Customer Reviews

The Dragons of Babel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

He's just a country boy, living in a small village after his parents are killed by the war. But when a dragon crashes nearby and decides to make himself king of the village, Will Le Fey gets drafted as the voice of the dragon. That role gives him a certain amount of power, but it also earns him the hatred of everyone in town--and when his best friend decides to lead a resistance movement, Will finds himself in a no-win situation.

When war extends across the land, Will and many others become refugees, finally making his way to Babel, the center of the Empire. There he falls in with confidence men and dreamers--and becomes the catspaw for a clever scheme to take advantage of the absent king and place him in the position of pretender--with all of the financial benefits that might create.

Author Michael Swanwick creates a powerful world, where technology and magic coexist, where pointless war is waged over forgotten slights, and where the ruling elite parties, indulges in casual sin, and where both the mob and the elite dream of a return of the absent king--for very different reasons. It's hard not to draw parallels between Swanwick's fantasy world and the world in which we live (Babel's library has stone lions out front, and Will dreams of crashing dragons into the great tower of Babel), and piecing through the clues to figure out exactly what Swanwick is saying about our current situation is half the fun of the story.

Will has vowed revenge for the casual destruction the forces of Babel called down on his home, but the world seems uninterested in his vows, conspiring to defeat his dreams at the same time as it showers new opportunities on him. Clearly Will is being manipulated. Exactly who, or what is doing that manipulation is less obvious--partly because so many forces seem intent on doing that.

There are some loose ends to the story--a long section in the middle where Will serves as an underground (literally) warrior champion seems poorly integrated with the story and I expected to see more of a resolution of the issues involving ex-friend No-name, the dragon, and Esme. Still, THE DRAGONS OF BABEL has a real power to it--the story sucked me in, made me think, and held my interest. It's a different kind of story, but it's hard to put down.

Swanwick is certinly one of the most original fantasists working today, and _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_ was perhaps his best (even though the evangelicals loudly denounced it). This one, while not actually a sequel, is set in the same world, which is a mish-mash of modern America and Faerie. You know you're there when the centaurs carry assault weapons, a high elf rides a Vespa, the haints play reggae, the royal palace includes rooms designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Cabinet of Curiosities displays both a stuffed capricorn and a Soyuz spacecraft. Will Le Fey is a young orphan subsisting in a rural village which is just trying to keep its collective head down while the endless war between East and West rages on. Then a war dragon (sentient, but with a half-human pilot) crashes and takes over the village for its own survival -- and appoints Will its lieutenant. When the dragon is killed (more or less), Will is forced out . . . and so begins a series of adventures in the classic pauper-to-prince picaresque tradition, from refugee camp to the tutelage of a master con man (keep an eye on him), to a period as an underground rebel leader, to his attempt to pass himself off as the lost heir of His Absent Majesty. (And, of course, there's more to the scam than he knows.) For all his occasional naivete, Will has innate cunning -- although when he tries to win the heart and hand of his True Love, who happens to be one of the ruling elite in the towering city of Babel (or maybe Babylon), the reader knows it won't be a sure thing. Swanwick's patented tongue-in-cheek cynicism and ability to make even temporary secondary characters interesting will keep you reading far into the night.

This book is a notch below Dragon's Daughter. Maybe because "Daughter" was a true original and this is book is a sequel, but this book lacked the impact of Swanwick's first book. Swanwick's world is a dark place where magical creatures gave up their immortality in exchange for a moral existence, and they appear to be much the worse for it.

The buildup was good. Our hero got into one mess after another and his life just kept getting worse and worse. He had disappointment after disappointment. Then, he met Nat the con man and his luck begin to change, sort of.

The book started wandering about along several plot lines, but came together nicely in the last quarter of the book. But the last chapter was a bit of a letdown, unless you are into endings that are not really endings. The ending is the only reason I cant give the book a 5.

Well, I finished Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanick and I got a lot of mixed feelings. The book is bizarre. The book is like the author stitched togehter a whole bunch of plots from OTHER short stories and linked them all together with the main character.
The main character goes from one situation to the other without seeming to gain anything except from the first "story" with the dragon. The sheer unstableness of both the main character and plot is weird. After the dragon dies (not much of a spoiler), he swears vengeance upon Bablyon...and then promptly forgets it. Did the author himself forget it? Destroying Bablyon was his goal, but he does not work towards it, or even think about it until the last THREE pages of the book? Seems like the author did not really think that out too well..
I can not say this is a very good book...

I'll admit that Swanwick had me worried a few times that this dark, steampunk-flavored fairytale was going to have one of those dreadful nihilistic endings that authors of serious scifi or fantasy are prone to writing, where the protagonist finds out that his cause is hopeless, life is pain, etc., and I almost stopped reading. Nihilism gets less and less appealing to me, for some reason, as I get older. But I stuck with it and was fairly pleased and pleasantly surprised with the way it ended.

I like to describe this kind of story as 'world-based' as opposed to a 'character-based' story where I identify with and empathize with the main character. It's a twisted worldscape, peopled with highly colorful characters from a wide variety of myths, with modernity thrown in the mix. Babel could be New York City, if it had been founded by haints, elves, dwarves and a hundred other types of supernatural beings. Through the eyes of a recently arrived war refugee, Will le Fey, the reader wanders, lost and overwhelmed, trying to find sense in the chaos.

Will le Fey has a lot of the characteristics of a hero. He's clever and cunning, with a sufficient dose of both compassion and ruthlessness. He's courageous and ambitious, and makes several attempts to do big things like lead a rebellion and win his true love, but he's continually being thwarted, not because he's done anything wrong, but because the world isn't actually what he thought it was. Reality carries him along for a while, then pulls the rug out from under him, but he does achieve a kind of mixed success in the end.

In the typical urban fantasy, beneath the "real" world of human science and rationality there hides a secret world of magical creatures and arcane magical practices. By contrast, in THE DRAGONS OF BABEL, the "real" world is a magical one inhabited by fairies, elves, boggarts, kobolds, and dragons who cast spells and glamors as a matter of routine. However, it is also a technological world where magical creatures listen to jazz, carry cell phones, ride motorcycles, conduct crooked ward-based machine politics, and keep Soyuz capsules in their royal collections. (It's not clearly spelled out whether anybody in this world is human, although our protagonist Will might be half-human, and I'm guessing that Duke Ellington and Mohammad Ali who are mentioned in passing are also meant to be human.) The results of this tweak of a familiar genre are often surprising an delightful.

I don't have much to say about the plot (which is fine, but described in detail by others), except that (a) it's an episodic, picaresque coming of age adventure story, not terribly different in form from zillions of others, and (b) while a single dragon we encounter at the beginning deeply influences the path that Will, our protagonist, follows, this book is NOT about dragons.

Swanwick's writing style is always vivid and fluent, but the language he uses varies from classic fairy tale "thee and thou" to contemporary urban slang. Images from classical mythology and mother goose rhymes are deliberately short-circuited or deflated (or probably reinflated -- since the Victorian era we've stripped away much of the rawness of myth and legend) with crude sexual innuendos and silly anachronisms. While this type of writing could easily become labored or tedious, I think that Swanwick pulls it off quite well.

If you're looking for a conventional swords and sorcery fantasy, look elsewhere. If you'd rather not read about sexual situations, like a hermaphrodite masturbating on stage in a club (briefly, in a scene), look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, an urban fantasy/classical mythology/sci-fi pastiche written with intelligence, wit, and a satirical eye might appeal to you, pick up THE DRAGONS OF BABEL.

The Good: Excellent (if weird) mythology and culture, strong characters, great setting

The Bad: Feels like it's going nowhere at times, jumps around too much, strange culture and mythology is hard to follow and seems like gibberish at times

I love scf-fi and fantasy books and when it veers away from video games I tend to be extremely picky. I love the weird ones and The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick is probably one of the weirdest books I have ever read.

The story revolves around a boy named Will le Fey who lives in a quite little village with his aunt. He observes a battle of dragon (dragons in this story are mechanical and are piloted by people) and one crashes into his village. The dragon crawls to the town square and declares himself ruler and makes all the townsfolk do his bidding. While this fiasco goes on for several chapters you follow Will's life as he become a ruler of an underground gang, and becomes a trickster in the great cit of Babel.

The book has strange mythology and culture, but ties current culture into as well. You'll see words like BlackBerry, Kawaski, Vespa, and real life names pop up here and there. It's feels a bit out of place and not at the same time. The book is full of witty humor, and strange sexual tension with the main character. The book has sexy vixens as well, so it appeals to everyone. The book is just so strange yet so invigorating that you can't put the thing down.

There are very confusing plot holes that really don't ever get answered, and some times you can get lost in all the made up gibberish that Michael makes up. The world is so magical yet so real it's hard to tell which it really is. There are strange creatures, magic, and just weird ways of him twisting real world ways into his own fantasy. The book is written very well, but jumps around a bit too much, and some times feels like it's going nowhere. If you're a huge sci-fi/fantasy fan then pick up The Dragons of Babel.

I'm not really sure how much this book really counts as a sequel... Jane makes only a minor cameo appearance and really, much of the book's setting seemed pretty different, too. It was definitely less dark, less violent and less oriented on sex. I read a review saying that this was mostly a re-working of previously published short stories, and I have to say that I can definitely see this is true, as this was not a very coherent book. But, really, _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_ was not very strong in this either. Basically, I liked this, but I didn't love it - and I really don't plan on following this series or author any longer.

i have read and enjoyed all published works from swanwick. he is one of my favorite authors of any type of science fiction (my normal reading is not scifi) this novel is yet another one of his hits. my first reading reminded me of the first version of mid summer night's dream i saw as a play. the fairies rode motorcycles and were dressed in modern day punk clothing. other readers have provided breif synopsis, all i can do is rave about the clever use of prose from such a talented writer.

A lot to say about this book. It returns to the world of The Iron Dragon's Daughter. This is a happy thing for me, since that is and remains one of my favorite fantasy novels. I wish I had more adjectives to convey "dark" and "original". Those words are overused, aren't they? But they apply here, both of them.

The story, as is usual for Swanwick, weaves together a number of plot threads. Think of it more as a rope with many strands than as a single clear plot line. There's something about power and how it corrupts, and something else about the pros and cons of terrorism. There are magical creatures of many kinds, all inventive and lovingly detailed. There's a lost king plot too-- but I would wager it is different than you have seen that old chestnut cooked before. A lot of humor here too, tossed in for good measure.

I will admit to some chaos with all these elements cooked together. I didn't mind it at all-- I was carried along by the energy of the book itself. If you like your fantasy very neat and simple, this may not appeal to you. Also be aware that the only "young" part of this book is the original age of the main character-- I would not mistake either this or The Iron Dragon's Daughter for young adult reading. At least not typical young adult reading; I suspect that there would be rather too much adult for many parents here.