THE IRON DRAGON'S DAUGHTER

Seething, brain-bursting, all but indescribable upper-world coming-of-age yarn, from the author of a string of splendid novels (Stations of the Tide; Griffin's Egg, etc.). A world where magic and technology both work exists at a much higher energy level than our own. Here dwell kobolds, imps, elves, demons, dwarves, and other fantastical beings—including Powers who poach souls from our world to use as slaves in the upper world. One such wretched waif, Jane Alderberry, is forced to toil in a vast, terrifying factory that manufactures stealth-attack dragons using both magical and technological components. One particularly evil dragon, pretending to be an inert wreck, desperately wants to escape the factory but cannot fly without a pilot. He arranges for Jane to discover him; but, before agreeing to help, Jane requires the dragon to reveal his true name and thus yield Jane a measure of power over him. Together, then, Jane and Melanchthon escape. Jane, beginning to grow up, attends a supernatural version of high school, then studies alchemy at college; her boyfriend, whom she can never quite bring herself to trust, is a serial incarnation, forever giving his life to save hers. Eventually, Jane comes to the attention of the Powers, and, following the Teind—a dreadful, goddess-inspired winnowing-out of the world's inhabitants—falls into despair, just as Melanchthon announces that he intends to assault the goddess's Spiral Castle, a puzzle-palace located in a set of yet higher dimensions. At once a gleefully bizarre parody and a dazzlingly imaginative tour de force, flawed by the rather distant, uninvolving narrative and an ending equivalent to ``then she fell out of bed and woke up.'' Withal: enormously impressive, rich, dense, demanding.