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    The Iron Heel
    The Iron Heel
    The Iron Heel
    Ebook338 pages5 hours

    The Iron Heel

    By Jack London

    3.5/5

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    The Iron Heel is a dystopian novel by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908. Generally considered to be "the earliest of the modern Dystopian", it chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. It is arguably the novel in which Jack London's socialist views are most explicitly on display. A forerunner of soft science fiction novels and stories of the 1960s and '70s, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes. The book is unusual among London's writings (and in the literature of the time in general) in being a first-person narrative of a woman protagonist written by a man. Much of the narrative is set in the San Francisco Bay Area, including events in San Francisco and Sonoma County. The novel is based on the (fictional) "Everhard Manuscript" written by Avis Everhard which she hid and which was subsequently found centuries later. In addition, this novel has an introduction and series of (often lengthy) footnotes written from the perspective of scholar Anthony Meredith. Meredith writes from around 2600 AD or 419 B.O.M. (the Brotherhood of Man). Jack London writes at two levels, often having Meredith condescendingly correcting the errors of Everhard yet, at the same time, exposing the often incomplete understanding of this distant future perspective. Meredith's introduction also acts as a deliberate "spoiler" (the term did not yet exist at the time of writing). Before ever getting a chance to get to know Avis and Ernest, how they fell in love or how Avis became politically involved, the reader is already told that all their struggles and hopes would end in total failure and repression, and that both of them would be summarily executed. This gives all that follows the air of a foreordained tragedy. There is still left the consolation that a happy end would come for humanity as a whole – though hundreds of years too late for Avis and Ernest as individuals.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSheba Blake Publishing
    Release dateMay 16, 2017
    ISBN9783961897889
    Author

    Jack London

    Jack London was born in San Francisco in 1876, and was a prolific and successful writer until his death in 1916. During his lifetime he wrote novels, short stories and essays, and is best known for ‘The Call of the Wild’ and ‘White Fang’.

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    Reviews for The Iron Heel

    3.5/5

    230 ratings19 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Very enjoyable and brief read taken from a fictional manuscript describing the life of a revolutionary during the rise of the oligarchy in America.
    • 4/5
      Totally over the top, turn of the last century Socialist propaganda, but I was totally hooked. Fascinating and thought provoking. I thought the way the footnotes were worked in was kind of clever.
    • 2/5
      Dystopian, or very dated alternate history, which drowned me in Marxism and the evils of capitalism as viewed through the lens of the very early 20th century. My perspective, a century later, shows many of these ills have been legislatively remedied. Not much of a story or plot, no real character growth; mostly essay or lecture on socialism, topped off with stomping feet, neo-terrorism and the beginnings of a non-nuclear Cold War.
    • 1/5
      The Iron Heel calls itself a novel, but it really isn’t. Basically, it’s a sad excuse for a novelist to expouse his political beliefs on a bully pulpit and call it a novel. There’s no real plot in the story. What there was, is page after page of London spouting his beliefs on socialism. It’s almost as if he had written these long essays on the virtues of socialism and after the fact, decided to make it into a novel. Even if I agreed with his position, which I don’t, it’s completely inappropriate to call this a novel. If I wanted to read about socialism, I would get a non-fiction book on the subject. There is nothing remotely redeemable about this novel, if you want to call it that. I would highly recommend avoiding this, even if you are a practicing socialist.Carl Alves – author of Reconquest: Mother Earth
    • 5/5
      What begins as a battle of the classes in America becomes a global war as a state oligarchy, known as “the Iron Heel,” moves to crush all opposition to its power. Prophetic and inspirational. An important book.
    • 4/5
      Written in 1908, it is considered to be one of the first dystopian novels. It also is written as a first person narrative from a woman’s POV in manuscripts found later, much later, so it is looking back in history. The novel has many flaws and it is also full of socialist view points but it is also quite amazing how forward looking Jack London was in some aspect. While this is considered ‘soft’ science fiction, it is a political statement. You know from there very beginning sentences that things are not going to go well for the revoluntionaries. Jack London believed that society was evolving in much the way as nature was said to evolve. The book probably does have historical importance for it’s influence on other science fiction and dystopian novels that would follow.
    • 3/5
      A conflicted work, revealing a conflicted author: To mark the 100th anniversary of the 1908 publication of Jack London's The Iron Heel, The Socialist Standard published an article attacking the book as "a decidedly anti-socialist work... considered a classic of its time... for all the wrong reasons". This naturally piqued my interest, and put the novel on my radar to pick up from the library.The Iron Heel is presented as an historical manuscript discovered some seven centuries in the future, a draft of memoirs written in the early 1930s by Avis Everhard, a socialist revolutionary. Avis, assisted by footnotes from a future historian, relates the process through which first America and then the world is taken over by a brutal plutocratic dictatorship -- dubbed the "Iron Heel" -- in the years after 1912. The victory of the Iron Heel comes about despite the best efforts of Avis and her husband, Ernest Everhard, a brilliant socialist philosopher-warrior-prophet-king, "a super-man, a blond beast such as Nietzsche has described" (12), and, of course, the fictionalized persona of London himself. Right from the start, we are informed that the Iron Heel is to triumph and reign for centuries, all opposition forced underground into endless guerrilla warfare, which London modeled on the violent conflict between certain Russian revolutionists and the Tsar's Empire.The greatest strength of London's novel, emphasized by Jonathan Auerbach's introduction to the 2006 Penguin edition, is the way both the Iron Heel and the armed resistance opposing it mirror each other in their tactics, strategy, and even ideology. Both infiltrate each other's organizations, and then infiltrate each other's infiltrations; both judge and execute; both must kill or be killed; both know their cause is just and righteous, the source and protection of all that is good in the world; both view the masses/working class/common people as a primitive, backwards and barbaric force to be feared and manipulated against their enemies. The only character who does no harm is merely caught in the crossfire, anonymously gunned down in the streets of Chicago.Unfortunately, such positive aspects of the novel are largely overwhelmed by other features both irritating and troubling. On the purely irritating end, the future historian's footnotes are sometimes used to good effect, but often simply tack on quotes or citations that are too pedantic or artificial to fit in text itself. Forking these off into footnotes doesn't help. And speaking of artificiality, the political debates in the earlier chapters often read less like dialogue than like a simplistic Marxist catechism -- occasional question, long uninterrupted response.Much more disturbing is London's half romantic, half apocalyptic vision of ceaseless warfare between bands of Nietzschean supermen and the shadowy, oppressive state. Coupled with his (perhaps unconscious) racism and (very conscious) "social Darwinism", this helps account for the book's otherwise puzzling appeal to far-right "survivalists" and white nationalists. Indeed, although London's future historian comes from a peaceful, democratic socialist society, much of The Iron Heel is a thinly-veiled social-Darwinist attack on the Socialists of London's day. In the novel, the Socialists disregard Everhard's (London's) warnings about the coming struggle for survival. They are weak and pacifistic, relying on democracy, education, and mass organization to build the co-operative commonwealth, and so they fail. They are completely smashed by the Iron Heel, which persists for centuries before naturally falling apart under its own weight.The style of The Iron Heel as a whole struck me as much more like that of Ayn Rand than that of Karl Marx or any other socialist. The chief difference from Rand's works is that instead of caring only for themselves, London's super-men care (for reasons that are far from convincing) only for a working class that is almost completely invisible. Common people are helpless to liberate themselves, and all the Iron Heel has to do to retain power is buy off (or kill off) whatever super-men rear their heads amongst the "people of the abyss". No wonder the International Socialist Review of the time panned the book as "well calculated to repel many whose addition to our forces is sorely needed".Mussolini was far from the only ex-socialist whose views of struggle, strength, and survival led him to abandon democracy and buy into an Iron Heel of his own. Although Jack London died in 1916 at the age of 40, many see in his work strong suggestions that he was on a similar trajectory. In 1945, George Orwell mused that had London lived longer, "it is hard to be sure where his political allegiance would have lain... One can imagine him in the Communist Party, one can imagine him falling victim to the Nazi racial theory, and one can imagine him the quixotic champion of some Trotskyist or Anarchist sect." In the end, I found the actual story in The Iron Heel considerably less interesting than what the book reveals about its author.
    • 3/5
      Out of the decay of self-seeking capitalism, it was held, would arise that flower of the ages, the Brotherhood of Man. Instead of which, appalling alike to us who look back and to those that lived at the time, capitalism, rotten-ripe, sent forth that monstrous offshoot, the Oligarchy.I chose to open with this quote not only because it encapsulates the basic premise of The Iron Heel, but also because I think it gives the reader a good glimpse of Jack London’s writing style. I just love the phrase “rotten-ripe.” It conjures up a picture that no other pair of words might have. The use of alliteration for expressive effects always scores high with me (and London seems to love alliteration almost as much as I do—geeky, I know).This is the second of London’s novels that I’ve read, and as with The Call of the Wild, I found myself disagreeing with much of his philosophy, and at the same time enjoying his craft. I was particularly fascinated by the intertexuality—or, to be more accurate, the intratextuality—of The Iron Heel. The main narrative is a document penned by Avis Everhard, the wife of a prominent revolutionary from the socialist uprising of London’s imagined 20th century; it has been discovered, hundreds of years later, by a scholar who provides a frame narrative in the form of an introduction and footnotes. It is suggested that we take both narrators’ perspectives with a grain of salt—Avis is too emotionally bound up with the revolution, while the scholar is a bit snooty in his utopian enlightenment—and London has a lot of fun with the textual interplay. The fact that some of the footnotes are accurate late 19th and early 20th century anecdotes, and others are completely fictional, only makes sorting through the material more fun.One of the results of this layering of narration makes the book unique as a piece of dystopian literature. It is simply this: we know there will be a happy ending. It will not come for a long time—centuries, in fact, all of them tragic and bloody—but the mere presence of an unbridled voice from the future proves that tyranny will end. And it seems clear that this future society is meant to be viewed as idyllic, even though certain aspects of our culture have disappeared over time, including the majority of H. G. Wells’s writings and the recipe for tamale. I couldn’t care less about Wells, but no tamales? Really? So much for Utopia.One could complain about London’s characters, who often take a back seat to the larger conflict between the socialists and the Oligarchy (or Iron Heel). The most interesting to me were minor figures: Avis’s father, a scientist in all situations; Bishop Morehouse, a saint fighting for principles that few care about; Anna Roylston, a beautiful killer who makes the difficult decision to remain childless. Erenest Everhard, the presumed hero of the piece, is surrounded by such a halo of glory that is difficult to relate to him at all. Avis, the narrator, regularly subsumes herself in order to sketch his portrait, which is a pity, as she had the potential to become a much more interesting figure. The descriptions of their relationship frequently sent me into fits of laughter, although I admit that they disturbed me a bit as well. Take this one: I lay long awake, listening in memory to the sound of his voice. I grew frightened at my thoughts. He was so unlike the men of my own class, so alien and so strong. His masterfulness delighted and terrified me, for my fancies roved until I found myself considering him as a lover, as a husband. I had always heard that the strength of men was an irresistible attraction to women; but he was too strong. ‘No, no!' I cried out. ‘It is impossible, absurd!’“His masterfulness” indeed! One could pass this off as simple datedness, but judging from the little I know of London’s life, I’d say it was indicative of a deep-seated misogyny.Again, my liking for the book is not based on any ideological similarities between London and myself. I am not in any sense a socialist. But I find his exploration of these issues fascinating, and his dialogical rhetoric surprisingly effective. The book does drag in places, but there are some powerful scenarios, such as Mr. Wickson’s revelation regarding the Iron Heel’s intentions, and certainly the Chicago Commune. Overall, I recommend the book.Suggested audio pairing: Muse’s Absolution (also apocalyptic, anti-establishment, and—in places—a bit mushy).
    • 3/5
      An unusual novel, largely written as a journal/story of a rebel in the 20th century movement against the Iron Heel dystopian society. Used as a historical document hundreds of years in the future, Avis Everhard describes how the Iron Heel took over the US, with the oligarchs enslaving more and more of the population, moving them at will to do work, and keeping them in ghettos. Everhard describes what happened to people--her father, her husband, a Catholic Bishop friend--who spoke out against the beginnings of the oligarchs as they crushed certain unions and gave huge favors to others to gain their support.Because this was written over 100 years ago, certain aspects are very out of date, particularly anything having to do with technology. But certain aspects seem very up to date, because this sounds like a government Donald Trump would design. We already live in an oligarchy, but people still deny it. Just as they did in this book. The writing is somewhat awkward, though this is my first London. Maybe this is just how he wrote?
    • 2/5
      Not my favorite Jack London book, but it wasn't terrible.

    • 3/5
      Interesting futuristic accounting of America that is overtaken by the working class. It tells a narrative account of how this takes place through the voice of the hero's wife. London shows a great deal of foreknoledge of what actually happens with the spread of corporatism in America and the world. Nice quick read.
    • 3/5
      This was pretty painful to read, although it does feature some surprisingly reasonable arguments for socialism from the perspective of the early 20th century. Other reviewers have mentioned that The Iron Heel is like a collectivist Atlas Shrugged, which couldn't be more accurate. Reading it, you can't help but see Ernest Everhard as an inverted John Galt. Atlas Shrugged and The Iron Heel even have the same literary deficiencies: they are both melodramatic, feature horrible dialogue, and totally lack subtlety. However, I gave Atlas Shrugged five stars and the Iron Heel only three. This is mainly because London didn't write an almost cinematic epic like Rand did. The Iron Heel isn't long enough to portray the downfall of America in a convincing way, and it's significantly less entertaining than Rand's work. Also, while we're comparing Everhard to Galt, in a similar comparison between Avis and Dagny, London's heroine doesn't stand a chance. Avis' character almost feels like an afterthought, thrown in merely to tell Ernest's story. Sure, Dagny isn't exactly a realistic character either, but at least you're rooting for her as you read Atlas Shrugged.On the up side, London's device of scholarly footnotes sprinkled into Avis' "manuscript" was clever. The Iron Heel is worth reading if you love dystopia and/or if you are looking for an interesting foil to Atlas Shrugged. Otherwise, skip it.
    • 3/5
      Friggin' meaty downfall of civilisation, and rise of the oligarchies. Sometimes reads like an inverse Atlas Shrugged, only in a good way. There is a hearty chunk of intrigue and mobs and Pinkertons and strike breakers. It's written in that style I'm kind of stupidly fond of, where there are footnotes (!) and general notation that indicates a scholar/historian came across the text some many years (in this case, three centuries) after it was written. Annotated fictive text. Kinda love it. I guess this guy mostly wrote nature stuff.
    • 2/5
      Though praised by the likes of George Orwell, The Iron Heel is decidedly... socialism by the numbers. Perhaps the story explained standard socialist polemics to a contemporary audience in an appealing narrative and in that, gains its value. Since I have a high regard for Orwell, this novel was disappointing.The majority of the book is composed of speeches by the book's hero, Ernest Everhard, against various factions as narrated by his wife. These speeches are normally straw man arguments, wherein the author puts specious arguments in the mouths of the opponents and then shoots them down.One particular episode that stands out is the accusation that theologians are logical relativists. I find it extraordinarily ironic that a materialist, atheist hero is defending absolutism and accusing theistic theologians of standing on relativistic grounds.While disparaging liberal democracy, the story does not, in any way, describe the future socialist government or society. Various hints can be discerned in the footnotes by the imaginary future editor, but nothing concrete. Like many socialists of his day, he knew what he didn't like, but the future was empty platitudes.Unlike Orwell, London had no original thought on the philosophy of socialism, at least in this book, instead restating contemporary socialist dogma. Perhaps his greatest contribution was predicting the shape of impending totalitarian governments (not just the fascists) with their spy games, double agents, agent provocateurs, underground opposition, ubiquitous informers, oppressive atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia, summary executions, sham trials, disappearances, and so on. Although he predicted the Iron Heel would rise from the plutocracy, instead it came from the students, the lower bourgeois and the working classes.The book's greatest flaw is the use of the hero's wife, Avis Everhard, to tell the tale. Jack London could not write women. Just as the Sea Wolf's romantic dialogues were incredibly annoying, Avis' unending maudlin fawning quickly gets old. Unfortunately, the whole story is told from her point of view. In the pseudo-Foreword, London himself probably recognized his fault by saying "forgive Avis Everhard for the heroic lines upon which she modeled her husband" and that he was "not so exceptional as his wife thought him to be."
    • 3/5
      I think the book would have benefited from some editing and rearranging of the text to make it more readable.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating, and incredibly relevant today. London had seen poverty, the excesses of extreme capitalism, and a widening ‘wealth gap’ in the America of his day, and like many, advocated socialism as a more humane and fair system. Here he writes a cautionary tale about what he believed the conflict inherent to capitalism between owners and workers would inevitably lead to – civil war, or revolution – and comes across even as advocating it. He does this by presenting a journal from one of the wife of one of the (fictional) early Socialist leaders, uncovered by historians in the future, after man had endured hundreds of years under the “Iron Heel” of an Oligarchy, and then were hundreds of years into a more enlightened “Brotherhood of Man”. I don’t buy all of London’s views, and he obviously didn’t have the benefit of seeing just how disastrously communism would play out in the 20th century, but found his descriptions of the power dynamic between owners and workers, the rich and poor – and all of the implications of that – to be highly compelling. There are so many things to chew on here, as the book includes:- Criticism of organized religion’s role in attempting to preserve the status quo, vs. preaching the real message of Christ … among other things, quoting several 19th century Southern church leaders justifying slavery.- Political corruption in the form of lobbyists in Congress eating away at democracy and turning it into a plutocracy, despite voting and what people thought was rule of the people. He also points out decisions like Lochner v. New York (1905), which held that the New York law prohibiting work days longer than 10 hours and work weeks with more than 60 hours was unconstitutional – a sign that wealthy, conservative interests were at play, and which would continue on into the progressive era (something we may see repeating itself in the future).- Echoes of Tolstoy’s idealistic suggestion to ending war – by the common man simply refusing to participate.- The wealthy saying criticisms against them amounted to “class hatred” just as we see today on Fox News, and ironically without the self-reflection of what a system that accelerates the wealth gap amounts to. They also believe they are the saviors of society, when the protagonist finds them not only selfish, but surprised by their “absence of intellectual life.”- London quotes statistics from 1900 as giving this breakdown of Americans: the Plutocratic (in this context, wealthy) class (1%), Middle Class (29%), and Proletarian Class (70%). It’s just fascinating to me to compare this to today, where we have increasing light shed on “the 1%”, which as of 2017 owned 40% of the nation’s wealth, and the bottom 90% owned a shockingly low 20%. In London’s vision, he sees the middle class being squeezed out of existence – and it’s this erosion that we see today.- Criticism of the small businessmen who were angry about being run out of business by big businessmen, who could use economies of scale to better compete – saying that they had had no problem in successively driving others out of business, were motivated by the same principles, and were swimming upstream to think a system that produced lower costs could be undone. I thought this was fantastic. While I cringe over the big businesses today (e.g. Amazon), London’s comments through his character are insightful. His solution is not to limit the big business (“the machine”, as he calls it), but to have workers own it (or the government), spreading the wealth. He also believed in “excessive income taxes, graduated with ferocity, to destroy large accumulations.”- The lengths to which the rich will go to preserve their wealth - buying off labor leaders, breaking unions and undermining them at every turn, sending agents out to incite violence so that armed force can be brought in, and most ominously, simply charging illegality of election results and then using violence. If that doesn’t make the hairs stand up on the back of your head, I don’t know what will. The crisis that threatened American democracy in London’s time was alleviated with social programs following the Depression, leading to rise of the middle class – but we face the problem again in 2019 after decades of the middle class being eroded, starting with the Reagan-era economic policies and tax changes. The novel shows us how full circle we’ve come, and while I don’t think London’s solution of revolution or socialism/communism is the answer, I couldn’t help but feel while reading his book that we’re standing on the same precipice over an abyss, that selfish behavior leads to history inevitably repeating itself, and that grave outcomes are certainly possible – either in the form of violence and a civil war, or a plutocracy that continues to shed all pretenses of being a democracy. It’s chilling, chilling stuff, and fascinating to me how both systems can lead to autocratic power – via the Oligarchy as London describes it here (and which we see examples of), or via communist dictators who brutally enslave their people.As a novel, it doesn’t hold up as well as it should, particularly in the chapters after the revolution breaks out, because it’s predominantly London essentially narrating events of violence. It’s also got a socialist leader who is too perfect – strong in mind and body, courageous, and uncannily prescient, and in that way, it reminded me of Chernyshevsky’s idealistic man in ‘What Is to be Done?’ Artistically the book works well in its first half, but starts faltering in its second half. I did like the journal format, footnoted centuries later by a fictional historian, an effective technique which allowed London to make comments on events from the late 19th century as well as the future, all seen from a distance. One might consider reading this book in tandem with Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ because Rand presents a clearly different (and positive) view of industrialists – as leaders, thinkers, and creators, and instead criticized those that dragged them down via bureaucracy, or via 'levelizing' humanity (ala communism). Personally, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, that absolute communism as in 20th century Russia/China is awful, and absolute capitalism as in the 19th century industrial revolution in Europe/America (and what we’ve trended towards over the last few decades) is also awful. A happy medium is what’s needed.Quotes:On business, he provides this footnote for ‘Wall Street’:“Wall Street – so named from a street in ancient New York, where was situated the stock exchange, and where the irrational organization of society permitted underhanded manipulation of all the industries of the country.”On lawyers and the rich, from Theodore Roosevelt in a commencement speech to Harvard in 1905:“We all know that, as things actually are, many of the most influential and most highly renumerated members of the Bar in every center of wealth, make it their special task to work out bold and ingenious schemes by which their wealthy clients, individual or corporate, can evade the laws which were made to regulate, in the interests of the public, the uses of great wealth.”On plutocracy, from John C. Calhoun:“A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.”And this one, which is stunning, which London says is Abraham Lincoln just before his assassination, but was actually written by John Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary a couple of decades after his death (still, wow!):“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country… Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudice of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”On the rich, from John Stuart Mill’s ‘On Liberty’:“Whenever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality emanates from its class interests and its class feelings of superiority.”On the wealth gap, this from Lord Avebury, and Englishman in the House of Lords, in 1906:“The unrest in Europe, the spread of socialism, and the ominous rise of Anarchism, are warmings to the governments and the ruling classes that the conditions of the working classes in Europe is becoming intolerable, and that if a revolution is to be avoided some steps must be taken to increase wages, reduce the hours of labor, and lower the prices of the necessities of life.”
    • 3/5
      The first part of the book has some of the preachiest speechifying one could ever hope to encounter in a dystopian scifi novel. If you enjoy dialectic, do not skip. Once that's all out of the way, the pace picks up appreciably. Prescient in the way an oligarchy would come to control the mass media, which we appear to have arrived at presently. One thing that struck me about this book was how much London, a socialist, writing about people working towards a socialist utopia of equality, still wrote within the class, race, and gender norms of the day.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I was assigned this novel for an American Fiction course and was not immediately impressed. It is slow to start, but is written as diary entries and once the action begins, it is hard to put down. The scenes of the revolution particularly in the end are descriptive and detailed and provide a clear mental image. The ending was abrupt but fitting for the story. While not something I would necessarily pick for myself, in the end I did enjoy reading it. If I had not known any better, I would have thought it to be a piece of non-fiction prose due to the realistic quality. London's dystopia novel could easily been written today because the underlying messages and themes are just as relatable in today's society as they were then.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Well, if I wasn't a socialist before....

      My first Bookslut 100 read of the year. Not so much I was expecting, based on both my prior exposure to Jack London and the description of this as a dystopian sf novel. It took me forever to read as only a few pages would be enough for me to get a righteous rage going, and I'd have to put the book down and walk away for a bit. Not, you know, Octavia Butler rage inducing, but the fact that it would occur to me to make such a comparison at all is a little surprising. Like Butler, where it succeeded is where it felt familiar/possible/looming right around the next corner. Where it failed were the sudden zip-forwards just when we'd transitioned from backstory/motivation to action. Not constant, but there were a few places where I thought, "Wait, we're skipping over this part of the story, why?"

      Overall I would recommend this to those interested in under-appreciated works of the dystopian sf canon. Readers not ready to put this book in its historical context may be impatient with it.

      1 person found this helpful

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    The Iron Heel - Jack London

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