The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Softcover

Michael-swanwick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857981464 ISBN 13: 9781857981469

Publisher: Gollancz, 1995

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

From Kirkus Reviews

Seething, brain-bursting, all but indescribable upper-world coming-of-age yarn, from the author of a string of splendid novels (Stations of the Tide; Griffin's Egg, etc.). A world where magic and technology both work exists at a much higher energy level than our own. Here dwell kobolds, imps, elves, demons, dwarves, and other fantastical beings--including Powers who poach souls from our world to use as slaves in the upper world. One such wretched waif, Jane Alderberry, is forced to toil in a vast, terrifying factory that manufactures stealth-attack dragons using both magical and technological components. One particularly evil dragon, pretending to be an inert wreck, desperately wants to escape the factory but cannot fly without a pilot. He arranges for Jane to discover him; but, before agreeing to help, Jane requires the dragon to reveal his true name and thus yield Jane a measure of power over him. Together, then, Jane and Melanchthon escape. Jane, beginning to grow up, attends a supernatural version of high school, then studies alchemy at college; her boyfriend, whom she can never quite bring herself to trust, is a serial incarnation, forever giving his life to save hers. Eventually, Jane comes to the attention of the Powers, and, following the Teind--a dreadful, goddess-inspired winnowing-out of the world's inhabitants--falls into despair, just as Melanchthon announces that he intends to assault the goddess's Spiral Castle, a puzzle-palace located in a set of yet higher dimensions. At once a gleefully bizarre parody and a dazzlingly imaginative tour de force, flawed by the rather distant, uninvolving narrative and an ending equivalent to ``then she fell out of bed and woke up.'' Withal: enormously impressive, rich, dense, demanding. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Gollancz
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1857981464
• ISBN 13: 9781857981469
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 416