Elaine Andraste was human once, but she has long since become a prisoner and servant of the Faerie Queen, Mebd, who holds her son, Ian, as a favored plaything. As Seeker, Elaine is tasked by the queen with locating human children who possess some trace of faerie blood and spiriting them away to the Seelie court. In this work, she competes against Kadiska, the seeker of the Unseelie queen, the Cat Anna, who wants all such children for herself. The survival of Faerie depends upon these children, whose mixed heritage offers hope of invigorating elfin bloodlines enervated after long centuries of tithing full-blooded fey to Hell in exchange for protection from the Almighty and his hosts. Meanwhile, the Promethean Club, a society of human mages led by Elaine's mother, Jane, is devoted to the rescue of the abducted children and the extermination of Seelie and Unseelie alike by means of magic and iron-based technology, against which the fey are powerless.

Two other formidable forces in the struggle are Mist, the mother of dragons, and Morgan le Fay, a third queen of Faerie, who is no longer the angry temptress of Arthurian days but an ostensibly benign, though still dangerous, grandmotherly figure. Both Mist and Morgan take a personal interest in Seeker, who, readers will perhaps be unsurprised to learn, is more than she seems.

The appearance of a Merlin, a human incarnation of pure magic, spurs each faction to try and win the living weapon to their side. Merlins emerge at regular intervals in history—previous manifestations include the magician of King Arthur's court—but only now has the Merlin been identified before coming into full knowledge and control of its abilities, which makes it more than ordinarily susceptible to manipulation, magical and otherwise. The appearance of Merlins also tracks to manifestations of the Dragon Prince, a culture hero whose unenviable destiny includes the commission of battlefield atrocities and betrayal at the hands of loved ones. Previous Dragon Princes include such liberators of the downtrodden as King Arthur and Vlad Tepes.

This time around, the heavy mantle of the Dragon Prince seems determined to settle upon the unwilling shoulders of Keith MacNeill, a prince of werewolves who also happens to be Ian's father and Elaine's estranged lover, responsible for her enslavement to Mebd.

Paint-by-the-numbers fantasy

It used to be comparatively rare for writers to cross back and forth between fantasy and science fiction, but today it's considered almost de rigueur to do so. Yet a talent for SF does not necessarily translate into an equivalent talent for fantasy, as this paint-by-the-numbers novel by Elizabeth Bear demonstrates.

Once upon a time, fantasies incorporating elements of the Arthurian mythos, fairy tales like Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin, and poems such as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and "The Stolen Child," often but not always set at least partially in a contemporary urban milieu, seemed to offer an escape from the dead end of Tolkien imitation. But now, years after trailblazing works by (among others) Ellen Kushner, John Crowley and Charles de Lint, there is a recognizable subgenre of books that are every bit as derivative as any Tolkien clone.

Bear's debt to these authors is evident on every page, as her wooden characters hit plot points that are less important in their own right, as vital parts of this particular story, than as familiar, comforting touchstones for readers addicted to this type of fantasy. Bear draws as well from the Anita Blake and Meredith Gentry books of Laurell K. Hamilton, especially in the character of Keith, the ambivalent werewolf prince, and in her depictions of life at the Faerie courts, but without the lush eroticism that briefly distinguished Hamilton's work before she slipped into self-parody.

Bear's real failing here is not her dependence upon models developed and more competently executed by others, for even a derivative novel can be a great read, provided it has a compelling story and vivid characters. Blood and Iron has neither. The story is a soap-opera family saga straining for a significance it does not possess, while the characters are game tokens with attributes rather than developed personalities.

The idea of the Dragon Prince is a potentially interesting element, but Bear does not follow it through. While her novel is set in the present, the list of Dragon Princes she presents ends before the modern age, though there is no reason to think there have not been more recent Dragon Princes. Hitler sprang to my mind as a perfect exemplar of the type, as Bear describes it, but she either didn't make the connection or hoped that readers would not—yet she must have at least subconsciously made it, because her title, Blood and Iron, is inextricably linked to the German militaristic ethos that culminated in World War II. Sure, it's a bit awkward to realize that the signs you have erected to distinguish the Dragon Prince point squarely to Adolf Hitler, an instance of the dark side of these wish-fulfillment fantasies rising up perhaps a bit too dangerously (as in Spinrad's classic The Iron Dream, featuring Hitler as a sci-fi writer), but had Bear embraced her idea in all its implications, however ugly, she would have had a much more interesting and original book.