A review by casella
The Iron Dragon's Mother by Michael Swanwick

4.0

A return to one of my favorite fictional worlds, and marks a sort-of trilogy for Swanwick, I think his first. The Iron Dragon books explore a Faerie that is a kind of mirror universe to ours, where a variety of mythic and magical traditions have gone through their own industrial revolutions. Blends fantastic elements and fairly gritty realism in interesting ways—Swanwick's fantasy work sometimes strikes me as kind of converse to Mieville's Bas-Lag. As with most of Swanwick's work, the blurb doesn't quite match the discourse—Swanwick is tangential, looping out on strange side plots and ideas that are often the most memorable. The Iron Dragon's Mother continues to flesh out and critique this world and its power structures, and has a wonderfully strong thread about death and aging.