While on holiday in New York last summer I managed to track down this small, quirky little bookshop called Singularity & Co. Inside was something close to Paradise for me: it specialises in old, out-of-print, vintage SF and fantasy. I could happily have spent hours browsing the shelves, but time was pressing and we wanted to go and get a drink at the Gotham City Lounge (it was a nerdy day). Still, I couldn't bear to leave without picking something up, and I happened across a battered copy of a book called The Iron Dragon's Daughter. I'd heard good things about it, but it didn't exactly seem like a well-known or particularly noteworthy book from what I knew. Still, it was in the 'Staff Recommendations' section, and for $5, what could be the harm?
And my goodness, if it didn't turn out to be the best fantasy novel I'd read in an awfully long time – probably since I finished A Dance With Dragons back in 2011, to be honest. And the reason why is very simple. It is purely and unashamedly a fantasy.
Well of course it is, I hear you say. But wait, I say, hear me out. As much as I like Tolkien, and I like Tolkien a lot, it's always bothered me that the vast majority of fantasy fiction basically exists to rip off The Lord of the Rings. The fact that the phrase 'generic fantasy' can be uttered without irony is a depressing indictment of the general state of the genre. Fantasy, like its sibling SF, should be a playground for the author's imagination, where they can cut loose with all the crazy, out-there concepts that you can't get away with in literary fiction. It's the entire reason people read fantasy in the first place, and yet so few authors actually make the most of this opportunity.
The Iron Dragon's Daughter is quite possibly the most imaginative fantasy novel I've ever read, simply because author Michael Swanwick never insults the reader's intelligence by worrying that a particular element might somehow be too fantastical. He isn't concerned that the reader will struggle to suspend disbelief, because if you're reading a fantasy novel that shouldn't ever be a problem. The novel takes place in a fantasy world featuring all the races you'd expect – elves, dwarves, gnomes et al – but loads of others as well, chief among them the changeling protagonist Jane, who appears to have been stolen from our world and brought to this dark, twisted version of Faerie.
The oppressive elven rulers force the poorer children to work in factories, building the steam-powered iron dragons which function as the elves' fighter jets. The plot later shifts to a great city, changing gears from an almost Dickensian beginning to an urban fantasy setting in a determinedly high fantasy world. In the city, Jane learns alchemy, cheats at her exams by practising quicker, easier sex magic, takes fantastic spins on various drugs, has a nightmarish, prophetic vision of her future, and takes part in a riot that is viciously put down by elves riding mechanical horses. It is utterly bananas, and that's what makes it so brilliant.
I've never read anything else like it, and surely one of the aims of writing a fantasy novel is to be able to elicit this sense of awe and wonder from the reader: to open to them a completely new, unfamiliar world where anything could happen, and where you don't just regurgitate the plot of The Lord of the Rings for the umpteenth bloody time. In this regard alone, The Iron Dragon's Daughter is one of the finest fantasy novels I've read, and that's not even getting into the other stuff. I could write a whole other post about the broken, heroic, utterly convincing female protagonist, in a genre too dominated by male authors and characters. Or the Iron Dragon of the title, one of the most frighteningly amoral, self-serving, genuinely menacing dragons since Smaug – and that's before he decides to have a go at committing genocide.
It's a mad book, but if you want to see what fantasy can be when the author really lets their imagination run wild, I can hardly think of a better example.
The oppressive elven rulers force the poorer children to work in factories, building the steam-powered iron dragons which function as the elves' fighter jets. The plot later shifts to a great city, changing gears from an almost Dickensian beginning to an urban fantasy setting in a determinedly high fantasy world. In the city, Jane learns alchemy, cheats at her exams by practising quicker, easier sex magic, takes fantastic spins on various drugs, has a nightmarish, prophetic vision of her future, and takes part in a riot that is viciously put down by elves riding mechanical horses. It is utterly bananas, and that's what makes it so brilliant.
I've never read anything else like it, and surely one of the aims of writing a fantasy novel is to be able to elicit this sense of awe and wonder from the reader: to open to them a completely new, unfamiliar world where anything could happen, and where you don't just regurgitate the plot of The Lord of the Rings for the umpteenth bloody time. In this regard alone, The Iron Dragon's Daughter is one of the finest fantasy novels I've read, and that's not even getting into the other stuff. I could write a whole other post about the broken, heroic, utterly convincing female protagonist, in a genre too dominated by male authors and characters. Or the Iron Dragon of the title, one of the most frighteningly amoral, self-serving, genuinely menacing dragons since Smaug – and that's before he decides to have a go at committing genocide.
It's a mad book, but if you want to see what fantasy can be when the author really lets their imagination run wild, I can hardly think of a better example.
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