Review: The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick

Michael Swanwick has made a career of turning genre on its head, winning a bunch of awards in the process. He wrote cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk at the beginning, and with The Iron Dragon’s Daughter he essentially laid out the blueprint for the New Weird years before the term existed. The Dragons of Babel follows in the same world, though it should not be viewed as a sequel, but a story all its own. After reading it, my first work of Swanwick’s, I consider it almost criminal that a genre writer of his caliber is so rarely discussed on the various blogs and message boards I spend time at.

The story begins with a standard coming-of age story of orphaned Will le Fey in a village far removed. The setting is Faerie – not the Faerie you’ve seen time and again – but a war-torn, post-industrial Faerie indirectly overlapping with our world. Dragons are iron-wrought behemoths full of technology and running off of jet fuel. Hippogriffs and griffons park side-by-side with motorcycles, BMWs and limousines with all matter of mythological races living amongst one another. If you think New York or London is a melting pot, wait until you see Babel.

A war dragon crashes into Will’s remote village, immediately installs himself as King, and chooses Will as his agent. Isolated from the village as a result, and in spite of his eventual rebellion against the dragon, Will is exiled from the village. His service to the dragon leaves him scarred with a dark power inside of him, not entirely in his control.

Will becomes a refuge fleeing the war zone, landing for a time in a refuge camp; and eventually in the great city of Babel. Along the way, Will picks up a surrogate daughter, becomes an apprentice of sorts to a trickster, a leader in an underground rebellion, and meets the love of his life. Beyond that, let’s just say that Swanwick has an interesting, even subversive take on the orphan of destiny trope.

It becomes instantly clear that Swanwick knows how to write well. His economic prose sets the mood and brings the world vividly to life with as few words as I’ve seen it done. While another author would have turned this story into a trilogy, in Swanwick’s skilled hands The Dragons of Babel weighs in at a mere 320 pages – a very welcome length to this over-busy blogger. Even with the relatively abbreviated page count, the pacing feels just right. Only the build-up at the end feels rushed, and even then, not very rushed.

Surficially, Swanwick pulls together a fresh-feeling, fun, satiric, and at times, heavy plot while focusing characterization on Will. The supporting caste should be viewed as literary vessels designed as true support for Will and the city itself, Babel. The character of Babel remains in the background, but of equal importance to that of Will, as it represents the whole of a society that Will is but a key part of.

Thematically, The Dragons of Babel almost has a schizophrenic feel about it – in the beginning it seems as if each chapter focuses on different elements. It’s not just about Will’s coming-of-age and the building of an eventual leader. It’s about everything in a modern society and its internal and external conflicts. Sides aren’t truly taken, with things laid out for the reader to absorb – just as they are for Will.

The Dragons of Babel is the first book by Michael Swanwick that I’ve read, and it won’t be the last. Call it fantasy, urban fantasy, new weird, or something else entirely; The Dragons of Babel is a powerfully entertaining (and entertainingly powerful) book for all – a book that should be talked about. 8.5/10

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Keeping It Real by Justina Robson

Multidisciplinary Studies is a buzz term often heard in the realm of higher education. Essentially referring to exactly what it sounds like, it is often praised and criticized by many people, though it’s generally agreed that it is an important part of dealing with our modern, integrated and global world. Genre-bending in the term most often used for a book that seems to fit into more than one existing genre category. Referring to Keeping It Real as genre-bending is not good enough – this book is multidisciplinary.

In Keeping It Real, the near-future Earth as we know it has suffered a catastrophic event – the explosion of a quantum bomb. The affects of this are not what we would generally associate with the explosion of a bomb, such as widespread physical destruction, but the breakdown of dimensional barriers separating parallel worlds that humans were unaware of. The worlds of elves, faeries, elementals, demons, and the dead have been revealed and uneasy integration has begun.

Lila Black is a human agent recovering from extreme injuries suffered at the hands of elfin agents. As a result she has been remade into a human-cyborg, a unique, powerful, and fully integrated super spy. Her new assignment is to guard an eccentric rock star elf under threat from his own kind in a conspiracy of unknown dimensions.

Keeping It Real has been called a book for the twenty-first century and I can see why. A gadgety, techno-punk feel prevails in a story with rock concerts, groupie parties, motorcycle chases, sex, shifting loyalties, and explosions. Ass-kicking female protagonists have become hot sellers, and Agent Black fits the typical mode of a damaged soul struggling to deal with her past as it’s confronted in the present – same story, different setting. In this aspect, Keeping It Real neither succeeds nor fails, it just is.

The flow of the book is somewhat uneven as Robson struggles with her hard sci-fi roots and comes across a bit bi-polar while inconsistent characterization never allowed me to fully care about Lila and the most intriguing characters are essentially ignored. Until the final 100 pages, I was never fully committed to this book and it was too easily set aside; however the final 100 pages generally rocked in spite of continued unevenness.

Keeping It Real is the first installment in the Quantum Gravity Sequence, with the second installment, Selling Out coming to the UK in June. It stands on its own well, as it contains a complete story arc, but leaves overarching questions unresolved – I’m comfortable with not knowing where the story will go next. In the future I hope to see more development of the secondary characters as they were simply more interesting than Lila.

Keeping It Real succeeds as a techno-punk romp through fantasy and science fiction while not quite achieving full integration elsewhere. For me, it scores a 6.5 out of 10 – this book will really appeal to some people while leaving others behind.

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A Few Pictures From Recent Travels

Well, I've said that I'd post a few pictures from the travels, so here they are. These made the cut from the 200 hundred or so that were taken as a nice summary of the trip.


St. Goar along the Rhine in Germany from the Rheinfels castle.



The central square in Olomouc, Czech Republic. A very nice little city that is totally off the tourist map.



The Prague Castle.

The library at Strahov Monastary. A great visit - I wish I had a picture of the dodo. Oh well.