The Clockwork Man

Several thousand years from now, advanced humanoids known as the Makers will implant clockwork devicesinto our heads. At the cost of a certain amount of agency, these devices will permit us to move unhinderedthrough time and space, and to live complacent, wellregulatedlives. However, when one of these devices goesawry, a "clockwork man" appears accidentally in the 1920s, at a cricket match in a small English village.Comical yet mindblowinghijinks ensue.

“"Edwin Vincent Odle's ominous, droll, and unforgettable THE CLOCKWORK MAN is a missing link between Lewis Carroll and John Sladek or Philip K. Dick. Considered with them, it suggests an alternate lineage for SF, springing as much from G.K. Chesterton's sensibility as from H.G. Wells's." ”

-- Jonathan Lethem (2013) "This is still one of the most eloquent pleas for the rejection of the 'rational' future and the conservation of the humanity of man. Of the many works of scientific romance that have fallen into utter obscurity, this is perhaps the one which most deserves rescue." -- Brian Stableford "Perhaps the outstanding scientific romance of the 1920s." -- Anatomy of Wonder

Edwin Vincent Odle (18901942) was founding editor of the British short-story magazine Argosy, and a member of avant-garde author Dorothy Richardson's circle. Odle's only other science fiction novel was never published, and is now lost.

Annalee Newitz is editor-in-chief of the science fiction and science blog io9. She's the author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (2013) and Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (2006).

Several thousand years from now, advanced humanoids known as the Makers will implant clockwork devicesinto our heads. At the cost of a certain amount of agency, these devices will permit us to move unhinderedthrough time and space, and to live complacent, wellregulatedlives. However, when one of these devices goesawry, a "clockwork man" appears accidentally in the 1920s, at a cricket match in a small English village.Comical yet mindblowinghijinks ensue.

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