Subject: Michael Swanwick review: The Iron Dragon's Daughter

From: [email-masked] (David Langford)
Date: Sun, 10 Apr 1994 21:15:39 GMT

%A Michael Swanwick
%T The Iron Dragon's Daughter
%I Millennium
%C London
%D 1993
%G 1-85798-081-6
%P 343pp
%O large paperback UKP 8.99 
 
reviewed by Dave Langford

[A version of this review is to appear in the British SF Association's 
critical journal VECTOR.]

When John Crowley's _Little, Big_ appeared in 1981, it carried (and has 
carried ever since) a commendation from Ursula Le Guin: `a book that all 
by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.' This begs the question, 
of course ... can we have a _re_definition when definition has always 
been elusive? It may be less so when John Clute has finished weaving the 
hypertextual Net To Catch Fantasy that will structure the coming 
Clute/Grant _Fantasy Encyclopedia_. For now let's say that, like _Little, 
Big_ yet far removed from it, _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_ gives one hell 
of a jolt to received ideas of what is possible in fantasy.

Swanwick's otherworld setting is simultaneously magical and 
steampunk-like, a dreamland ravaged by Industrial Revolution. Its opening 
sequence in the vast factory where iron dragons (cybermagical war 
machines) are made _seems_ to cue a standard picaresque: when Jane the 
indentured changeling has flown an iron dragon to safety, she and it will 
have adventures at all the interesting places on the map, right?

In fact the dragon Melanchthon recedes for a time into the background, 
and Jane's story weaves on through a series of surprises. School life 
with a class of weirdly assorted nonhumans alternates with shoplifting 
down at the local mall, with fantasy and realism brutally interwoven. The 
child-catcher sent to retrieve Jane for the factory engages in a battle 
of electronic countermeasures with the dragon, under the guise of a 
riddle game. A friend chosen for a year of bliss followed by glorious 
burning in a wicker cage is of course constantly appearing on TV (and 
hides a dirty little secret which in our own world, the other side of 
Dream Gate, could only be allegorical). The school principal's basilisk 
provides one memorably nasty bit of description. In the next sequence at 
university, Jane's initiation into how alchemy really works -- not to 
mention the real difference between exoteric and esoteric -- has a 
bizarre ring of conviction. (Not to mention humour. I loved the passage 
where Jane and another female student discuss the essential giving of a 
name to their, ahem, fount of sexual power: `Siege Perilous', for 
example, or `The Ineluctable Cavern of Despair'.) Swanwick's invention 
never flags, and there are plenty more ingenious set-pieces, outlined 
with hallucinated intensity.

Besides illuminations there are mysteries, lines of perplexity which all 
lead to Spiral Castle: not a castle but a singularity, a beginning and 
ending place, a multidimensional manifold supporting or enclosing the 
universe. One withered and blasted explorer lectures to the University 
about his disastrous expedition through Hell Gate almost to Spiral 
Castle, with slides ... this is called the Deep Grammar lecture. Through 
tangles of space, time and recarnation, people may have many simultaneous 
avatars, and in each section of the book Jane's life becomes tortuously 
entangled with a different boy/man who is always the same and always 
doomed. Other characters recur: one senile and ineffectual-seeming elf 
(elves are the upper class as always, and total bastards) keeps 
reappearing as something greater, while each new glimpse of Melanchthon 
shows him more powerful, ambitious and insane. The iron dragon 
manipulates Jane mercilessly; no longer a nice girl, she herself has 
become a dab hand at sexual manipulation and exploitation; the world (not 
her own) compels it.

In the end, the metaphysical connections with our own reality seem almost 
clear. The _awen_, the trance of inspiration, offers Dream-Gate visions 
and glossolalia from our world, its commercials, political slogans, 
historic phrases: `one small step for man' ... there is an element of 
jokiness here and in some of the allusions to mythagos, Friar Bacon's 
Brazen Head, _Little, Big_, _1066 and All That_, even one dread 
Lovecraftian tome. Swanwick oversteps just once, with a magick Word of 
Power which sacrifices everything for the insider's giggle on realizing 
its syllables are acronyms -- SF Writers of America Young-Adult Special 
Interest Group -- oh, come off it!

Penultimately we follow Jane and Melanchthon through Hell Gate into chaos 
on an impossible mission of destruction, edge-of-the-seat pursuit and 
black betrayal. The conclusion takes us satisfyingly beyond Spiral Castle 
and an encounter with its Goddess. It ought to be read.

Indeed the whole of _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_ should be read. It's 
garish, quirky and new. It will have imitators. Come back in a dozen 
years and we'll discuss whether it's lasted as well as _Little, Big_ can 
be seen to have lasted today. Swanwick's chances look pretty good to me.

[Ends]

David Langford
[email-masked]