The Clockwork Man - (Mit Press / Radium Age) by E V Odle (Paperback)

About the Book

Several thousand years from now, advanced humanoids known as the Makers will implant clockwork devices into our heads. At the cost of a certain amount of agency, these devices will permit us to move unhindered through time and space, and to live complacent, well-regulated lives. However, when one of these devices goes awry, a "clockwork man" appears accidentally in the 1920s, at a cricket match in a small English village. Considered the original cyborg novel, and perhaps the original singularity novel, too.

Book Synopsis

In the first-ever novel about a cyborg, a machine-enhanced man from a multiverse of the far future visits 1920s England.

In 1920s England, a strange being crashes a village cricket game. After some glitchy, jerky attempts to communicate, this creature reveals that he is a machine-enhanced human from a multiverse thousands of years in the future. The mechanism implanted in his skull has malfunctioned, sending him tumbling through time onto the green grass of the cricket field. Apparently in the future, at the behest of fed-up women, all men will be controlled by an embedded "clockwork," camouflaged with hats and wigs. Published in 1923, The Clockwork Man--the first cyborg novel--tells the story of this odd time traveler's visit.

Spending time with two village couples about to embark upon married life, the Clockwork Man warns that because men of the twentieth century are so violent, sexist, and selfish, in the not-too-distant future they will be banned from physical reality. They will inhabit instead a virtual world--what we'd now call the Singularity--in which their every need is met, but love is absent. Will the Clockwork Man's tale lead his new friends to reconsider technology, gender roles, sex, and free will?

Overshadowed in its own time by Karel Čapek's sensational 1923 play R.U.R., about a robot uprising, The Clockwork Man is overdue for rediscovery.

Annalee Newitz is the author of Four Lost Cities (2021), the novels The Future of Another Timeline (2019) andAutonomous (2017), which won the Lambda Award, and the novel The Terraformers (forthcoming). As a science journalist, they are a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and have a column in New Scientist. They are also the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

Review Quotes

"An excellent example of the promise of the Radium Age series, giving deserved attention to a hilarious and prescient work of science fiction that has almost been forgotten."
--Shelf Awareness

"Fluidity versus fixedness as markers of peace versus conflict is a strikingly resonant argument to find in a novel that's just under a century old, and it more than justifies time spent in the company of The Clockwork Man."
--The Los Angeles Review of Books

About the Radium Age Series:

"Joshua Glenn's admirable Radium Age series [is] devoted to early- 20th-century science fiction and fantasy."
-- The Washington Post

"Long live the Radium Age."
-- The Los Angeles Times

"It's an attractive crusade. [...] Glenn's project is well suited to providing an organizing principle for an SF reprint line, to the point where I'm a little surprised that I can't think of other similarly high-profile examples of reprint-as-critical-advocacy. "
--The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Neglected classics of early 20th-century sci-fi in spiffily designed paperback editions."
--The Financial Times

"New editions of a host of under-discussed classics of the genre."
--Tor.com

"Shows that 'proto-sf' was being published much more widely, alongside other kinds of fiction, in a world before it emerged as a genre and became ghettoised."
--BSFA Review

"A huge effort to help define a new era of science fiction."
--Transfer Orbit

"An excellent start at showcasing the strange wonders offered by the Radium Age."
--Maximum Shelf

About the Author

E. V. Odle (1890-1942) was a Bloomsbury-adjacent magazine editor in London.