1937 feminist alternate history. Seven centuries after Nazi victory,
women are uneducated cattle, and men have eliminated history, books,
and creativity.
This is much more a feminist than an anti-fascist book. Nazism is
the basis for its dystopian future, but what's being excoriated is
nothing specific to the Nazi system; instead it's what one might call
performative masculinity, the deliberately violent and brutal
philosophy of life that admits of no tender feelings. Most people are
unable to read (the only books in existence are the Hitler Bible and
technical manuals, and it's not surprising that technology seems if
anything to have regressed); women are kept separate from men,
prohibited even the basic education the men get, and forced to shave
their heads and wear baggy clothing, their only purpose being to
produce sons. Even the despised Christian under-race lives this way.
There is some very good stuff here: in particular, the social
indoctrination of the characters is so strong that they're literally
unable to imagine women as being beautiful or having minds of their
own, or an actual history or civilisation before the divine Hitler
created everything. Although there are people trying to be "good" and
change things, nobody has anything like the whole picture.
But this is more of a tract than a story. Characters are there to
provide information, often in extended Socratic dialogues, and have
Sudden Awakenings; their personalities are irrelevant and mostly
nonexistent. There's very little action, not even a picaresque tour of
the world in the style of The Sleeper Awakes, and the ideas often
feel as though they would be better in an extended essay than being
clothed in the ill-fitting form of a novel.
The book very clearly prefigures Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four,
containing many of the ideas about the control of history that were
key to that later book, as well having as significant plot elements in
common. (It comes to rather different conclusions, advocating
non-violent education rather than hopelessness.) But what it doesn't
have, which Orwell's book does, is a compelling story to carry the
reader over the lectures.
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