Beauty

Tepper, Sheri S. Beauty. NYC and other cities: Doubleday-Foundation, 1991. For translations, awards, and later printings, see entry in Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of April 2025, available here.[1]

Novel, primarily metaFantasy with some SF elements, including a Fantasy variation on time-travel; there's also a 20th-c. dystopian dying Earth, compared to a hive ("March 1994," p. 284). Beauty is relevant in this wiki for the motif of the count-down clock, or clocks (ch. 25, p. 328). For measuring out characters' lives (ch. 27, pp. 341, 354), cf. and strongly contrast LOGAN'S RUN. Note the appropriateness of mechanical clocks in northern European Late Medieval settings, but with the switch here that the clocks are elegant and at levels of mechanical and esthetic sophistication from far later, 18th-c. or so.[2] The character Puck speaks of a great lady of Fairy (or Faerie) as "old Clockwork Carabose [...,] one of the Sidhe" of Irish folklore (ch. 25, p. 324) — in an unusual linguistic merging of the mechanical and supernatural.

RDE, finishing, 28Ap25