The Iron Heel - SFBA Book Club

paperback, 242 pages

Published May 7, 2008 by Forgotten Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-60620-185-5

(1 review)

Generally considered to be "the earliest of the modern Dystopian," it chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. It is arguably the novel in which Jack London's socialist views are most explicitly on display. A forerunner of soft science fiction novels and stories of the 1960s and 1970s, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes.

2 editions

loppear reviewed The Iron Heel by Jack London

This was a thorough surprise

4 stars

How much did I like this for how early it is, how much for how timely it is? Surprisingly modern throughout, a dystopia written in 1908 as the personal account of a Socialist revolution lived and crushed in 1930s America and the occasional future footnote revealing hundreds of years of subsequent fascist rule by The Oligarchy. Opens very didactically on the need for worker solidarity to oppose the corporate trusts squeezing and setting against each other all below, but turns to an increasingly gripping and grim account - reminiscent of For Whom The Bell Tolls in ways - of state repression and underground rebellion and counter-maneuver.