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Title details for The Clockwork Man by E. V. Odle - Available

The Clockwork Man

by E. V. Odle
Annalee Newitz
ebook
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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.
 

  • Creators

  • Series

    MIT Press / Radium Age

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 3, 2022

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780262368841

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780262368841
      • File size: 304 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      May 1, 2022

      Odle's 1923 proto-cyborg novel starts off like a P. G. Wodehouse story gone bonkers. A cricket match at the village of Great Wymering devolves into mayhem owing to the sudden appearance on the pitch of a weirdly herky-jerky fellow, stammering and clicking and wagging his ears. This odd individual turns out to be a castaway from mankind's multidimensional future, concealing under a red wig and bowler hat whirring dials whose malfunction has stranded him in our decidedly provincial three dimensions. The satiric misadventures that ensue often reflect two unsettling preoccupations of the era: Einsteinian relativity and women's rights. Some are horrified by the Clockwork Man's shocking metamorphic powers, while others excitedly anticipate the marriage of man and machine that we now term the Singularity. Readers ultimately discover a sobering aspect of life in the 59th century--and learn who winds up all those clocks--in a poignant finale that anticipates the technological anxieties at the heart of much speculative fiction to this day. VERDICT Odd but no mere curiosity, this whimsical yet haunting novella reads like a missing link between Victorian and Golden Age science fiction, as befits the aim of MIT Press's new "Radium Age" series to recover neglected classics of early 20th-century science fiction.

      Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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