The Clockwork Man
The Clockwork Man
The Radium Age Book Series
Joshua Glenn
Voices from the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn, 2022
A World of Women, J. D. Beresford, 2022
The World Set Free, H. G. Wells, 2022
The Clockwork Man, E. V. Odle, 2022
The Clockwork Man
E. V. Odle
introduction by Annalee Newitz
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This edition of The Clockwork Man follows the text of the 1923 edition published by Doubleday, Page & Company, which is in the public domain. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Arnhem Pro and PF DIN Text Pro by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Odle, E. V. (Edwin Vincent), 1890–1942, author. | Newitz, Annalee, 1969– writer of introduction.
Title: The clockwork man / E. V. Odle ; introduction by Annalee Newitz.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2022] | Series: The Radium Age series
Identifiers: LCCN 2021010589 | ISBN 9780262543439 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Cyborgs—Fiction. | Time travel—Fiction. | GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6029.D48 C57 2022 | DDC 823/.912—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010589
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
d_r0
Contents
Series Foreword
Introduction: The Radical Future of The Clockwork Man
Annalee Newitz
1 The Coming of the Clockwork Man
2 The Wonderful Cricketer
3 The Mystery of the Clockwork Man
4 Arthur Withers Thinks Things Out
5 The Clockwork Man Investigates Matters
6 “It was not so, it is not so, and, indeed, God forbid it should be so.”
7 The Clockwork Man Explains Himself
8 The Clock
9 Gregg
10 Last Appearance of the Clockwork Man
Series Foreword
Joshua Glenn
Do we really know science fiction? There were the scientific romance years that stretched from the mid-nineteenth century to circa 1900. And there was the genre’s so-called golden age, from circa 1935 through the early 1960s. But between those periods, and overshadowed by them, was an era that has bequeathed us such tropes as the robot (berserk or benevolent), the tyrannical superman, the dystopia, the unfathomable extraterrestrial, the sinister telepath, and the eco-catastrophe. A dozen years ago, writing for the sf blog io9.com at the invitation of Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, I became fascinated with the period during which the sf genre as we know it emerged. Inspired by the exactly contemporaneous career of Marie Curie, who shared a Nobel Prize for her discovery of radium in 1903, only to die of radiation-induced leukemia in 1934, I eventually dubbed this three-decade interregnum the “Radium Age.”
Curie’s development of the theory of radioactivity, which led to the extraordinary, terrifying, awe-inspiring insight that the atom is, at least in part, a state of energy constantly in movement, is an apt metaphor for the twentieth century’s first three decades. These years were marked by rising sociocultural strife across various fronts: the founding of the women’s suffrage movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, socialist currents within the labor movement, anticolonial and revolutionary upheaval around the world . . . as well as the associated strengthening of reactionary movements that supported, for example, racial segregation, immigration restriction, eugenics, and sexist policies.
Science—as a system of knowledge, a mode of experimenting, and a method of reasoning—accelerated the pace of change during these years in ways simultaneously liberating and terrifying. As sf author and historian Brian Stableford points out in his 1989 essay “The Plausibility of the Impossible,” the universe we discovered by means of the scientific method in the early twentieth century defies common sense: “We are haunted by a sense of the impossibility of ultimately making sense of things.” By playing host to certain far-out notions—time travel, faster-than-light travel, and ESP, for example—that we have every reason to judge impossible, science fiction serves as an “instrument of negotiation,” Stableford suggests, with which we strive to accomplish “the difficult diplomacy of existence in a scientifically knowable but essentially unimaginable world.” This is no less true today than during the Radium Age.
The social, cultural, political, and technological upheavals of the 1900–1935 period are reflected in the proto-sf writings of authors such as Olaf Stapledon, William Hope Hodgson, Muriel Jaeger, Karel Čapek, G. K. Chesterton, Cicely Hamilton, W. E. B. Du Bois, Yevgeny Zamyatin, E. V. Odle, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mikhail Bulgakov, Pauline Hopkins, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Aldous Huxley, Gustave Le Rouge, A. Merritt, Rudyard Kipling, Rose Macaulay, J. D. Beresford, J. J. Connington, S. Fowler Wright, Jack London, Thea von Harbou, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, not to mention the late-period but still incredibly prolific H. G. Wells himself. More cynical than its Victorian precursor yet less hard-boiled than the sf that followed, in the writings of these visionaries we find acerbic social commentary, shock tactics, and also a sense of frustrated idealism—and reactionary cynicism, too—regarding humankind’s trajectory.
The MIT Press’s Radium Age series represents a much-needed evolution of my own efforts to champion the best proto-sf novels and stories from 1900 to 1935 among scholars already engaged in the fields of utopian and speculative fiction studies, as well as general readers interested in science, technology, history, and thrills and chills. By reissuing literary productions from a time period that hasn’t received sufficient attention for its contribution to the emergence of science fiction as a recognizable form—one that exists and has meaning in relation to its own traditions and innovations, as well as within a broader ecosystem of literary genres, each of which, as John Rieder notes in Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017), is itself a product of overlapping “communities of practice”—we hope not only to draw attention to key overlooked works but perhaps also to influence the way scholars and sf fans alike think about this crucial yet neglected and misunderstood moment in the emergence of the sf genre.
John W. Campbell and other Cold War–era sf editors and propagandists dubbed a select group of writers and story types from the pulp era to be the golden age of science fiction. In doing so, they helped fix in the popular imagination a too-narrow understanding of what the sf genre can offer. (In his introduction to the 1974 collection Before the Golden Age, for example, Isaac Asimov notes that although it may have possessed a certain exuberance, in general sf from before the mid-1930s moment when Campbell assumed editorship of Astounding Stories “seems, to anyone who has experienced the Campbell Revolution, to be clumsy, primitive, naive.”) By returning to an international tradition of scientific speculation via fiction from after the Poe–Verne–Wells era and before sf’s Golden Age, the Radium Age series will demonstrate—contra Asimov et al.—the breadth, richness, and diversity of the literary works that were responding to a vertiginous historical period, and how they helped innovate a nascent genre (which wouldn’t be named until the mid-1920s, by Hugo Gernsback, founder of Amazing Stories and namesake of the Hugo Awards) as a mode of speculative imagining.
The MIT Press’s Noah J. Springer and I are grateful to the sf writers and scholars who have agreed to serve as this series’ advisory board. Aided by their guidance, we’ll endeavor to surface a rich variety of texts, along with introductions by a diverse group of sf scholars, sf writers, and others that will situate these remarkable, entertaining, forgotten works within their own social, political, and scientific contexts, while drawing out contemporary parallels.
We hope that reading Radium Age writings, published in times as volatile as our own, will serve to remind us that our own era’s seemingly natural, eternal, and inevitable social, economic, and cultural forms and norms are—like Madame Curie’s atom—forever in flux.
Introduction: The Radical Future of The Clockwork Man
Annalee Newitz
If you don’t stop making war, all the women of Earth will team up with benevolent, naked aliens and implant you with a clock that controls your behavior and sends you into a timeless multiverse. Oh, and also? That timeless multiverse will be full of hat and wig stores.
This is the warning expressed in E. V. Odle’s 1923 novel The Clockwork Man, and the goofiness is intentional. One of Odle’s preoccupations in this story is the way genuinely futuristic ideas seem laughable—until they aren’t.
The Clockwork Man is one of the first cyborg novels ever written, and perhaps Odle was anticipating an audience snorting with derision at his bizarre creation: a human man from the distant future whose skull is implanted with an elaborate, mind-controlling clock mechanism, which he tries to hide with a hat and wig. However, it turned out Odle was not the only writer obsessed with synthetic humans in 1923. Karel Čapek’s robot-uprising play R.U.R. came out that year as well. The play introduced the word “robot” and stole the spotlight from Odle’s arguably more nuanced and weirder tale.
As Odle’
s wife Rose puts it in her memoir, The Salt of Our Youth: “All seemed set for success, but almost concurrently, appeared a far more powerful work—‘The Robots,’ [sic] a play by Karel Čapek, that all London flocked to see; this was a case of Goliath slaying David.”
Though disappointing, it’s not surprising that R.U.R. captured the public’s imagination more than The Clockwork Man did. Čapek takes a more straightforward approach than Odle, creating robots who are obvious stand-ins for abused workers in factories or the colonies. Perhaps the real key to R.U.R.’s success, however, was the conservative bent to its uprising scenario. Though we sympathize with the robots’ plight initially, their bloody revolution leads to the extermination of all humans save one—and without their old bosses to order them around, the robots form an aimless idiocracy with no clue how to reproduce. In the end, the robots are saved from extinction themselves when a male and female robot fall in love and the last living human blesses them as “Adam and Eve.”
So the worker uprising turns out to have been terrible, and the robots are saved from themselves by a biblical form of heterosexuality.
The Clockwork Man suggests a more radical alternative. Though the novel is nominally about a machine-enhanced man from the distant future, it focuses largely on two British couples trying to navigate marriage in the modern world, where gender roles are changing fast. The satirical figure of the Clockwork man stumbles into encounters with these couples, spurring them to think about the future, where women will vote and join the workforce just like men. Unlike R.U.R., which hides behind allegory, The Clockwork Man engages directly with human politics and refuses to give us easy answers.
As the novel unfolds, we learn that the Clockwork man has fallen back into linear time, thousands of years in his past, because his mechanism is broken. He’s stuck in 1923, in our monoverse, and he bears a garbled message from the future to two men whose lives he changes forever. These men, the middle-aged Doctor Allingham and the young dreamer Arthur Withers, respond very differently to the prospect of humanity’s mechanized future. And those responses hinge in part on their view of women.
Odle was writing at a time when women’s rights were an enormously important issue of the day, and female political power loomed as a futuristic threat and promise. This was a personal concern for Odle, who was inspired by feminist creators, and owed his writing career to women. His wife Rose was a teacher and freethinker who often supported him financially. His and Rose’s social circle in Bloomsbury included Virginia Woolf, and Odle’s older brother, an illustrator, was married to the famous bohemian author Dorothy Richardson. Richardson is often credited with writing the first stream-of-consciousness novel in English (Pointed Roofs), and before settling down with Alan Odle she dated H. G. Wells for a couple of years.
In her autobiography, Rose Odle recalls that it was Richardson’s mentor, J. D. Beresford, who helped her husband publish his first novel, The History of Alfred Rudd, the year before The Clockwork Man came out. (Beresford was the author of the proto-sf novels The Hampdenshire Wonder and Goslings, also published as A World of Women.) Through his wife and sister-in-law, Odle was exposed to a world where women dominated the artistic scene.
It’s no surprise, then, that Odle stages political conflict in the arena of marriage and gender relations. Stuffy, old-fashioned Doctor Allingham’s horror at the Clockwork man is paralleled only by his horror at the radical ideas about women’s equality espoused by his fiancée Lilian Payne. Cyborgs and women represent the future, and not just metaphorically. In a fascinating scene toward the end of the novel, Odle explores how Allingham’s conflicts with Lilian, if left unresolved, are the sort of thing that on a large scale could result in a gender apocalypse.
Lilian is considering calling her impending marriage off because she believes Allingham wants a traditional wife who spends all her time doing housework and managing his affairs. She’s also dismayed by his habit of turning everything into a joke—an issue that ties into Odle’s larger point about humor as humankind’s defense mechanism against the future. Allingham reluctantly admits that she has a legitimate point of view, but their conflict is never quite resolved.
While Allingham and Lilian discuss their relationship, the Clockwork man figures out how to fix his broken mechanism. But he remains in our timeline long enough to have a strange conversation with Arthur and his beloved Rose (no doubt named for Odle’s wife, to whom the novel is dedicated). Arthur has been struggling to make enough money to marry Rose, who doesn’t care a fig for conventions that say men should be breadwinners; she’s encouraging him to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. Unlike Allingham, who can barely see his way forward into a future where women are his equals, Arthur already inhabits that future. Encouraged by his fiancée, he’s contemplating shedding the conventional male breadwinner role.
When the Clockwork man encounters Arthur and Rose embracing and whispering about their plans, he decides to tell them why the future is full of posthuman men like himself. Their love has reminded him that his incredible superpowers come at the expense of emotions. With tears running down his face, he explains that the Clockwork men are the creation of “makers,” creatures who came to Earth “after the last wars.” It’s unclear whether these makers are aliens or advanced humans, but we know they don’t wear clothes and are “very clever, and very mild and gentle.” The Clockwork man also describes them as “real,” unlike himself.
Men of the future became so obsessed with war, he tells the open-mouthed Arthur and Rose, that the makers allied with women—also “real,” he notes—and banished men from their world. Men’s destructiveness, and their inability to perceive the realness of women, was their downfall. It’s hard not to hear an echo of Allingham and Lilian’s conflict over gender roles. The cyborg explains that men left the makers no choice but to “shut us up in the clocks,” and give them “the world we wanted,” filled with infinite power and resources but absent of emotion.
Here it becomes clear that the Clockwork man lives mostly in a virtual world, which he calls “the clock,” rather than the “real” world that is apparently still inhabited by women and makers. He’s an analog version of what we would today call an upload, and his world of plenitude is also a prison. In this scenario we see echoes of early feminist science fiction like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 Herland, where women are the only people capable of building a utopia. There are also flares of the anxiety expressed by Henry Adams, who noted in his 1905 book The Education of Henry Adams that women would achieve equality in part by “marrying machinery.”
In addition to being informed by feminism, The Clockwork Man’s narrative arc was influenced by the shadow of World War I and anticolonialist uprisings in Asia and Africa. Odle had worked as the foreman at a munitions factory during the war, and his vision of a battle-mangled future was surely spawned by his experience of those years. Like other perspicacious writers of his generation, Odle saw not only the lure of infinite productivity promised by the age of mechanical reproduction but also the connection between technological innovations and state violence.
The Clockwork man was born a human. But his nervous system, brain, and body have been enhanced with technology. He does not die; he is exceptionally strong; he can sense physical phenomena beyond the capacity of the human mind; and his physical attributes can be changed with the poke of a knob. Ordinarily, he explains, he exists in a multiverse where all his desires are satisfied simply through a kind of conjuring of whatever he wants. (“Where I come from,” he says, “we are all conjurers.”) He’s especially stumped by the way humans are always putting finite objects into finite places. In the multiverse, all objects can be anywhere, anytime.
It seems as though the Clockwork man’s virtual reality is a product of what today’s sf writers would call the Singularity. He’s the product of what Singularitarians call “the intelligence explosion,” when the human mind is enhanced beyond all recognition by merging with computers. Much the way uploaded people do in the fiction of Iain M. Banks, say, or the futurism of Ray Kurzweil, the Clockwork man lives in a virtual world of infinite plenitude. Many of our current sf tropes, then, first began to evolve a century ago. Embedded in the figure of the cyborg, from his very first appearance in literature, are the ideas of a Singularity, virtual worlds, and brain uploads.