Telos Publishing The Clockwork Woman

Author	Claire Bott
Published	2004
ISBN	1-903889-39-1 (paperback) 1-903889-40-5 (deluxe hardback)
Featuring	Honore Lechasseur and Emily Blandish

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 3/11/04

Fantastic! I loved it! Often I'm not carried away by recent books other reviewers rave about, which have struck me as impressively crafted but somewhat uninvolving. This is another clever book, but it also has heart and a soul; personally I'd say it's my favourite Time Hunter novella to date, including Daniel O'Mahony's The Cabinet of Light.

Firstly, it's not a novel manque. This book is a first-person narrative through the damaged eyes of the eponymous Clockwork Woman. I'm not sure if that could have sustained a novel-length story, but it works perfectly for the novella being told here. Similarly the story conceit (a fully functioning clockwork android with artificial intelligence in 1805) is far enough removed from reality to feel almost like a fairy tale. In a novel the plausibility gap might have become a problem, but here one accepts it. The Clockwork Woman is self-winding, for instance. Obviously this is grossly unscientific (a perpetual motion machine!), but this is a fable rather than hard SF. (The ending isn't scientific either, but it's not meant to be.)

In subject matter, it's an ingeniously inverted Frankenstein crossed with Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. What's more, Claire Bott has actually read the latter! (It seems these days that Mary Wollstonecraft is famous mostly for being Mary Shelley's mother, but she was a fiercely intellectual woman in her own right and respect is due to anyone writing feminist tracts in 1792.) I confess to being tickled by this mother-and-daughter combination, just as I enjoyed the Kennedy-and-Who conflation in David Bishop's Who Killed Kennedy. Synchronicity is fun!

What I admire most about this novella is its focus. Every word and every page comes from the story's heart; it never degenerates into corridor-running or empty jeopardy. It's easier to be on-theme when your theme is as engrossing as it is here, but that doesn't affect my admiration for what Claire Bott has achieved. This isn't merely better than every BBC Book for donkey's years (even pre-cutback), but so far out of their sight that it's almost bathetic to mention them in the same sentence.

This has been one of my hardest reviews to write in ages! Nonsense like Gary Russell's Legacy will yield a list of nitpicks that could stretch to the moon, but my notes this time only comprised 24 words (and that included the title). I got as far as "awesome, loved it", then ran out of things to say. I have no criticisms of this at all. There isn't a word I'd change... though I can't say the same for John Higgins's cover illustration, which I don't think makes the Clockwork Woman look pretty enough. This is a (distantly) Who-related book to thrust on your non-Who friends. Top-notch stuff.