E. V. Odle 2 hr 51 min read

A strange, jerky man in outlandish clothes stumbles onto a village cricket match and performs impossible feats, a being from the far future, part man and part clockwork mechanism.

E. V. Odle's 1923 novel is a landmark of the field, arguably the first cyborg novel. Witty, visionary, remarkably ahead of its time. Read it for a foundational work of SF, a clockwork-augmented man from a far-future world glitching hilariously and profoundly through a placid English village, decades before the word 'cyborg' existed.

In its time

Published in 1923, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

2 hr 51 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).