The Iron Heel

Jack London's dystopian SF novel is not well written, but painfully prescient

When I started this blog, I promised myself I wasn’t going to talk about politics. But this is a book review, so I’m going to allow this.

Jack London was a lot more versatile than most people realize. He’s best known for his dog stories, White Fang and Call of the Wild, and you may have heard of some of his sea stories, even if you haven’t read them. But he was also one of the pioneers of science fiction, among other things, as well as a political activist. The Iron Heel was written at the very beginning of the 20th century, in 1908, before the First World War or the Russian Revolution, and it was utterly groundbreaking.

Part science fiction, part dystopian fantasy, part radical socialist tract, Jack London's The Iron Heel offers a grim depiction of warfare between the classes in America and around the globe. Originally published over a hundred years ago, it anticipated many features of the past century, including the rise of fascism, the emergence of domestic terrorism, and the growth of centralized government surveillance and authority.

Written long before 1984, Brave New World, or We, it was one of the first of the dystopian novels. It's terrifyingly prescient, describing the way a government is taken over by a group of industrial oligarchs, filled with details such as the "wonder cities" (almost a perfect description of Dubai or Singapore), fake news, and much more. As a political document and prophecy, it's magnificent.

As a novel, however, it's not good. The first half of the book is devoted to political polemics, where the protagonist makes speeches to various people propounding his ideas of socialism, the evils of capitalism, and the inevitability of revolution. I can't say I disagree with the idea, but they become tedious to read. Then the next third of the book is a brief overview of a failed revolution. It touches on important incidents, but it's a recitation of (fictional) facts and reads more like a history for beginners than a story. There's so much material there that could have been worked into something really engrossing. 1984 and the others work well because they depict a dystopia from the point of view of people who are going through a personal hell. The final few chapters do turn into a personal narrative, but it's too late by then, and they don't focus on the most important character. And the ending is terrible: it's unresolved and unsatisfying.

Political stories shouldn’t be speeches. It’s all too easy to relying on telling, when they should be showing. The reader doesn’t want explanations or harangues. They don’t want to read about a brilliant orator orating brilliantly and demonstrating his intellectual superiority. They want to understand what it is like to live in that world. And, if you’re offering the big view, they want to be immersed in how that came about: they need to feel the collapse into dystopia, and realize for themselves how it came about and how it could have been stopped. They need to experience the decisive moments and feel in their guts what went wrong and why. It has to be visceral, personal, and painful. The Iron Heel fails at all of those.

Nevertheless, I recommend The Iron Heel because it's a powerful book that more people should read. Don't expect the brilliance of Orwell, Huxley or Zamyatin, but it's worth seeing where they got their inspiration from.