In 1984 Daphne Patai got hold of it and uses it as a feminist alternative to George Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. From her Andy Croft wrote about it in a bibliographical essay in Christopher Norris's INSIDE THE MYTH - ORWELL: VIEWS FROM THE LEFT. Croft showed a lot of unacknowledged political SF-oriented work was written in 1930s and 1940s, he argued that NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR was nothing special, and called SWASTIKA NIGHT "the most sophisticated and original of the many anti-fascist dystopias of the late 1930s and 1940s". This seems to have encouraged Lawrence and Wishart , who published the Norris collection, to re-print the novel with an introduction by Daphne Patai.

Burdekin set her novel in the twenty-sixth century. Germany and Japan rule the world: within the Reich all non-Aryans have been exterminated, and the soil is tilled by solid Aryan peasantry who worship the god Hitler. Men and women are strictly separated, with women reduced to near-moronic slave status, kept in camps for breeding purposes, shaven headed and wrecked. A stocky British yeoman (actually an aircraft engineer), Arthur, who visits his friend, Hermann, in Germany, is initiated by Hermann's feudal lord into a secret - that Hitler was human, and that perhaps the extremes of Nazism were too extreme - and is passed a true, secret history of the world. Arthur returns to England with the book and, before being kicked to death by the SS, passes its secrets on to his son. Shortly before his death, as well, Arthur has visited his regular partner in her camp (marriage like socialism is a thing forgotten) and decided not to be rude to her in future.

The survival of the son and the choice of politeness lead Patai to write about "Orwell's Despair, Burdekin's Hope". But the main purpose of the novel is to show the effects of sexual segregation. It is done perfectly credibly. But, Patai provides disturbing evidence of the abuses to which "feminist SF" can be subject: to her, the subjugation of the Nazi women is so important (because they are women) that the extermination of the Jews of both sexes which Burdekin mentions is not worth mentioning again. And in her praise of the novel Patai is also prepared to remain silent about a major flaw in SWASTIKA NIGHT - that it is violently anti- homosexual. All the Nazis are misogynists, most of them are gay, and many of them prefer little boys - not just pederasts but paedophiles. Burdekin's sophistication did not stop her using homosexuality as an automatic disqualification from humanity. She used an ultimate clich‚ to prove the villainy of the Nazis, and Patai does nothing to correct the slander, although she must know that gender played no part in going to the gas chambers. (While sexual orientation definitely did).

Croft and Patai compare Burdekin with Orwell unfavourably. Orwell wrote a book influenced by "a gender ideology that he fully supports" - it has taken a long time to discover that Orwell was a Nazi! But what would Croft or Patai make of Philip K. Dick's MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE or Norman Spinrad's IRON DREAM? Spinrad, with no evidence of having read Burdekin, brilliantly shows fascism as a sexual abberation, woman- hating, leather-loving. He manages to arrive at the same conclusion in his novel as the feudal lord of Swastika Night, that Nazism results in sterility. But such as novel by a man does not fit Patai's thesis. And she ignores the fact that the principle novels today in which characters spend hours and pages in conversation about sexual subjugation are those of John Norman and Sharon Green, all of whose arguments are in favour of it.

Burdekin's is an interesting novel, expanding the range of alternative worlds, a major expansion of women's role in SF. The re- discovery of the novel has been an act of misappropriation. That is my complaint.