Michael Swanwick

Any of you guys ever read any Michael Swanwick? He wrote a book that just blew me a way a few years ago called "The Iron Dragon's Daughter" that is an amazing urban fantasy. Here here comments on it:

"Q: Is The Iron Dragon's Daughter a Marxist fairy tale?

Well, it's certainly not a fairy tale – I was trying to deal with some serious matters in as straightforward and truthful a manner as I could. But as Kafka demonstrated, sometimes that involves turning a man into vermin or putting a sword in the hand of the Statue of Liberty. You could say that it's Marxist in the sense that I don't pretend that class differences don't exist. But it's not really informed by leftist sensibilities at all. It's more like a world in which everything has been turned inside out so that the essential mysteries of human consciousness are more obvious.

Q: What was the atmosphere you wanted to convey in the book?

I wanted to write a high fantasy but I'm allergic to horses, a mediocre archer, a worse fencer, and I was thirty-two when I first set foot in a castle. So my experiences left me woefully unqualified to go toe-to-toe with J.R.R. Tolkien or E.R. Eddison. But all that Medievalia is just settings and furniture, really, for the serious work those writers were doing. I replaced that stuff with factories and strip joints and mega-malls – places I know and understand – and this in turn made the world more convincing to me.

There's a kind of a bleak, lonesome beauty to a sunset seen from a factory parking lot. That's the kind of feeling I was going for – that the world is magical even if it's the one we're most familiar with. You can be incredibly unhappy and still feel that, still feel privileged to be alive."