Clockwork
Alternate title : Clockwork, or All Wound Up
Imagine you’re an apprentice clock-maker. It is the day before you are supposed to unveil your personal masterpiece – an addition to the great clock tower in the center of town, the final step in your training. But you haven’t created a masterpiece. You haven’t created anything. Tomorrow will be your greatest humiliation, rather than a triumph.
But then a shadowy, sinister figure steps out of a story and offers you a clockwork statue of a knight, so intricate, so real, that to pass it off as yours would make you forever famous. Would it matter that this knight will seek out and kill anyone who utters the word “devil”? Would it matter that the price might be your soul?
The stories of Karl, the apprentice; Dr. Kalmenius, his nefarious “savior”; Gretl, the brave daughter of the town innkeeper; and a young prince whose clockwork heart is in danger of winding down come together in surprising and magical ways in a story that has behind it the relentless urgency of a ticking clock.
With this novella, as finely wrought as an exquisite timepiece, Philip Pullman shows again why he is considered one of the great writers of our time.
Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman (born 1946) is an English writer. He is the best-selling author of His Dark Materials, a trilogy of fantasy novels, and a number of other books.
Life
Pullman was born in Norwich. The family travelled with his RAF pilot father's job, including to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he spent time at school. His father was killed in a plane crash in 1953 when Pullman was seven. His mother remarried and with a move to Australia came Pullman's discovery of comic books including Superman and Batman. From 1957 he was educated at Ysgol Ardudwy school in Wales and spent time in Norfolk with his grandfather, a clergyman. Around this time Pullman discovered John Milton's Paradise Lost, which would become a major influence for His Dark Materials. From 1963 Pullman attended Exeter College, Oxford, receiving BA in 1968. Pullman married in 1970 and began teaching children.
His first fantasy novel was Galatea in 1978, but it was his school plays which inspired his first children's book, Count Karlstein, in 1982. He stopped teaching around the publication of The Ruby in the Smoke (1986), his second children's book, whose Victorian setting is indicative of Pullman's interest in that era.
Pullman taught part-time at Westminster College, Oxford between 1988 and 1996, continuing to write children's stories. He began His Dark Materials about 1993. The Golden Compass was published in 1996 and won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Award. Pullman has been writing full-time since 1996. He was awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honours list in 2004.
His Dark Materials
