'The Iron Dragon's Daughter' first was published in hardcover in the UK in 1993; this mass market paperback edition (424 pp) was released in April 1995 by Avon / Nova. The cover illustration is by Dorian Vallejo.
I remember reading this book back upon its release in 1995 and thinking that despite its flaws it was something new in the field of sci-fi publishing: a novel that took the tropes of traditional fantasy literature and gave them a cyberpunk sensibility.
In fact, Swanwick's book can arguably be regarded as the progenitor of the genre of 'steam fantasy'. Before there was China Mieville and Perdido Street Station (2000), before there was Alan Campbell and Scar Night (2006), or Tim Lebbon and Dusk (2006), or most of the current catalog of publisher Angry Robot books, there was Swanwick opening the way with 'The Iron Dragon's Daughter'.
The novel doesn't provide much in the way of a preamble, leaving it to the reader to infer from the narrative that our heroine, Jane Atterbury, is a changeling; that is, a mortal child who, as an infant, was secretly exchanged with a fairy or goblin duplicate, and thus is doomed to grow up in the Fairy World.
Jane labors with other orphans in an arms factory where life is nasty, brutal, and short. These opening passages are among the best in the book at creating a convincing world where the creatures of fantasy, such as elves, goblins, ghosts, dwarves, and dragons, all exist within a modernized, 'industrial' version of Fairyland.
Jane learns that as a human, she has powers otherwise absent in the other denizens of this world; these powers attract the attention of Melanchthon, the dragon of the book's title.
The dragons of this world serve much as do the ultra-sophisticated fighter jets of 'our' world. Formerly a cutting-edge combat model designed for stealth operations, Melanchthon has managed to secrete himself on the grounds of the factory and thus avoid being dismantled and melted down for scrap. But time is running out for Melanchthon, and his one chance at escape is to persuade the changeling child to be his pilot.
With nothing to lose, Jane agrees to cooperate with the dragon. But little does she know that the world outside the confines of the factory has its own dangers and temptations......but also the path by which she can find her way back to the world in which she was born........
While 'The Iron Dragon's Daughter' certainly deserves kudos for bringing something new and imaginative to the fantasy / sci-fi genres, as a novel, it suffers too much from a meandering, indolent approach to plotting. After the first few chapters, the dragon of the title is consigned to an off-stage role, only returning in the closing chapter. In between, author Swanwick spends a great deal of time recounting the various melodramas and social intrigues within which Jane is obliged to operate, en route to discovering a way to transport herself back to her own world.
After patiently working through these ancillary plot developments, I found the novel's denouement - which rushes to tie things together via the introduction of a flurry of 'cosmic' events - to have a contrived quality.
Summing up, 'The Iron Dragon's Daughter' deserves notice more for how it expanded the fantasy genre, than its intrinsic value as an entertaining novel.
