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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Engineered Handmaid's (Gentler) Future,
This review is from: The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass (Kindle Edition)
The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass is a novella (99 pages) set in the landscape of a future Earth, where human beings have become androgynous, slow aging and sterile. The book opens to a miraculous event - the genetic engineering of the ova and sperm of earlier humans to create a fertile female. Humanity's survival depends on the production of a child to expand the available gene pool.
The novella is a bit strange in tone, spinning between clinical impressions, the touching humanity of the heroine as she grows up to be a teenager (with a heavy burden), and sly commentary on our present-day society as viewed through the lens of this future version of humanity. The heroine, Liaei, stays true to age - a believable character, complete with embarrassment, intelligence, frustration and fears. The landscape is interesting - the ocean has become deadly, the sun has undergone changes, there are technologies that are vital, but, as with the aquaducts and plumbing after the fall of the Roman empire, no one knows how they work or how to repair them. While I enjoyed most of the novella, there were a few things that just didn't sit well, particularly in the second part with the Clock King, and the ending. Part of me was happy at the ending, but the other part was thinking how unlikley it was that it would be left like that. All in all, I enjoyed reading The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass; it stayed more human than many future earth stories I have read. I'd give this 3.5 stars, really, but Amazon only goes by whole stars, and I don't want to give it less than it's worth. I recieved this review copy from the author as part of LibraryThing's Member's Giveaway.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I want more,
By
This review is from: The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass (Kindle Edition)
Received through LibraryThing Memeber Give Away.I very much enjoyed this book. The sort of flat writing style perfectly complements the tone of the story. It evokes a kind of calm despair and disconnect that the "evolved" people must be feeling. Humans have "controlled" things until they are impotent both physically and intellectually. They go through the motions of a life they can't live or enjoy. So stagnant have they become that they do what they have always done to survive and seemingly never attempt to try to come up with any better way of surviving. They rely on their "genetic throw backs" to supply them with new genetic material to carry on a human race that merely exists. Liaei, The Queen of the Hourglass, defies expectation and the reader is left with the hope she resurrects life. I would love to read what happens next, but the author leaves it to the readers imagination, but she leaves us with hope.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Before we forget curiosity...,
This review is from: The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass (Kindle Edition)
This quick little novella runs its course in the extremely distant future, where Earth has been reduced to a shrinking lake of sludge at the bottom of the Pacific basin and two highly advanced cities of demi-humans. Our protagonist, Liaei, is an engineered 'modern' homo sapien who comes to learn that her DNA is part of a millenniums-long program of genetic renewal.
In The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass, Ms. Nazarian presents us briefly with an understated view of a vastly different human race. Our world has become strange, but in her hands it is not difficult to accept her future-people and their alien worldview. Her language sometimes has a shade of Bradbury, both to good and bad effect, but she plies her metaphors without overwriting. Questioning and curiosity -- both important themes -- exist both within the plot and without, as the author uses her character's displacement from our own time to re-frame gender identity and sexuality as an outside observer. These monologues unfortunately range from the thought-provoking to the funny to the irritatingly didactic, but come with good intent and real insight. A few features of the story do grate a bit. The characters can't seem to decide if they measure time or not; in the same page they both criticize their ancestor's clocks and track their own heart's beats per minute. Even in 100 pages, one or two spots seem to start sputtering. However, the last few pages open up the whole story's foundation, that it is our human drive to discover and explore that makes us great and gives us our best chance for the future. I am certainly curious to seek out more of Very Nazarian's work and see if it stands up to another such rigorous and heartening message.
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