 First UK edition | |
| Author | Michael Swanwick |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Geoff Taylor |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fantasy |
| Publisher | Millennium (UK) |
Publication date | November 1993 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | x, 424 |
| ISBN | 0-688-13174-3 |
The Iron Dragon's Daughter is a 1993 science fantasy novel by American writer Michael Swanwick. The story follows Jane, a changeling girl who slaves at a dragon factory in the world of Faerie, building part-magical, part-cybernetic monsters that are used as jet fighters. The plot of her story takes the form of a spiral, with events and characters constantly recurring in new settings.
The novel constantly subverts fantasy tropes and archetypes. Swanwick admits having written it both as a homage to J. R. R. Tolkien and in reaction to a handful of writers he claims exploit Tolkien's milieu and the readers' imaginations with derivative, commercial fantasy:
The recent slew of interchangeable Fantasy trilogies has hit me in much the same way that discovering that the woods I used to play in as a child have been cut down to make way for shoddy housing developments did.[1]
The dragon Melanchthon is named after German theologian Philipp Melanchthon, an associate of Martin Luther. Further references to Lutheranism can be found in Swanwick's novel Jack Faust.
Swanwick has written two other books in the same setting, entitled The Dragons of Babel (published in 2008) and The Iron Dragon's Mother (published in 2019). Excerpts from The Dragons of Babel have periodically been published as short stories. They include King Dragon, The Word that Sings the Scythe, An Episode of Stardust, A Small Room in Koboldtown and Lord Weary's Empire. Most of these were originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction.
- ^ Nick Gevers, "The Literary Alchemist: An Interview with Michael Swanwick", Infinity Plus (24 December 1999)