 First edition | |
| Author | Murray Constantine |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Dystopian |
| Publisher | Victor Gollancz Ltd |
Publication date | 1937 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 287 pp |
| ISBN | 0-935312-56-0 |
| OCLC | 12162019 |
| 823/.912 19 | |
| LC Class | PR6003.U45 S8 1985 |
Swastika Night is a futuristic novel by British writer Katharine Burdekin, writing under the pseudonym Murray Constantine. First published in 1937 and subsequently as a Left Book Club selection in 1940, the novel depicts a world where Adolf Hitler's claim that Nazism would create a "Thousand Year Reich" is realised. Forgotten for many years, until republication in 1985 in England and the United States,[1] literary historian Andy Croft has described Swastika Night as "the most original of all the many anti-fascist dystopias of the late 1930s."[2]
Set hundreds of years in the future, this dystopia envisions a sterile, dying Nazi Reich in which Jews have long since been eradicated, Christians are marginalised, and Hitler is venerated as a God.[3] A "cult of masculinity" prevails, homosexuality has become the norm, and a "reduction of women" has occurred: deprived of all rights, women are kept in concentration camps, their sole value residing in their reproductive roles.
The novel bears striking similarities to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, published more than a decade later: the past has been destroyed and history is rewritten, language is distorted, few books exist apart from propaganda, and a secret book is the only witness to the past.[4]
- ^ Clute, John (1995). Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia. Dorling Kindersley. pp. 121, 215. ISBN 0751302023.
- ^ Hopkins, Chris (2006). English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 138. ISBN 0826489389.
- ^ D. Shaw (19 September 2000). Women, Science and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 42–. ISBN 978-0-230-28734-1.
- ^ For a comparative reading of these elements of the two dystopias, see George McKay (1994). 'Metapropaganda - self-reading dystopian fiction: Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night and George Orwell's 1984. Science-Fiction Studies 21(3): November.