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Pulley, Natasha

Entry updated 11 March 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1988-    ) UK teacher and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Watchmaker of Filigree Street" in Alt Hist for June 2011 as by N K Pulley, a tale she expanded into the first volume of her Steampunk Watchmaker of Filigree Street Universe series. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (2015) is set in an Alternate History version of Victorian London, where a Japanese watchmaker distressingly shows himself able to scry (or remember) various futures, all it seems potentially true (see Prediction). One of his watches saves the life of the tale's protagonist, a translator who traces the immigrant down, and who begins to apprehend the nature of exile, solitude. The ornate inside-outside brass topologies of steampunk Britain help a little to accustom the watchmaker to what seems a Multiverse aborning. The Bedlam Stacks (2017) is set earlier in the same universe, with an essentially different cast; the two main figures from the first volume reappear in The Lost Future of Pepperharrow (2020), and travel to a recognizably nineteenth-century Japan in the throes of change, where they find ghosts, and a freezing world. The artefact of the steampunk planet begins to shake.

Pulley's first singleton, The Kingdoms (2021), is an Alternate History tale whose Jonbar Point is the British defeat at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805; a century or so later, Britain is a satrapy of the French empire, which Pulley describes in terms mildly reminiscent of the skewed Steampunk world that Bryan Talbot created for his Grandville sequence. Suffering from Amnesia, the protagonist finds himself in Paris, but then returns briefly to his infant daughter before being transported back to 1807 by British survivors of the disaster, who hope to gain ascendancy from his knowledge of the future and his Technological competence. Linkages between Time Travel and amnesia suggest that this world may be ontologically fragile. In her second singleton, The Mars House (2024), a moderately distant-Near Future autonomous Mars welcomes Climate-Change refugees from Earth; one of these becomes intricately involved with a female politician, a mover and shaker. Love must be consummated; and a terrible storm survived. [JC]

Natasha Pulley

born Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: 4 December 1988

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Watchmaker of Filigree Street

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