Swastika Night

Katharine Burdekin

Science Fiction
6.0 / 10
1 rating

Note! This novel was originally published under the pseudonym of Murray Constantine.

Published in 1937, twelve years before Orwell's 1984, this novel projects a totally male-controlled fascist world that has eliminated women as we know them. They are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. Not even the memory of culture remains. The plot centers on a "misfit" who asks, as readers must, "How could this have happened?"

Ann J. Lane calls the novel a "brilliant, chilling dystopia."

"This is a powerful, haunting vision of the inner and outer worlds of male violence." - Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One, 1884-1933

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Published
1937
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Author

Katharine Burdekin

Katharine Burdekin (1896–1963, born Katharine Penelope Cade) was a British novelist who wrote speculative fiction dealing with political, social, and spiritual issues. She was the sister of Rowena Cade, creator of the Minack Theatre in Cornwall. Many of her novels could be categorized as feminist utopian/dystopian fiction. She also wrote under the name Kay Burdekin and under the pseudonym Murray Constantine. Daphne Patai unraveled "Murray Constantine's" true identity while doing research on utopian and dystopian fiction in the mid-1980s.