The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Swanwick's nihilistic tale features a human changeling who tries to make her way in a cutthroat society that mirrors contemporary life. While the players are elves, dwarves, lamies and other ``magickal'' creatures, they could be 20th-century juvenile delinquents and power politicians in a society ruled by caste snobbery, drugs, a mall culture and child labor. Determined to end her slavery in a steam dragon plant, the young human Jane escapes with the help of a rusted old dragon hulk named Melancthon. Thereafter, she goes to school disguised as a fey in order to learn the magic necessary to repair the ravages inflicted on the dragon by time and battle. But the misfit Jane finds school horrifying, and she turns to shoplifting to gain friends. She falls in love with a young man destined to be the annual sacrifice; when she loses her virginity, her usefulness to Melancthon as a magic-maker is ended. After her lover's tragic death, Jane is taken under the wing of a power-hungry elven lord, Galiagante. Eventually she joins Melancthon once again as he sets out to destroy the Universe. Nebula Award-winner Swanwick ( Stations of the Tide ) develops a powerful, yet dark and hopeless fantasy that should forever shatter charming illusions of Faerie and its folk. (Jan.)

Library Journal

When Jane, a human changeling, steals a magical steam dragon to escape the factory/prison that has been her home, she embarks on a life of freedom and normalcy in a world of timeless shopping malls, alchemy classes, and high school ``wicker'' queens--only to find that her stolen dragon has other, bigger plans that may change her life forever. Swanwick ( Stations of the Tide , Avon, 1992) brings his particular brand of elan to the fairy world, where high tech and magic are interdependent and where the denizens of folklore include leather-clad werewolves, half-elven pilots, and brash dwarven mechanics. Combining cyberpunk's grit with dystopic fantasy, this iconoclastic hybrid is a standout piece of storytelling.

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 andwoke up." Withal: enormously impressive, rich, dense, demanding.