The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Michael Swanwick is a very angry man.

This is one of my favorite reads of the year. The conceit is simple: Swanwick is angry at the state of fantasy in 1994. In 1994, Swanwick's world is going to shit. Why, he asks, do we write about noble elves and chaste princesses and chivalrous knights, and especially, why do we kid ourselves that some child of humble origins will enter this world, aspire to great things, and climb the rungs of society?

Swanwick asks what would happen if a fantasy world worked exactly like ours.

Enter Jane Alderberry. We find out her story eventually, but figuratively, she's an orphan working in a factory, then she cons a mechanical dragon (from the factory) into helping her escape. From there, she lives as Appalachian trailer trash with a single-parent dad (the dragon), then a student at a state school in an unnamed city. She's a changeling who was stolen from Earth, ordinarily bred with faeries to create dragon pilots until her womb gives out. These fairies are varied, but the grotesquerie of the world is prominent. Instead of Arwen and Aragorn and Boromir, we have Ratsnickle and Monkey and Blugg, and Swanwick takes every opportunity he can to tell you how disgusting this world is and how much it makes a truly horrible person out of our protagonist.

I don't like grimdark fantasy, but this world, despite its immense cynicism, was so colorful and detailed. I couldn't help but think that JK Rowling must have read this book at some point. The sheer sliminess, weirdness, and again that word, grotesque aspects of the world just remind me so much of the genius of the Wizarding World that Rowling would create three years later.

As Jane matures and falls more into the decadence of society, we get a lot of sex, both on screen and off screen, and drug trips. I viewed these less as self-indulgent and more as Swanwick's continual digging into the underbelly of this society, which fetishizes and dehumanizes Jane as she grows older and more mature. I think some people have read this as a societal critique, but it read very much to me as a critique of the fantasy genre and, secondarily, of academia. Swanwick's view on society on this book is very clearly that it exists, and that people in certain circles ignore it.

This book is extremely well written, tight, and had a satisfying ending. Avoid if you're prudish, but it's historically fascinating, reads very modern, and you'll never read anything like this again. 9/10.