E. V. Odle

E. V. Odle (1890-1942) was a British writer of scientific romance, born in Brockley, Kent, who managed a munitions factory during the First World War before becoming the founding editor of the revived Argosy Magazine in 1926, a post he held for a decade. His best-known book, The Clockwork Man (1923), imagines a cyborg from the year 8000 who disrupts an English cricket match, using the encounter to question a society governed by machines and to challenge conventional gender roles; the novel drew on the influence of contemporaries J. D. Beresford and H. G. Wells and is now read as an early landmark of British science fiction. A further novel, Juggernaut, in which a sentient automaton devised by an inventor brings about civilisation's collapse, was published posthumously.