Dragons of Babel, by Michael Swanwick

This nov­el arrived in the mail about a day before I head­ed west, after I’d wait­ed the bet­ter part of two weeks for it (and even longer, if you fac­tor in the fact that I pre-ordered it, but that’s a whole ‘nother sto­ry, as they say).

I start­ed read­ing it on the train, and I fin­ished it in the base­ment liv­ing room of my sis­ter-in-law’s house. It’s an engross­ing read; as I neared the end, I had to force myself to slow down, to not miss any of the fan­tas­tic* details hid­den in very near­ly every sin­gle sentence.

The nov­el­’s set in the same indus­tri­al-faerie uni­verse as The Iron Drag­on’s Daugh­ter, but it’s by no means a sequel. The sto­ry starts off with Will le Fey watch­ing war drag­ons arc across the sky over his small vil­lage, bound for con­flict in some unimag­in­able war. One is shot down, and drags itself, flight­less, to Will’s vil­lage, where it declares itself ruler. It makes Will its lieu­tenant, in part because Will, unlike any­one else in town, is half-human.

Will par­takes in the priv­i­leges and the awful respon­si­bil­i­ties of his role, and in short order the entire vil­lage is set against him. When the drag­on’s grip on the vil­lage is final­ly bro­ken, Will is sent into exile.

He makes his way across a Faërie beset by the rav­ages of war, and winds up in a refugee camp. From there he trav­els to Babel itself, the great tow­er that stands high as Heav­en, and joins in a con­fi­dence game that trades on the iden­ti­ty of the absen­tee King of Babel to make a lot of mon­ey. But there’s a twist; there’s always a twist…

This book is dense with infor­ma­tion, and every sen­tence serves to nudge the plot for­ward. There’s a depth and a human­i­ty to the char­ac­ters, and we see peo­ple at their best and at their very worst, some­times on the same page. Noth­ing is irrel­e­vant; every detail has its place and its pur­pose. The world of Babel is rife with betray­als, dis­ap­point­ments, tri­umphs, and tragedies.

Michael Swan­wick very much needs to be more well-known than he is. It’s a shame that hard­ly any­one will have heard of this book, much less read it.

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* In every sense of the word.