Skip to main content

The Clockwork Man (SF) - E. V. Odle ***

This 1923 novel by Edwin Vincent Odle is a title that many with an interest in the history of science fiction will have heard of, but few are  likely to have read. It's often described as the first cyborg story (I did so myself in my book on science fiction and science Ten Billion Tomorrows). But it was overshadowed by the publication in the same year of Karel Čapek's play Rossum's Universal Robots - the origin of the English language word 'robot'. Odle's only novel is not a great book, so that overshadowing is unsurprising, and even the cyborg description is more than a little misleading.

This is a romance (literally - it features two courting couples), but not so much a scientific romance (as early SF was often described), more a mythic romance. The titular clockwork man turns up from 8,000 years in the future at a village cricket match, producing some sub-Jerome K. Jerome style humour as a result of his wacky behaviour. He is a cyborg in the sense that he is a human that has been fitted with a piece of what appears to be technology. But this 'technology' is no more science-based that the wings of Daedalus and Icarus were in Ancient Greek mythology. The back of the clockwork man's head features an extremely complex clock that somehow magically takes him outside of time and space, able to shape both of them at will.

The clock seems to have been put in place to remove the war-like tendencies of men from the world. Odle was peripheral to the Bloomsbury set and the underlying theme of the book seems to be a Bloomsburyesque commentary on the role of women and men - and that's the whole point of it. The clockwork man makes no sense scientifically: he is simply a vehicle, like Daedalus and Icarus's wax-fixed wings, to (heavy handedly) make a point about human relations. This heavy handedness comes through particularly in one character, Doctor Armstrong, whose role is primarily to spend ages anguishing over how impossible the clockwork man is, unable to accept the existence of this creature from the future because he disrupts Armstrong's Edwardian pipe and slippers view of how human life should be (complete with servant wife), and should continue to be forever.

It's good that the Radium Age series in which this book is published gives readers the chance to encounter a title that is often held up as a starting point of an important science fiction trope. But when read, it shows us that the book is neither a particularly good work of fiction, nor does it play much of a meaningful part in SF history. The clockwork man is no more a cyborg than Talos, the huge bronze automaton in Greek mythology, was a robot. (To be fair, Čapek's robots weren't robots either, they were androids.) This is an interesting oddity, but no more than that.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more