Subject: Swanwick: The Iron Dragon's Daughter

From: [email-masked]
Date: 24 May 1994 16:36:48 -0400

"The Iron Dragon's Daughter" is Michael Swanwick's venture into fantasy --
if you're willing to stretch the term.  Jane is a changeling -- a human
child in a world of elves and trolls and dwarves and gargoyles and so on
and on.  The novel opens in Dickensian circumstances, in a Steam Dragon
factory, where she and other children are worked -- most of them to an
early death.  Through circumstances which at first seem coincidental, she
acquires a grimoire -- the operations manual of a war dragon.

Like so many of the concepts in the book, this one balances between magic
and technology:  A dragon is manufactured, but it is also alive, with its
own will and imperatives.  The dragon Jane eventually finds is hidden in
the factory junkyard -- damaged, but not nearly as badly damaged as its
stealth technology makes it appear -- and its main imperative is one of
destruction.  They make an unequal bargain which leads to their escape
into the wider world beyond the factory. 

Jane makes her way through this world, first in school, then at
university, then in society.  She is often a sympathetic character, but
only occasionally an admirable one:  As an underdog in this world she
generally does whatever it takes to make her way, and a lot of people seem
to get used up in the process.

It's an excellent book.  Swanwick creates a world recognizably based on
our own, despite the prevalence of magic and of creatures of myth, but
avoids the too-common step of making the worlds similar to the point of
parody.  The parallels and differences are sometimes quirky ("My roommate
ate my homework!"), but they are never allowed to obscure the life-and-
death seriousness of Jane's situation.  The whole book is a successful
balancing act.
-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]  [email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope