Book Home Books Information Norman Richard Spinrad

Norman Richard Spinrad

Norman Richard Spinrad (born September 15, 1940) is an American science fiction author. One of his most famous works, Bug Jack Barron, a tale of a cynical, exploitative talk-show host who gradually uncovers a conspiracy around an immortality treatment and the methods used in that treatment, was serialised in the British magazine New Worlds during Michael Moorcock's editorship. It was this novel, with its explicit language and cynical attitude to politicians, that aroused an English Member of Parliament's ire at the magazine's partial funding by the British Arts Council.

Norman Spinrad was born in New York City, on September 15, 1940. In 1957, he entered City College of New York and graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Science degree as a pre-law major. In 1966 he moved to San Francisco, then to Los Angeles, and now lives in Paris.

His 1972 novel The Iron Dream is an unusual alternate history novel; the bulk of the text is a reprint of a (fictional) fantasy classic, written in a couple of weeks by a famous fantasy writer shortly before his death in 1953 from (it was rumoured) tertiary syphilis; the book won the 1953 Hugo Award. The remainder of the book is a commentary on the text, pointing out the elements of fetishism, phallic imagery, and paranoia in this most famous and beloved of fantasy epics. The novel is, of course, the 1953 fantasy classic Lord of the Swastika, by Adolf Hitler. As a commentary on and parody of the fascistic undertones in popular fantasy fiction, Spinrad's book was not enjoyed everywhere; it was banned in Germany.