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The Iron Dragon's Daughter (Fantasy Masterworks) (Paperback)

by Michael Swanwick (Author) "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..." (more)
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Gollancz; New edition edition (14 Oct 2004)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0575076054
  • ISBN-13: 978-0575076051
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.6 x 2.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 390,784 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #4 in  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > S > Swanwick, Michael

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Product Description

Product Description

Part classic fantasy, part Charles Dickens, The Iron Dragon's Daughter is one of the most unique novels in the genre. Jane is a changeling child, enslaved in a factory that makes the iron dragons - terrible engines of war - until she discovers the secret of the dragons' sentience and is able to use one of the beasts to escape. Then, her adventures as a thief and an outsider take her into a reality rich in wild magic and sharp-edged technology, a world where Time and shopping malls have a strange relationship and gryphons have a low capacity for alcohol. A surprising and brilliant novel that undercuts the easy escapism of more conventional fantasy.


About the Author

Michael Swanwick was born in 1950. He is recognised as one of the most powerful and consistently inventive writers of his generation. THE IRON DRAGON'S DAUGHTER was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award; it was a New York Times Notable Book, as was JACK FAUST. He has been nominated for the Nebula Award more than a dozen times and won a Hugo for his SF novel STATIONS OF THE TIDE. He lives with his wife and son in Philadelphia.
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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. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews

11 Reviews
5 star:
 (5)
4 star:
 (3)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.9 out of 5 stars (11 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Mindblowingly inventive, brutally gorgeous, 15 Jun 2005
This is probably the purest fantasy novel I've ever read. Nothing is familiar yet everything is recognisable. It is unsettling. It's fantasy, yes, but in a nightmarish way, showing a world every bit as colourful, exciting, amoral and downright terrifying as our own.
The prose is unbelievably elegant, showing more imagination in one short chapter than many books contain in their entirety.
If you are a fan of 'heroic' fantasy, you might not enjoy this book.
On the other hand, if you like authors Gene Wolf, M. John Harrison and Jack Vance, you will find similar quality here and, for me, there's no higher praise than that!
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An outstanding feast of creativty, 25 Sep 2006
The premise of the book is the intriguing if familiar one of a changeling child - a human child brought up in the land of faerie. Yet what makes this book unique is firstly the quality of the writing, which is superb, and secondly the disconcertingly twisted version of faerie that Mr. Swanwick creates - both uncannily familiar yet disconcertingly different to our world. In many ways the protagonist confronts the trials and tribulations of growing up in the 21st century but with a vicious skein of magic laid over everything. Its not a work of tolkeinesque fantasy, with an epic war against some evil lord figure, but instead a coming of age story of a girl who lives in the drugery and misery of a magical world and dreams of escaping to the idylllic 'real' world.

Imaginative and intriguing, The Iron Dragon's Daughter really shows just how lacking in true originality something like Tad Williams' War of the Flowers (which had a somewhat similar theme) is. It fully deserves its place in the Fantasy Masterworks Pantheon.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Not what you expected: I guarantee it, 15 Feb 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (Paperback)
Okay, so The Iron Dragon's Daughter isn't the easiest book in the world to read, and I don't think it's possible to go into it with any accurate idea of what you're going to get. But how anyone could find it a waste of time baffles me. If there are people out there who really, honestly feel that their reading time in the fantasy field would be better spent on one of a thousand identikit heroes-versus-cackling-wizard trilogies doing the rounds... well, it just goes to prove many of Mr. Swanwick's points for him. I'm as much a fan of pulp hack-'n'-slash fantasy as anyone else, but this is real ground-breaking stuff - unpredictable, unrelenting and packed with far more evidence of real imagination than almost anything else currently on the shelves. Like I say, it's not perfect - sometimes it's almost impossible to follow and the ending makes it seem as if several pages have been ripped out - but fantasy lovers owe it to themselves to read this, just to see what *can* be done with the genre.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing and unsettling
Having been somewhat put off this book by the previous negative review, I was still intrigued enough to buy it. Read more
Published on 11 May 2005 by Tristan Fitzgerald

2.0 out of 5 stars Very poor for a 'Masterwork'
I absolutely detested this book. It probably did not help that i was co-currently reading another fantasy book, but the pseudo-punk/fantasy merging of the world that Michael... Read more
Published on 28 April 2005 by smallfurryandpsychotic

4.0 out of 5 stars mind blowing
I loved it. a superb book with real inventiveness. the mix of technology and traditional fantasy was stunning - you've never come across dragons like these (or elves for that... Read more
Published on 31 Jul 2003 by R. D. C. Palmer

5.0 out of 5 stars dark fantasy meets cyberpunk
It's an absolutely impossible task - to take two mass-cult genres and mix a high-art object out of them! Read more
Published on 4 Jul 2002 by alex kovzhun

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books i have ever read
The Iron Dragon's Daughter is a stunning read, the plot and characters compleatly new and unquie. it is a break from the sterotype of fantasy, and offers some interesting point... Read more
Published on 30 Mar 2001

1.0 out of 5 stars Not a book I would recommend to anyone
This book promised so much yet delivered so little. The forward is very misleading as it implies that 'the dragon element' is the centrepiece of the storyline, which it most... Read more
Published on 11 Feb 2001

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the most original fantasy novels ever written
A real fantasy original, this book takes fantasy staples such as dragons and faeries, and mixes the into a modern life setting. Read more
Published on 18 Jan 2001

3.0 out of 5 stars Rubbish
I thought that this book was rubbish i have never read anthing so boring in the whole of my 17 years alive it was about this girl which nicks a dragon and goes of on an... Read more
Published on 1 Feb 2000

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