Book Techno Fantasy (2 Books Collection Set)
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Book 1: Daughter of the Iron Dragon
Michael Swanwick /1950/ is a famous American writer who works at the intersection of many genres, including postmodern fantasy, cyberpunk, alternative history, and science fiction.
Swanwick's creative style is original and extraordinary, so comparing him to others is a futile exercise. No matter what he tackles - an ordinary and boring official business trip to another planet or the growing up of a kidnapped faerie girl - his story will make more than one genre and ideological and conceptual somersault, and the ending will definitely be unexpected.
Michael Swanwick's awards include such prestigious industry awards as the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, the World Fantasy Award, and others. Among the dozen novels and more than eighty short stories, the most famous are the novels of the Iron Dragons trilogy, the first of which, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, is a complete, amazing and original example of philosophical postmodern fantasy that still remains the standard of the genre.
Imagine the world of Tolkien's Middle-earth, lurking in parallel dimensions of a confusing multiverse. A world that has developed in much the same way as ours, but in which magic, rituals and magical creatures have remained, and now live in the huge megacities we know. Somewhere there are wars going on, for which factories create mechanical dragons - powerful war machines endowed with artificial intelligence, cold and cunning, based only on a thirst for destruction and chaos. To function, dragons need pilots - human half-breeds, only with them can a dragon take to the air and use its entire devastating arsenal.
But what happens when one such scrapped dragon wants to take revenge for his meaningless existence on the very foundations of the world that gave birth to him? And what will happen when he finds a worthy pilot to carry out his plan - a substitute girl whom no one asked for, and takes her to this bizarre world with its strange rules and unjust laws? Then the very foundations of the universe will be shaken, and reality will appear in all its true incredible essence, stunning, surprising, terrifying.
«Daughter of the Iron Dragon» – is the ultimate example of postmodern techno-fantasy, fairypunk, in which Michael Swanwick fully reveals his entire arsenal of unconventional views on traditional genres and turns our understanding of them upside down.
It seems that the whole burden of life in the future, twisted by political and social perturbations, falls on the shoulders of the reader of Neil Stephenson's Snowfall. Although the text is full of parody and irony, it is not an easy read. It is important to know that Stevenson is considered one of the most prominent representatives of post-cyberpunk, not cyberpunk. The fundamental difference between the subgenres was formulated in 1998 by another science fiction writer, Lawrence Person: «Post-cyberpunk characters are not alienated loners, but are often integral members of society (i.e., they have jobs).They live in a future that is not necessarily dystopian, but their daily lives are still affected by rapid technological change and the ubiquitous computerised infrastructure. It is not surprising that the protagonist of Stevenson's novel, Hiro, or Pizza Delivery Man, is not a complete loser. He used to develop software and was one of those who built the Metaverse. That's why Hiro will have to forget about his mediocre job in order to save hackers and then other people from a deadly drug. The plot of the novel is too complicated to be described in a few sentences. However, it is worth mentioning that the author's numerous technological predictions made in 1992 are quite impressive.