Mary Carmen

The Clarkl Soup Kitchens Mary Carmen

Clarkl is a planet of cold days and even colder nights. Although Clarkl's star is not visible from Earth, Clarkl's advanced technology allows its natives to visit Earth and take Earthlings back to Clarkl for work. In the early 2070s, the American government entered into a contract with the people of Clarkl to manage and staff farms and kitchens to feed some of the large numbers of Clarkl natives who are faced with the planet's ever-present famine. The American government received certain critical minerals from Clarkl, and the Clarklians received the services of farmers and cooks. This novel presents the diaries of five Americans who went to Clarkl for work in the dining rooms. They left troubling problems on Earth to go to Clarkl for a guaranteed monthly income and a decade of hard work. The diaries discuss the ugly Clarkl natives, with all seven sexes described. Three imaginative illustrations by Lance Jackson show these natives. Carmen, MaryTHE CLARKL SOUP KITCHENSAuthorHouse (277 pp.) November 2004ISBN: 1-4184-8031-2 The cold planet of Clarkl, a place of .few comforts and extensive famine,. serves as thebackdrop for this humorous, pseudo-allegorical tale. Clarkl is the last-ditch option for the rag-tag recruits of two competing Christian missionary groups in the late-21st century.at least one of which consists of disgraced Catholic prelates.who run a food-for-uranium exchange between Earth and Clarkl. Carmen.s darkly comic saga of interspecies miscommunication is told through the diaries of four Clarkl enlistees who have little interest in Christianity and even less understanding of the hungry creatures for whom they must constantly cook. They are middle-aged, greedy, needy, and unnervingly selfabsorbed, showing very little interest in the fantastic landscape in which they live and work. Though they are on the strangest planet in the galaxy, they remain only mildly curious about Clarkl and the mysterious lives of its inhabitants. In short, they are the ugly, xenophob