Jack London's forays into science fiction are subtle, tastefully written stories that almost present themselves as rather boring slow moving affairs. But after I have read them I have looked back on them and realized how excellent they are. The Iron Heel is a manuscript written by Avis Everhard (you have to excuse the porn star name) describing the socialist revolutionary movement in North America between about 1912 and 1920. The manuscript had been hidden in a great oak tree and was found some 700 years later.
The story begins by tracing the early years of Ernest Everhard (Avis' soon to be husband) as a revolutionary thinker preaching socialism in the Bay Area around 1912. Ernest's preaching gains greater momentum and is joined by a network of national and international socialists all of whom want to overthrow the current capitalist regimes in their respective countries. The European socialists achieve the earliest success by staging a global general strike which overthrows the German monarchy and prevents a war with the United States (presumably World War I).
The North American socialists, however, meet with far less success. In the United States the all powerful trusts (big monopolist corporations) form a powerful oligarchy that ends up taking over the Canadian, US, Mexican and Cuban governments. This oligarchy is the Iron Heel which stamps out the labor movement and engages in a prolonged cold and hot war with the socialists. Once the Iron Heel has firmly put itself in power it raises a mercenary army to fight the socialists who engage in a number of all out revolts to try to overthrow the Oligarchy. The introduction, written by the person who found the manuscript, suggests that the socialists are eventually successful but not until they have tried four or five times and have been rebuffed each time.
The narrative is initially rather polemical but is graphic when it turns to describing the great socialist prison break, the stamping out of the Grange party and the labor movement and the first revolution known as the Chicago Commune.
2 comments:
Oh very cool. It's an alternate history for us but was science fiction for London. Sounds quite intriguing.
I wonder if London was advocating for the Iron Heel or if he was more of a socialist. I think the prevailing mood just after the turn of the century was one of a growing socialist/anarcho awareness and he was writing about putative conflicts in the future. Sort of a preview of the situations in Russia and Spain in the coming decades.
BTW, I want to name my next metal band Iron Heel.
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