Tag Team" (Land of the Lost)
