The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick

Title: The Iron Dragon’s Daughter

Author: Michael Swanwick

Publisher: BCA

Originally published in 1993

Pages: 343

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, an alchemical fantasy

Format: Hardback

A dragon is sent through Dream Gate to raid the lower world and harvest mortal children. The child is claimed for the good of the state… 

Thus the life of Jane, changeling child, is shaped. Enslaved in a workhouse that manufactures iron dragons, terrorising engines of war, one day Jane finds a grimoire holding the secrets of the dragons’ sentience. So she escapes with an iron beast, unaware that his is her fate.  

Perpetually bound to the dragon, Jane’s adventures as thief and outsider are set in a world of rich, wild magic, one where spells hexes and all manner of faerie sorceries interweave with the sharpest edges of technology. And as Jane’s life unfolds, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter reveals itself to be a rattle bag of glittering tales, layer upon layer of fables, nightmares, advice columns, passions and loves, lies and deceits. 

A cornucopia of phantasmagoria… Part classic fantasy, part Charles Dickens, part Brothers Grimm… Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is simply brilliant, one of the most unique novels written under the banner of fantasy fiction.

This was an incredibly challenging book to approach and I still feel that i’ve failed to grasp it in some fundamental way. Then again I think that’s intentional. Just as I felt that I had settled into the rhythm of the story the sands under that falsely conceived conviction shifted and left me sprawled in some unknown territory. But the book led me onwards, relentlessly onwards, like the dark fate that propels Jane through Swanwick’s world. 

This book was recommended to me as supplementary reading for the Fantastic History of the Twentieth Century course that I took under Dr. Robert Maslen at the University of Glasgow. He assumed that those taking the course would have read the mainstream classics, and so set us challenging literature that would extract us from our fantasy comfort zones. Twenty-one years ago it was nominated for the Arthur C. Clark Award, the Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and for good reason. 

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter takes traditional fantasy of the Tolkienesque mould and turns it on its head. Yes there’s a dragon, but it’s a sentient war machine built from cold iron by child slave labour, to be broken by technology and magic for the purpose of war. The heroine is a complicated and pleasantly immoral changeling girl, displaced from her home universe through human trafficking. She succumbs to the sinister flattery of the dragon, Melanchthon, and together they orchestrate their own displacement through a daring escape. In this world magic and technology exist side-by-side, dependent upon one another. It is a universe complicated by species from all magical writing, and throughout Jane is disappointingly, compellingly, triumphantly, human. 

If you’re looking for a book that will class as ‘easy reading’ or ‘escapism’ this is not it. For all the fantasy elements I couldn't help but see this book as our own world reflected back to me from the shards of a shattered mirror. At once beautiful, sad, and foreboding. 

It is a book that I will recommend to anyone who is not scared by the prospect of being challenged. And I would say that of all the books I read throughout my years at University, this is the one that continues to intrigue me.