The Iron Heel

The Iron Heel is a science fiction novel novel by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908. It is considered to be ‘the earliest of the modern dystopian‘ fiction, it chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. In The Iron Heel, Jack London‘s socialist views are 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 Iron Heel is cited by George Orwell‘s biographer Michael Shelden as having influenced Orwell‘s most famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell himself described London as having made ‘a very remarkable prophecy of the rise of Fascism‘, in the book and believed that London‘s understanding of the primitive had made him a better prophet ‘than many better-informed and more logical thinkers.‘ Specifically, Orwell‘s protagonist Winston Smith, like London‘s Avis Everhard, keeps a diary where he writes down his rebellious thoughts and experiences. However, while Everhard‘s diary remained hidden during the centuries of tyranny to be discovered and published later, Smith‘s diary falls into the hands of the book‘s harsh Thought Police, whose interrogator tells Smith not to expect posterity to vindicate him: ‘Posterity will never hear of you, we will vaporize you‘.