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RYO Review: The Clockwork Man by E. V. Odle
Technically, E. V. Odle‘s The Clockwork Man (1923) is not on my TBR shelf. However, if it had been in print during the last few years, it would have been. I’ve wanted to read it for several years, and just discovered that it was reissued in September 2013 by HiLoBooks in their Radium Age Science Fiction series (1904-1933). Because HiLoBooks are such good chaps, they are serializing each novel they release on their website. I just finished reading the twenty-installment serial, but I will support HiLoBooks’s fabulous efforts by purchasing the novel as well.
The unnamed Clockwork Man appears at a village cricket match in an England contemporary with the publication date. He is a time-traveler from the far future, but his clockwork mechanism is damaged, and he never meant to land in the 1920s. His coordination and communication skills are not functioning well, but he looks human enough that the people he encounters take him—at first — to be someone escaped from an asylum: “You had to laugh at the odd-looking figure, or else feel cold all over with another kind of sensation. Of course, this man was mad. He was, in spite of his denial, an escaped lunatic.” Yet when he tries to play cricket, he hits the balls three miles away, “spoiling other folks’ sport.”
