Meghna Jayanth's Reviews > The Iron Dragon's Daughter

One of the books on Mieville's list of 50 Scifi and Fantasy Books for Socialists, he tells you that it "completely destroys the sentimental aspects of genre fiction". And holy hell, please do take that warning seriously. Jane is a child-worker in a factory which is building treacherously aware warmachines made of cold iron. These "dragons" are enslaved to their pilots, wills broken by technology and magic, as Jane is essentially a slave to the factory. Until one of the dragons starts whispering to her of escape.

This is a difficult book, and no mistake. It's endlessly surprising and inventive, deeply shocking, especially if you bring to it the expectations of genre fiction - it reminds me of a much older strain of speculative fiction; charged, full of ideas, unexpected, perhaps slightly more interested in plot and situation and its effects on character than in the characters themselves. But it's not an old-fashioned book. Technology exists alongside the magic of the Faerie (a disturbing vision of colleges of alchemy existing alongside air-conditioned malls, stealth dragons made of cold-iron fitted out with radar-jamming tech), our own mundane world is an acknowledged but separate plane of existence - Jane is a changeling stolen from our world and into the faerie, and her abduction isn't a romanticised transplantation into Faerie courts, but rather part of a healthy trade in child-trafficking and slave labour.

Personally, I thought Jane was an excellent protagonist: resourceful, intelligent, but also deeply flawed. By turns compassionate and ruthless. The book is about her attempts to live her life, perhaps try to return to her mother and her blank-eyed physical body on "our plane", while navigating the political, social and economic world of Faerie that seems systematically determined to corner, manipulate, and lessen her. In this world, there are no last-minute saves, or unexamined heroics. Jane is far from noble, but endlessly human.

If you're willing to give yourself to Swanwick's twisting narrative, Iron Dragon's Daughter is a rewarding, thoughtful, deeply engaging book that will stay with you.