First published in 1937 and subsequently as a Left Book Club selection in 1940, the novel depicts a world where Adolf Hitler's claim that Nazism would create a "Thousand Year Reich" is realised.

Forgotten for many years, until republication in 1985 in England and the United States,[1] literary historian Andy Croft has described Swastika Night as "the most original of all the many anti-fascist dystopias of the late 1930s.

"[2] Set hundreds of years in the future, this dystopia envisions a sterile, dying Nazi Reich in which Jews have long since been eradicated, Christians are marginalised, and Hitler is venerated as a God.

These sites include the holy forest and the sacred aeroplane in Munich with which Hitler won the Twenty Years' War by personally flying to Moscow, it is said.

John Clute described Swastika Night as "a scathing feminist anatomy of war, sexism and power" and lists the novel as one of the "classic titles" of inter-war science fiction.

[1] Adam Roberts stated "Burdekin's pre-war story reads as horribly prescient and its feminist emphasis ... provides a very valid critique of fascism.