THE IRON HEEL
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The Iron Heel is a dystopian and political novel in the form of science fiction by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908.
The main premise of the book is the rise of a socialist mass movement in the United States – strong enough to have a real chance of winning national elections, getting to power, and implementing a radical socialist regime. Conservatives feel alarmed and threatened by this prospect, to the point of seizing power and establishing a brutal dictatorship in order to avert it.
The novel is told via the framing device of a manuscript found centuries after the action takes place and footnotes by a scholar, Anthony Meredith, circa 2600 AD or 419 B.O.M. (the Brotherhood of Man). Jack London writes at two levels, sporadically having Meredith correcting the errors of Avis Everhard through his own future prism, while at the same time exposing his often incomplete understanding of this distant future perspective. Meredith's introduction also reveals that the protagonist's efforts will fail, giving the work an air of foreordained tragedy.
The Iron Heel is cited by George Orwell's biographer Michael Shelden as having influenced Orwell's most famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell himself described London as having made "a very remarkable prophecy of the rise of Fascism" and believed that London's understanding of the primitive had made him a better prophet "than many better-informed and more logical thinkers." Specifically, Orwell's protagonist Winston Smith, like London's Avis Everhard, keeps a diary where he writes down his rebellious thoughts and experiences. Many believe that it influenced the Robert A. Heinlein Hugo winning novella, If This Goes On.
The novel has been adapted into two Russian films: The Iron Heel (1919) and The Iron Heel of Oligarchy, 1998.
THE IRON HEEL
$10.75