An incredible blend of a technological thriller and psychological fantasy. Dragons are assembled in factories; strange creatures transport cargo; and a little girl—maybe a fairy, maybe not—kidnaps an old iron dragon and flies away into an unknown, cruel, and beautiful world of wars and love…
The cult novel by Michael Swanwick—master of mixing styles and unpredictable plot twists—combines the low and the high in a strange mixture. Michael Swanwick is one of the founders of cyberpunk (together with Bruce Sterling and William Gibson). He writes a book of fate first for a girl, then for a woman, abducted at a young age from a human family and brought into a brutal world of elves and steam dragons. A fantasy backdrop and vivid realistic details, deep philosophical content and a real language of contemporary prose brought the author fame as a destroyer of genre foundations and one of the best science-fiction writers in America.