THE IRON DRAGON’S DAUGHTER
Nina Allan champions a bleakly original vision of fairyland
“The chanGelInG’S decision to steal a dragon and escape was born, though she did not know it then, the night the children met to plot the death of their supervisor.” So begins The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, a book I first encountered after seeing it listed in one of those Top 10 Works Of SFF To Read now features and liking the sound of it. I was smitten from that first page, which goes on to describe a strange and terrifying world in which captive children are put to work in hellish foundries where the titular iron dragons are constructed.
I was at a stage with my own writing where I was actively seeking examples of speculative works that defy expectations, that take familiar tropes of fantasy and science fiction and break them apart. The dragon factory – a concept that seemed subversive in and of itself – was like no other fantasy environment I had thus far read about. If it reminded me of anything at all, it was the underground rendering plants of hG Wells’s Morlocks that had terrified me when I first read The Time Machine two decades before. I sensed that in Michael Swanwick I had found an author who would speak to me, and to my newly-evolving vision of what science fiction could be. I’ve read The Iron Dragon’s Daughter several more times in the years since then, and can guarantee that it is everything I believed it would be and more, the kind of novel that offers new insights and wonders with each encounter.
Our hero is Jane, and if there was ever a hero with flaws then she is it. We learn that Jane, like the other children who work in the dragon factory, is a changeling, stolen from her human parents in order to become a slave in the land of faerie. Swanwick’s vision of fairyland is unremittingly bleak, its various tribes constantly at war with one another, their elders engaged in vicious schemes to unseat or murder their rivals. Blood sacrifice is casual and common – what happens to Jane’s friend Gwen when she’s elected to be Wicker Queen is burned (not a word I choose randomly…) into my memory. On the run from her captors, Jane discovers the only way to survive is through deception, theft and betrayal. But how many times can her integrity be compromised before she begins to lose her grip on who she is?
The dragons are part machine, part alchemically raised demigods. enraged at being in harness to beings they consider to be their inferiors, they plot to destroy the kings and kingdoms that barter their freedom. Jane’s relationship with stolen dragon Melanchthon is one of deadly ambiguities, a game of chess in which the stakes are life and sanity.
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter works on multiple levels. Part coming-of-age story, part philosophy, part surreal illusion, it challenges our notions of what’s real and what’s imagined. Swanwick’s worldbuilding is complex and extraordinary, the workings of his fairyland as compelling as they are chilling. This is a magical story peopled with complicated, contradictory characters that can be read for the sheer pleasure of its language, of its radiant sights, of its vision of a world that may have more in common with our own than we might initially guess.
A new edition of Nina Allan’s The Silver Wind, featuring a wealth of extra material, is out now from Titan Books.
Swanwick’s worldbuilding is extraordinary