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The Clockwork Man is quite a remarkable little novel: steampunk before steampunk was cool; one of the first appearances of a cyborg in science fiction literature; and a delicate commentary on modern humanity and its great enemy, time.

The novel opens with the farcical setup of the Clockwork Man's abrupt appearance at an early-twentieth-century afternoon cricket match in the countryside, which he ultimately joins and wrecks. The novel soon changes tone, however, and views the threat and promise of the Clockwork Man from several perspectives, including that of a middle-aged doctor who has grown settled in his opinions and middling life and shame at his own lack of originality, and a young man who strains against convention and the predicament of his youth.

Along the way, the story challenges modern assumptions about efficiency, the tyranny of fast-paced life (and small-town opinion), and the value of free will.

E.V. Odle was the editor who founded Argosy, and some have claimed Odle was a pseudonym used by Virginia Woolf. This was his first and only published novel, and it is a gem of early science fiction.