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Title | The Iron Dragon's Daughter
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Author | Michael Swanwick
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Cover Art | Dorian Vallejo
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Publisher | AvoNova - 1995
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First Printing | 1993
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Title | The Dragon's of Babel
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Author | Michael Swanwick
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Cover Art | Stephane Martiniere
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Publisher | Tor - 2008
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First Printing | Tor - 2008
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Category | Urban Fantasy
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Warnings | Sex, drugs, depression and other dark disturbing things
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Main Characters | Jane, Will, Esme, Nat Whilk
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Main Elements | Dragons, Fey
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Website | michaelswanwick.com
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 The Iron Dragon's Daughter
A human changeling child coming of age in a world of violence and monsters, Jane toils unceasingly alongside trolls, dwarves, shifters and feys i the dank, stygian bowels of a steam dragon plant - helping to construct the massive black iron flying machines the elvan rulers use for waging war. Then one day, the cold, tantalizing voice of a rusting, discarded dragon speaks softly to Jane - whispering to her of freedom and vengeance...and the terrible wonders awaiting her far beyond the factory gates.
Critically acclaimed, Nebula Award-winning author of Stations of the Tide, Michael Swanwick now ushers us into a remarkable realm of darkest fantasy, erotic dreams and industrial magicks - on a stunningly original and hair-raising ride toward the obliteration of another history and the end of all things.
The Dragon's of Babel
Michael Swanwick has been nominated for the Hugo Award for his writing fourteen times in the last ten years and has won five of them. He is one of the most important and respected living writers of fantasy and science fiction. Until now, his most famous fantasy has been the groundbreaking novel The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. And now Swanwick returns to the world of that novel to tell a new story in The Dragons of Babel.
A war-dragon of Babel crashes in the idyllic fields of a post-industrialized Faerie and, dragging himself into the nearest village, declares himself king and makes young Will his lieutenant. Nightly, he crawls inside the young fey’s brain to get a measure of what his subjects think.
Forced out of his village, Will travels with female centaur soldiers, witnesses the violent clash of giants, and acquires a surrogate daughter, Esme, who has no knowledge of the past and may be immortal.
Evacuated to the Tower of Babel—infinitely high, infinitely vulgar, very much like New York City—Will meets the confidence trickster Nat Whilk. Inside the Dread Tower, Will becomes a hero to the homeless living in the tunnels under the city, rises as an underling to a politician, and meets his one true love—a high-elven woman to whom he dare not aspire.
Swanwick is a master of storytelling and memorable imagery, striking characterization and sheer surprise. It is an excellent year in fantasy fiction when one novel this good appears.
Picture a world that is a reflection of our world, but in a Fey Realm populated with Elven elite and a whole range of other fey folk from pixies to half human/half animals beings, to stranger things yet. Now this is a world of magic not science. You replace chemistry with alchemy. Astronomy with astrology. And fighter jets with dragons! Swanwick did an amazing job of taking things familiar to us and figuring out how they would work using magic instead of science as their basis.
However this is a dark and scary world. We start with Jane, a human slave in a iron dragon plant. She is picked on by her fellow slaves, there are a lot of sexual references, and on the whole, the first time I tried to read it, I couldn't, it was too dark, too disturbing. Older now and having read some other weird and disturbing stuff, I was able to get all the way through. It's a fascinating world, but also disturbing, and because of that I find it hard to decide if I actually liked it or not. There is a lot of bizare things going on seemingly in the background, like when the dragon watches a society of tiny fey evolve before his eyes, starting from a feudal society to a polluting, waring, technological one. It didn't have that much to do with the overall story, but these little touches both disturb and fascinate. And yet I wouldn't label this book a dystopia...the people aren't so much oppressed as they are simply depressed. It's a world with a rich elite and a poor majority and as such, not really all that different from our world. Except here the elite are immortal and as such have centuries to perfect their decadence.
The dragons are fascinating too, sentient in their own way, but built for war, they souls are consumed with hate and a desire for destruction. They are evil beings with one purpose in life, to fly with screaming jets through the air and kill. Cunning and cruel, one dragon began to hate so much he just wanted to destory everything, wipe out all creation, and for that, he needed Jane. Her human blood allows her to join with the dragon's mind, to not be sickened by the cold iron of the dragon's body (remember Fey are sensitive to iron).
So did I like it? I don't know, but it was definitely different and worth giving a read.
The Dragons of Babel starts off with a short story I read in The Dragon Quintet called King Dragon. Since I'd just read it this year, I kind of skimmed through the first 60 pages or so. But then the story continues, Will is cast out of his village and ends up making his way to the Tower of Babel. This is mystifying place made up not of a single tower but an entire city built to be the tower. Filled with haints and mermaids and elves, Will is immersed in a world of swindles and revolutions, the rich elven elite flying their hippogryphs, and the poor and rejected living amongst the underground tunnels and sewers. While this is the same world as Iron Dragon's Daughter, other than one page where we run into Jane, there is no overlap between the two, and you don't need to have read the first to enjoy this second one. The dragon's also play a lesser role, though Will's dragon is always kind of there, just as his best friend he had executed haunts him. And in a world like this it's hard to tell what is in your imagination and what is really there.
I enjoyed the second book more since it is a bit more lighthearted (though this is no happy romp, there are a lot of sad, broken, disturbed characters, including Will himself) but the core of the tale is a con being run by will and his partner Nat, so seeing that come to fruition, watching Will trick and scheme those around him, is actually quite fun. I figured out the twist fairly early on, but so what, it was still an enjoyable read. In this one, I think Swanwick wasn't so careful with his mapping of our world to the Fey one, he had the elves playing Mozart at one of their balls, which I thought was weird, and there are references to our culture that I don't see why they would be aware of (those references in the past tended to come through those having visions, which did make sense). But still, it was particularly interesting for me since I'd recently read Senlin Ascends, which also takes place is a demented Tower of Babel...I'll have to see if there are more Babel books out there, seems it's a thing that lends itself well to the whims of imagination.
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