Product Description

Part classic fantasy, part Charles Dickens, The Iron Dragon's Daughter is one of the most unique novels in the genre. Jane is a changeling child, enslaved in a factory that makes the iron dragons - terrible engines of war - until she discovers the secret of the dragons' sentience and is able to use one of the beasts to escape. Then, her adventures as a thief and an outsider take her into a reality rich in wild magic and sharp-edged technology, a world where Time and shopping malls have a strange relationship and gryphons have a low capacity for alcohol. A surprising and brilliant novel that undercuts the easy escapism of more conventional fantasy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #446218 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

About the Author
Michael Swanwick was born in 1950. He is recognised as one of the most powerful and consistently inventive writers of his generation. THE IRON DRAGON'S DAUGHTER was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award; it was a New York Times Notable Book, as was JACK FAUST. He has been nominated for the Nebula Award more than a dozen times and won a Hugo for his SF novel STATIONS OF THE TIDE. He lives with his wife and son in Philadelphia.

Customer Reviews

Mindblowingly inventive, brutally gorgeous
This is probably the purest fantasy novel I've ever read. Nothing is familiar yet everything is recognisable. It is unsettling. It's fantasy, yes, but in a nightmarish way, showing a world every bit as colourful, exciting, amoral and downright terrifying as our own.
The prose is unbelievably elegant, showing more imagination in one short chapter than many books contain in their entirety.
If you are a fan of 'heroic' fantasy, you might not enjoy this book.
On the other hand, if you like authors Gene Wolf, M. John Harrison and Jack Vance, you will find similar quality here and, for me, there's no higher praise than that!

An outstanding feast of creativty
The premise of the book is the intriguing if familiar one of a changeling child - a human child brought up in the land of faerie. Yet what makes this book unique is firstly the quality of the writing, which is superb, and secondly the disconcertingly twisted version of faerie that Mr. Swanwick creates - both uncannily familiar yet disconcertingly different to our world. In many ways the protagonist confronts the trials and tribulations of growing up in the 21st century but with a vicious skein of magic laid over everything. Its not a work of tolkeinesque fantasy, with an epic war against some evil lord figure, but instead a coming of age story of a girl who lives in the drugery and misery of a magical world and dreams of escaping to the idylllic 'real' world.

Imaginative and intriguing, The Iron Dragon's Daughter really shows just how lacking in true originality something like Tad Williams' War of the Flowers (which had a somewhat similar theme) is. It fully deserves its place in the Fantasy Masterworks Pantheon.

Not what you expected: I guarantee it
Okay, so The Iron Dragon's Daughter isn't the easiest book in the world to read, and I don't think it's possible to go into it with any accurate idea of what you're going to get. But how anyone could find it a waste of time baffles me. If there are people out there who really, honestly feel that their reading time in the fantasy field would be better spent on one of a thousand identikit heroes-versus-cackling-wizard trilogies doing the rounds... well, it just goes to prove many of Mr. Swanwick's points for him. I'm as much a fan of pulp hack-'n'-slash fantasy as anyone else, but this is real ground-breaking stuff - unpredictable, unrelenting and packed with far more evidence of real imagination than almost anything else currently on the shelves. Like I say, it's not perfect - sometimes it's almost impossible to follow and the ending makes it seem as if several pages have been ripped out - but fantasy lovers owe it to themselves to read this, just to see what *can* be done with the genre.