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.    

Publishing and the Tech Industry

The battle between Hachette and Amazon has been raging for almost a year and it may take as long again to reach a resolution. I am a Literature graduate who wants nothing more than to make my way in the publishing industry, but I previously worked at a tech company where developers laboured over innovative solutions to historic problems and congratulated themselves daily on being the future. 

My partner is a developer, he scoffs at my enormous book collection and if he had his own way would pair our furniture down to a sofa and a series of interactive screens. This being the case I straddle the line between the worlds. I write books, I paint, but I am also designing a computer game using entirely digital media. 

Now the publishing industry desperately needs developers on its side if it’s to survive, an uncomfortable fact for some die-hard book lovers to accept, but a necessary one. The problem is that developers feel that the publishing industry has allowed itself to die, and they’re now awaiting its inevitable descent into history. To them Amazon is progress. Self publishing is progress. To a lot of developers the internet has removed the need for many traditional institutions. 

I argue that quality control has its place and so does the recognition of art and the ability to invest in the important works of the future. They argue that internet consumers provide all the quality control a product needs, that if a book is good the internet will hear about it, if it’s bad it will disappear into oblivion. I happen to think that the publishing industry can adapt to incorporate the internet as an essential medium, and that a middle ground will be reached. The fact is that this battle between Amazon and the main publishers: Hachette, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Penguin Random House, needs to be fought before a way forward can be forged. These publishers are trying desperately to catch up after some bad initial decisions, like forfeiting control of the price at which ebooks could be sold through Amazon, the devastating mistake that has spawned these disagreements.   

When the dust settles the publishing industry will have no choice but to embrace the developers and hack a solution out of this technical thicket. Unfortunately, while publishing houses are beginning to recognise the need for in-house developers, the current job descriptions being drafted and released confirm how out of step the industry is with the turning tide of future economics. 

For instance, any developer will laugh at the idea of accepting a job in London for 18-24k a year. The technology industries are on the up, and as a result their wages reflect this. A publishing house would have to look seriously at doubling that figure to attract a quality developer, and it would have to put up a fight for them as well. 

To make things worse most developers will not take a job in publishing for their love of books and literature. It’s a cut-throat world they live in. Developers have to hone their skills regularly to stay ahead of the curve and this means paying attention to current and future technological trends. Anyone who allows themselves to fall behind are left behind, as the Pirate Code would have it.

If the publishing world is to adapt in this changing environment, it is going to have to invest real money in developers. There will be no sympathy, and they will not be persuaded to help otherwise.