The original cyborg novel.
The Clockwork Man - written in 1923 by British author E.V. Odle features a man from the distant future who's a combination human and advanced mechanism run by a clock inserted into the back of his head.
The Clockwork Man - combination philosophical speculation and humorous yarn about what happens when The Clockwork Man's mechanism goes haywire and lands him at a 1920s cricket match in a quaint English village.
With the appearance of The Clockwork Man, those proper Brits sipping their tea have new topics of conversation: the way the Clockwork Man flaps his ears, the Clockwork Man's movements, his actions (he can hit a cricket ball three miles), his mode of speech, all so comic, as if his coming into their world was a huge practical joke. Oh, yes, a comic novel, to be sure, but also, as noted above, a novel of ideas - the following among their number:
OVERCOMING TIME AS THE DESTROYER OF ALL THINGS
"Suppose they have found a way of keeping things going, just as they are? Hasn't the aim of man always been the permanence of his institutions? And wouldn't it be characteristic of man, as we know him to-day, that he should hold on to purely utilitarian things, conveniences? In this age we sacrifice everything to utility. That's because we're getting somewhere in a hurry. Modern life is the last lap in man's race against Time." What would you like to remain the same? In the future Clockwork Man world, your wish could be granted instantly, giving expanded meaning to tradition.
CYBORG IN CYBERSPACE
"One gets a sort of glimmer—of an immense speeding up of the entire organism, and the brain of man developing new senses and powers of apprehension. They would have all sorts of second sights and subsidiary senses. They would feel their way about in a larger universe, creep into all sorts of niches and corners unknown to us, because of their different construction." No doubt about it, The Clockwork Man of the future lives in a different universe - cyberspace makes our conventional world look like a suffocating box.
WORLD WITHOUT DESIRE AND SUFFERING
"The clock, perhaps, was the index of a new and enlarged order of things. Man had altered the very shape of the universe in order to be able to pursue his aims without frustration. That was an old dream of Gregg's. Time and Space were the obstacles to man's aspirations, and therefore he had invented this cunning device, which would adjust his faculties to some mightier rhythm of universal forces. It was a logical step forward in the path of material progress." Throughout the novel, both in ways comical and serious, E.V. Odle addresses what it means to be locked into the limitations of time and space coupled with our ongoing, ever present human desires. Yes, yes, as children we had our long list of the things we wanted. And as we progressed through the stages of life, the list changed but there was always a list, a very long list.
MAGNIFICENT MULTIVERSE
Young Gregg tells an older English doctor; "Priests had evoked the gods from that starry depth, poets had sung of the swinging hemispheres, scientists had traced comets and knew the quality of each solar earth; but still that vast arch spanned all the movements of crawling mankind, and closed him in like a basin placed over a colony of ants." Gregg detects the future humans, as represented by The Clockwork Man, have transcended our human limitations.
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION
Again, as young Gregg explains to the older English Doctor: "And yet, a slight alteration in man's perceptive organs and that wide blue shell might shatter and disclose a thousand new forms, like fantastic cities shaped in the clouds at sunset. Physiologists claimed that the addition of a single lobe to the human brain might mean that man would know the future as well as the past." Turns out, this is an ongoing theme of New Wave SF, specifically in The Game-Players of Titan where Philip K. Dick presents some beings who have the ability to see into the future. What an advantage in playing the odds!
THE ONE AND THE MANY
The Clockwork man voices his understanding: "Now, your world has a certain definite shape. That is what puzzles me so. There is one of everything. One sky, and one floor. Everything is fixed and stable. . . . Now, in my world everything is constantly moving, and there is not one of everything, but always there are a great many of each thing. The universe has no definite shape at all. The sky does not look, like yours does, simply a sort of inverted bowl." Oh, our limited human world where we see so little! That's why our human imagination always will trump our modest human understanding.
WE'RE LIVING IN FLATLAND
As the Clockwork Man explains: "Unless you had a clock you couldn't possibly understand. But I hope I have made it clear that my world is a multiform world. It has a thousand manifestations as compared to one of yours." I hear echoes of Flatland, the satirical novella by the English author Edwin Abbott Abbott, where someone describes a three-dimensional world to those living in a mere two-dimensional world.
SURPRISE REVELATION
And yet with all that I mentioned above, E.V. Odle still has a whopping jolt about the book's future world in store for readers at the end. I highly recommend you take the readerly plunge into this Radium Age classic available as an audio book via audible or online as per this link: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/60374/...
Comments
Post a Comment