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Title | The Iron Man
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Author | Ted Hughes
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | 1968
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First Printing | 1968
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Title | The Iron Woman
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Author | Ted Hughes
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | 1993
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First Printing | 1993
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Category | Children
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | Hogarth, Lucy
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Main Elements | Iron Giants, Space Dragons
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Website | ---
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 The Iron Giant
Mankind must put a stop to the dreadful destruction caused by the Iron Man. A trap is set for him, but he cannot be kept down. Then, when a terrible monster from outer space threatens to lay waste to the planet, it is the Iron Man who finds a way to save the world.
The Iron Woman
The streaming shape reared . . . like a sudden wall of cliff, pouring cataracts of black mud and clotted, rooty lumps of reeds.
Mankind for has polluted the seas, lakes and rivers. The Iron Woman has come to take revenge. Lucy understands the Iron Woman's rage and she too wants to save the water creatures from their painful deaths. But she also wants to save her town from total destruction. She needs help. Who better to call on but Hogarth and the Iron Man . . . ?
A sequel and companion piece to Ted Hughes' The Iron Man, this new, child-friendly setting will be treasured by a new generation of readers.
I had the movie on my PVR and also discovered it was a book (can be found on OpenLibrary). I did what I rarely do, I watched the movie first. That was a good thing. See, the movie made sense. Sure, they took a British story and plopped it into an American settings cause heaven forbid an American audience be exposed to a weird accent, but still, it was a very touching story and a beautiful movie.
It also had absolutely nothing to do with the book other than an iron man and a boy name Hogarth. While the movie's enemy is man itself and its desire to destroy anything it doesn't understand, in the book its a space dragon...or space angel...or space demon, anyway they don't know what it is but it is the size of Australia. And it's dumb as a rock since it loses in a "I am better than you are" contest. When I finshed reading the book I just stared at my screen for a bit wondering what exactly it was I had just read. It was trippy, nonsensical trip through utter weirdness. I guess kids could like it?
In the case of The Iron Woman, a "child-friendly setting"...the British have a very different definition of child-friendly. You can see that in Roald Dahl books which can at times be nightmare inducing. I mean the whole "scream" concept in the Iron Woman was terrifying, all those animals crying out in pain and agony reverberating through everyone's heads, images of opens mouths in agony. Yep, perfect bedtime reading.
This one points out man's destruction of the environment and uses a sledgehammer to make their point. And ok fine, maybe we need something like that to point out to us the evil's we're doing since we're really not doing a great job of stopping...but what irked me is that there is a perfect solution at the end...but an unrealistic one! See the bird/bat/angel/dragon thing from the previous book gets converted into this magic material that does no harm to the environment but can be used as fuel, food, building materials, etc and Britain has an endless supply of it. Yay, the enviroment is saved. Except that this will never happen for real, so where does that leave the kids that read this book? That in reality trying to save our ecosystems is a lost cause and an only be fixed with magic?
It's also pretty sexist, when Lucy needs help she has to call on Hogarth and the Iron Man. On the flip side it's all the men that are evil and are turned into river creatures as punishment. Women are left in their normal form but they are utterly helpless without their husbands. The Iron Woman is hysterical and unhinged, the Iron Man is needed to control her.
Maybe people have a childhood nostalgic attachment to these two novels but I thought they were pretty terrible.
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