Harry Potter and the Iron Dream | Behind the Books

In many of the communities I operate in, in the past few years, there has been rotating discourse over what to do about Joanne (JK) Rowling. Like, a lot of discourse. Be it from the people rightly disturbed by her bigoted beliefs or those who grew up with her fantastical world of Hogwarts that refuse to let it go, to the person herself who refuses to just let one single sleeping dog lie, it seems like Rowling is never far from the thoughts of someone in the communities I operate in.

And, inevitably, someone involved in that conversation will speak up and say some version of "well, you see, it's really about art vs the artist."

Let’s talk about this with some history.

Before Harry Potter, the biggest thing going was Goosebumps. Goosebumps was everywhere, it got kids reading. It came out almost monthly and was accessible: you could read them in any order.

TV shows, comics, merch, it was for horror young reading what Harry Potter was for fantasy.

But then there was legal trouble with royalties, and amidst the clamor, Scholastic needed something to fill the hole. So they ported over a then-little-known fantasy novel from the UK, and suddenly JK Rowling was a household name.

You know the rest. Stardom. Legions of fans. Midnight releases. Black mold. Transphobia.

But I keep hearing fans beat their chests and ask why they should give up this thing they love just because the author is using the money from it to fund hate campaigns.

I have a better question: WHY DO YOU STILL LIKE IT ANYWAY? These are books for CHILDREN. You are 42. Let it go. Kids today mostly like OTHER things. Bone, Captain Underpants, I don’t know, it’s been a while since I worked with kids. They only like Potter if parental fans jam it down their throats.

Let it go. Read another book. Being obsessed with seven books for twenty years is weird. Normal people read more books than that *every year.* You’ll find more books to love. Trust me.

But to close this loop: RL Stine seems like he’s still a nice guy. But if he wasn’t? I’d stop financially supporting his work. BECAUSE I’M NOT MARRIED TO A BRAND I DISCOVERED WHEN I WAS TWELVE.

And then the tired cliches will get brought up. Lovecraft will get brought up, and how we still celebrate his contributions despite his overt racism. Roald Dahl will get thrown into the mix and HG Wells, both of whom I think we tarred too easily. Alice Munro, if you're Canadian, has been brought into this debate post-humously, to the horror of our literary community.

And I always empathize, a little, at first, with those who have had something of their childhood ruined by Rowling. I went through it with Orson Scott Card and the Ender series -- though notably, I gave up that series without a second thought when I learned just how extreme the author's views were.

It's all circling this question of "what do we do with a problematic person whose work we like?"

Which, first of all, selfishly, I'm always a little miffed at the question. As a genre writer suffering in indie obscurity, I have never once said the opposite. I have never said "well you might not like my book, but I'm a good person, so why not give it a pass?" Like, turning it around like that, we must be aware of how bananas this all sounds... right?

But what if I told you that this question, the "what do we do with a problematic person whose work we like" question, was answered way back in 1972?

Let me tell you about Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, one of the greatest (and most misunderstood) novels of the 20th Century.

The Iron Dream is one of those novels where, when I start telling you the premise, you're going to balk. But please, stick with me.

In trying to grapple with the "art vs the artist" question, it grapples with another question. One about history's greatest monster. Yes, him. There's two questions time travelers and alternative history musers ask themselves about Adolf Hitler: "if you could kill Hitler as a baby, would you?" and "what if Hitler had just stayed an artist?"

The Iron Dream deals with the second: "what if Hitler had just stayed an artist?"

If I can tangent for a moment, this question has always bothered me in a modern context because there's a lot of blame shifting in it, I feel. There are A LOT of right-wing weirdos who started as left-wing artists, failed on the left, then went right-wing to try and find an audience. Steve Bannon. Trump. Tucker Carlson. Kevin Sorbo. Dean Cain. Like, it's a thing. But I feel like, very often, the narrative becomes "if only you liberal artists had accepted them, we wouldn't have to deal with their megalomania!" Or, in context: "if the art community had embraced Adolf, we wouldn't have gotten World War II." And that's... that's gross.

Back back to The Iron Dream. The Iron Dream seeks to answer that question: "what IF Hitler had just stayed an artist?" It centers around a novel-within-the-novel and the reaction to it. In this alternate history, Adolf moved to America in 1919 and found work as a painter, painting the covers for pulp magazines, and eventually being offered a writing gig.

The plot of The Iron Dream focusses around passages from this fictional novel (it has a name I'd rather not have on my website, in case you're wondering why I'm dancing around it), reviews of it, discourse around it. Importantly, the author, Adolf, is dead at the time of this discourse, having died of natural causes in 1953.

And then... and then people start to be inspired by the themes of the novel, and not in a good way. Factions form, and as the novel's ideology begins to take hold with disenfranchised youth, literary critics are quick to dismiss the outrage over the novel and it's apocolapse-like setting, saying "it can't happen here" in ominous last lines.

There are conflicting points of view on the real-world novel, but my read on it has always been to answer that age-old question "what if Hitler had just stayed an artist?"

And the answer is: it would have been bad.

The book's answer, to me, is: it would have been bad. Maybe just as bad, because it's the IDEAS that Adolf had that are toxic and gross and dangerous and wrong. And that regardless of how he expressed them, be it as head of a state, or as a painter, or as a poet, the ideas themselves would still be destructuve. That if he'd taken his stupid, infantile beliefs about humanity and channelled them into art, that that art would have inspired the same death and destruction, albeit on a different timeline.

I believe that Norman Spinrad's answer to the question "what if Hitler had just stayed an artist" is that the question itself is stupid, and ignorant. That it would have been the same, because the ideas themselves were the problem, and that the people of this alternative history shouldn't have read that book any more than the people of ours should read his memoir.

And this, to me, is the answer to what to do about JK Rowling. This is the answer for the Potter fans out there, who want to guiltlessly enjoy her works despite knowing how evil she has shown herself to be.

And the answer is: you can't.

Because her ideas are the problem.

Buried in that text, deep down, in ways modern critics are only now coming to terms with, are ideas about the world that are a problem. Racist ideas. Bad ideas around body image. And yes, transphobic and homophobic ideas. They're in there just as assuredly as Adolf's bad ideas were buried in the fictional text of The Iron Dream, waiting to inspire something awful.