HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to It essentially IS a graphic novel

Well, it's not a real novel....

...dealing with human characters responding to real events. Its a political fantasy, with heroic protagonists and unspeakable villains operating in a contrived situation in order to promote a particular ideology. Not that's there's anything wrong with that. Most political novels are that way, they're not about real people responding to realistic crises, they are about how perfect, right-thinking people will inevitably triumph over a corrupt system and its running dogs. The emphasis is not on characterization, its on corruption.

It reminds me of Norman Spinrad's "The Iron Dream", or more specifically, in the novel-within-a-novel embedded within. If you haven't read that, I suggest you look over Ursula K. Le Guin's excellent review.

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/1/leguin1art.htm

Taken as a parody of S&S [Sword & Sorcery], the book hits all its targets. There is the Hero, the Alpha Male with his muscles of steel and his clear eyes and his manifest destiny; there are the Hero's Friends; there are the vile, subhuman enemies; there is the Hero's Sword, in this case a truncheon of interesting construction; there are the tests, quests, battles, victories, culminating in a final supernal super-victory of the Superman.
...
There is another kind of book of which this can be said to be a parody or oblique criticism, and that is the Straight SF Adventure Yarn, as it is called in manly-modest disclaimer of its having any highfalutin philosophical/intellectual message, though, in fact, it usually contains a strong dose of concentrated ideology.
This is the kind of story best exemplified by Robert Heinlein, who believes in the Alpha Male, in the role of the innately (genetically) superior man, in the heroic virtues of militarism, in the desirability and necessity of authoritarian control, etc., and who is a very persuasive arguer for all these things. Here The Iron Dream may have an effect as a moral counterweight: for in reading it, reading all the familiar things about the glory of battle, the foulness of enemies of the truth, the joys of obedience to a true leader, the reader is forced to remember that it is Hitler saying these things--and thus to question what is said, over and over. The tension and discomfort thus set up may prove salutary to people who are used to swallowing the stuff whole.


http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/512Wp84ScmL.jpg

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