L'Ève future

by Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

L'Ève Future (1886) est au roman ce que les "Poésies" de Mallarmé sont à la poésie : le chef-d'oeuvre de l'époque symboliste, l'anti-Zola, l'anti-Goncourt.
Villiers est le plus grand conteur fantastique français. La donnée est fantastique, ou de science-fiction, puisqu'il s'agit de créer une femme artificielle, qui évite les inconvénients des femmes réelles. Ce livre traite de l'amour impossible, pour une femme qui n'existe pas. C'est aussi un roman de la révolte, qui se termine sur le frisson du créateur de l'automate. Edison, face au silence glacé, à "l'inconcevable mystère" des cieux ; un roman proche du mythe de Faust autant que de Jules Verne, par l'anticipation scientifique ; un ouvrage philosophique parce qu'il médite sur l'être et le paraître. Le style est brillant, somptueux, insolite et ironique, comme Mallarmé l'a relevé : il mène "l'ironie jusqu'à une page cime, où l'esprit chancelle."

[Source : Ed. Gallimard]

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, France, Classics, French Literature, 19th Century, Novels

448 pages, Pocket Book

First published January 1, 1886

About the author

Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (7 November 1838 – 19 August 1889) was a French symbolist writer.

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 3 out of 5]

EX MACHINA



A questo libro e al suo autore sono arrivato attraverso altri scrittori che sono stati miei amici e compagni di un’epoca in cui, anche grazie a loro, scoprivo il piacere intenso di leggere: Baudelaire, Huysmans, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Jarry.
Non per nulla la prefazione a questo romanzo è l’elogio funebre dell’amico scrittore che Stéphane Mallarmé pronunciò in sette diverse città.
Ma dopo L’Eva futura a Villiers de l’Isle Adam non sono più tornato.



Se da una parte il fascino emerge facilmente dal nucleo della trama, la costruzione di un automa, o meglio, di un androide, come romanzo risulta soprattutto voler dimostrare una tesi filosofica che utilizzare regole classiche, non solo del genere fantascientifico, tipo ritmo attesa eccetera.
Per cui la piacevolezza del mio ricordo è legata soprattutto al momento in cui lo lessi, a quell’epoca, alla compagnia degli autori garanti e sponsor di Villiers de l’Isle Adam che alla qualità e piacevolezza del libro in sé.



E certo da allora l’argomento è diventato perfino un cliché.
Ci sarebbe da ragionare su come mai per la maggior parte delle volte è uno scienziato uomo a voler costruire una macchina donna che migliori l’originale. Come se le donne fossero sempre contente degli uomini che hanno al fianco…
Come se le donne non sapessero inventare…



E quindi in queste pagine si racconta di Lord Ewald che è innamorato di una donna molto bella ma poco intelligente, per non dire proprio mediocre. Lo scienziato Thomas Alva Edison, che è proprio l’inventore Edison passato alla storia per la lampadina e il fonografo, e che quando uscì il romanzo era ancora vivo, grato a Lord Ewald per averlo finanziato nel passato, progetta e costruisce un android, e cioè una macchina con le fattezze della splendida amata dal lord, la quale macchina è anche dotata di intelligenza.
Intelligenza umana? Il romanzo genera dubbi perché l’impressione è che Villiers de l’Isle Adam parteggi per le macchine a scapito degli umani.
Questa creazione meccanica, questa Eva futura, riceve il nome di Hadaly, e rappresenta la perfezione.

Rappresenta davvero la perfezione? La domanda appare un po’ ingenua. Ma se si pensa che il romanzo uscì nel 1886, forse l’ingenuità scema.

[Bbrown · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tomorrow’s Eve is an almost impressively bad book. You shouldn’t read it, so here is a summary of the entire book so that you don’t have to:

Thomas Edison: I’m a great inventor, the public doesn’t know a tenth of my inventions or discoveries. Oh, here is my friend who supported me when I was in poverty, why do you look so poorly Lord Ewald?
Ewald: I’m in love with a woman named Alicia who’s really hot, but a complete bitch. At first I thought she was just pretending to be a complete bitch, but then I realized she really is a complete bitch.
Edison: Why don’t you break up with her then?
Ewald: You don’t get it, she’s really, really hot. Also people in my family only fall in love once.
Edison: Are you sure she has no redeeming personality traits?
Ewald: Yeah. She doesn’t like the mountains or Wagner, and she’s not that interested in art. Like I said, complete bitch. Anyway, just dropped in to say goodbye and now I’m going to go kill myself.
Edison: You’ve convinced me, friend, to do something I’ve been planning on for a while now: I’m going to build you a sexbot that looks just like the woman you’re in love with.
Ewald: Won’t that be super weird?
Edison: No, trust me, “[s]he will be a thousand times more identical to herself…than she is in her own person,” whatever that means. The sexbot will function through electricity and [scientific gobbledygook].
Ewald: Well, okay then.
Edison: Great, I’ll send for the woman. Now let’s go to my secret chamber deep underground, filled with robot birds and artificial flowers, where I keep my prototype sexbot.
Ewald: What motivated you to create a prototype sexbot?
Edison: I had a friend, just the best guy, who cheated on his loving wife a bunch of times, lost the money of a bunch of people that invested with him, then killed himself. I tracked down the slut that seduced him and ruined his life and, just as I suspected, she was actually ugly but wore a lot of makeup. That’s when I designed this sexbot. If we open it up, we can see it operates by [more scientific gobbledygook]. In the end the sexbot will look identical to Alicia, we’ll even knock out Alicia with a drug of my own design so that a dentist can make a copy of her teeth. Oh, she’s arrived! Let’s go back up.
Alicia: Hello Ewald, who is this guy?
Edison: I’m Thomas Edison.
Alicia: Am I supposed to know who that is?
Edison: I’m a music and theater producer that can make you famous.
Alicia: Absolutely delighted to meet you!
Edison: I’ll give you a stage debut, but we’ll need to make a statue of you first.
Alicia: If you say so.
Edison: Great. Just to be sure you’ll cooperate, I’ve also hypnotized you.
Over the course of three weeks, while keeping Alicia hypnotized, Edison builds the sexbot.
Ewald: Is it ready, Edison?
Sexbot: Speak to me first Ewald. I’m going to behave completely differently than Alicia, but we look enough alike that I’ve successfully tricked you into thinking I’m her. But I’m not!
Ewald: Damn you for tricking me, Edison, I’ll kill you! Wait, no I won’t, this sexbot is amazing!
Sexbot: Blah blah blah incoherent rambling about the infinite. Don’t listen to reason, I’m real!
Ewald: You’re not real!
Sexbot: Oh, cruel rejection, I’m leaving.
Ewald: Wait, don’t go, I accept you now!
Edison: So you’ll take it? Great, let me just box it up for you. Oh, quick FYI, this sexbot has been imbued with the (vengeful?) spirit of the ex-wife of the friend who killed himself I mentioned earlier. So have fun with that.
On the way back to Europe Ewald’s ship catches fire and the sexbot is lost, and Ewald probably kills himself.

That’s all the action that happens in this book, but the text is stretched to well over two hundred pages through some of the worst writing you can imagine. This isn’t actually a novel, but rather a closet drama, with characters constantly monologuing for pages at a time. These monologues are oftentimes packed full of nonsensical jargon, as l'Isle-Adam knew nothing of science but still wrote a book with Thomas Edison as a main character. It’s obvious that the entirety of this book originated from l'Isle-Adam having heard that Thomas Edison’s nickname was “the Wizard of Menlo Park” and deciding, based on that nickname, to write a story where Edison is essentially an actual wizard, capable of doing anything. As such, l'Isle-Adam has Edison go on for pages and pages about how the sexbot moves using quicksilver, electricity, and magnets, despite l'Isle-Adam having no idea what he’s talking about. Even when Edison isn’t rambling, some other character is, and no semblance of narrative momentum survives the morass of these constant overlong monologues.

Even if the writing style wasn’t so terrible, the content still would be. You may think I’m exaggerating in my summary about how bad the views expressed in this book are, but I’m really not, at most I’m paraphrasing sentiments that are even worse. Here’s an actual line in the book: “word began to circulate that Edison had sent in haste for the excellent Doctor Samuelson, D.D.S., and the famous W. Pejor, the preferred dentist of American high society, a practitioner famous alike for the delicacy and solidity of his bridgework, and for an innocent tendency to rape his patients.” Is the line meant as a joke? If so, it’s not funny in the slightest, and made worse be the fact that, at the time of the line, Edison has already announced his plan to drug Alicia and leave her unconscious with the dentist in order to produce the sexbot’s teeth. There’s also an entire monologue about how loose women are closer to animals than people, so men can do with them what they want. The whole damn book is just packed with disgusting ideas, outdated and offensive even at the time the book was written. In case the summary didn’t communicate it, the characters do nothing to redeem the story, as they are all completely one-dimensional and not at all sympathetic.

Credit where credit is due, the early pages of Tomorrow’s Eve do express some interesting thoughts about the invention of the phonograph. The ability to record sound has been around for so long that we consider it commonplace, and there are none alive who can remember what it was like before the technology existed, but when the technology was first introduced it was seen as miraculous and magical. Tomorrow’s Eve captures a bit of that sentiment, which I appreciated, but this small virtue does little to redeem the work as a whole.

I often like old examples of science fiction, as they tend to tackle topics in ways that are surprisingly fresh given the age of the works. This is not the case with Tomorrow’s Eve. It’s unoriginal, exploring a science fiction topic covered earlier and more interestingly by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. It’s terribly written and not at all enjoyable to read, speeches stretching out what should have been a novella into a 250-page slog. It’s not predictive of the future at all, l'Isle-Adam essentially having all of Edison’s inventions either be magic or be improved versions of some piece of technology that existed contemporaneously. It’s frankly offensive in both the action it depicts and the sentiments it expresses. It somehow manages to get worse and worse as it goes on. It’s certainly the worst book I’ve read this year, and very likely the worst book I’ve read in the last three years or more. Even its cover is nonsensical and terrible. It should never have been translated to English, but should have been allowed to remain in obscurity until it was eventually forgotten completely and lost to the sands of time forever. I recommend it to no one, and give it the lowest possible rating.

[Rowena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, I never knew the word “android” was in existence in the 19th Century! This may be the oldest sci-fi novel I’ve read and one of the most fascinating. It starts off with us being introduced to a fictionalized Thomas Edison, a kind of mad scientist, and his interesting thoughts on how things would have been different had the human race had the means to record sound earlier on in its history.

“Even among the noises of the past, how many mysterious sounds were known to our predecessors, which for lack of a convenient machine to record them have now fallen forever into the abyss? Dead voices, lost voices, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss, and now too distant ever to be recaptured!”

Edison also laments the fact that we don’t have photographs of Cleopatra, Rachel, Queen of Sheba, Helen of Troy, etc.

“Isn’t it exasperating to think of all the pictures, portraits, scenes, and landscapes that it [photography] could have recorded once, and which are now lost to us?”

The Deluge, The Seven Plagues of Egypt, The Furies, the Head of Medusa are examples of subjects Edison would have liked to see photographed. There’s no distinction between myth and reality in his mind, obviously!

After his musings, things get interesting when his friend Lord Ewald falls in love with a plain and vapid girl, whom he recognizes is “a sphinx without an enigma”, and has decided to end his life. Edison decides to make an android version of his fiancée for him, an ideal woman, using as the prototype, Hadaly, a similarly plain woman who caused his friend to kill himself. What follows is a deep philosophical journey into the role of God in creation, the parts of a woman, and the soul.

The book lost a point for its blatant misogyny, there is lots of it:

“Yes, that’s what these women are: trifling playthings for the passing gadabout, but deadly to men of more depth, whom they blind, befoul, and bind into slavery through the slow hysteria that distills from them.”

But all in all, a very well-written book, one that made the think.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thomas Edison, The Wizard Of Menlo Park, builds a robot woman (Hadaly) for a rich man who's in love with a woman's body but not her base soul (she's a vulgar, uncouth actress).

There's so much here it's almost impossible to talk about. It took me a while to read because it's certainly not written as a plotted novel, more as one event, a bunch of explanations, another event and a coda. Also, it has one of those section you get in 19th century novels, like the bit in Moby-Dick or, The Whale where Melville just lists every whale known to man, where much detail is gone into for little effect - in the case of THE FUTURE EVE this is in service of trying to realistically, scientifically explain how an android could do things like walk, talk, etc. Villers de l'Isle-Adam obviously wanted his book to not *just* be a symbolist cogitation on women and men and what it means to be human, he really wanted to sell the idea that such a thing could (or would) be possible, so he spends a lot of time going into minute detail about valves and magnets and quicksilver balances. Unfortunately, that effect is undone because he has to, still, resort to metaphysical handwaving to explain how Hadaly has something like a soul.

The Introduction in the version of this published in The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France, "Science Fictions" by Asti Hustvedt, is excellent, placing the book in historical context, specifically in regards to gender issues of the times and Charcot's work with "hysterical" women at the Salpetriere. It's fascinating how so much effort was put into "scientifically diagnosing" the "condition" of being a woman, how it was a malady to be studied, exhibited and ultimately, controlled. Amazing, bizarre, disturbing stuff! The way in which Villers de l'Isle-Adam extrapolates this material into the attempt to make a robot woman (who will be better - that is to say, more controllable - than the real thing) is also fascinating. I imagine Villers del'Isle-Adam may not fully deserve the tag of misogynist, as there seems to be a satirical undercurrent to much of the book (Edison's tale of why he decided to design a blank-slate android Hadaly, tied to a friend's marriage ruined by a notorious actress, is some kind of fascinating exercise in misogynist justification). I particularly find it fascinating that Edison offers the imprinting of Hadaly to Lord Ewald as a way that science can solve his problem (without which the latter plans to kill himself) and yet after going over all the details, Ewald is still somewhat unsure and asks Edison what *he* would do if offered such a gift/responsibility, to which Edison replies "blow my brains out."

The portrayal of Edison is pretty interesting as well - he is literally a magician of science with almost any power at his command, a giant sanctum sanctorum stuffed with "technology" where voices come from the air, a secret grotto below his lab where Hadaly resides - it's really bizarre but interesting stuff.

What a fascinating book!

[magali she|her]

okay also

- Frauen = femmes fatales
➡ verühren alle Männer und verleiten diese dann früher oder später 1) in den Ruin und/oder 2) zum Selbstmord
➡ macht Allusion (irgendwo) an Adam und Eva und wie Eva Adam verführt hat den Apfel zu essen
➡ Inspiration von Goethe's Faust
- es ist egal, ob Frauen hübsch oder hässlich sind, sie verführen Männer und das ist 🙅‍♀️ nicht gut
➡ was macht man also? Genau, man baut eine ideale, perfekte Robotertante, die zukünftige tolle Eva, die der Mann (Mensch? ✨) kontrollieren kann... dabei werden einfach die originalen Objekte repliziert (von den Augen, zur Haut, zu den Zähnen, einfach bah . Die sind dann natürlich wie gesagt ~ perfekt ~
- quite misogynistic if u ask me 👀
- Edison: "Schau, wie schlau ich bin haha !! Schau, wie groß und krass mein Gehirn ist haha !!"
➡ basically die Arroganz der Männer nochmal ordentlich unterstreichen
- der gute Lord Ewald will nicht mehr leben, weil er verliebt ist ... ooooooookaaaayyy, and they say women are dramatic.
- das Buch war einfach nur weird
- bro idk don't read this shit, hatte bestimmt noch andere Gedanken aber obviously keine Leseempfehlung, da hilft auch die ✨gehobene Sprache✨ (besteht eigentlich nur aus Hauptsatz & 94651654 Nebensätzen/Einschüben) nichts mehr..

[Corianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to admit, that I would not have read this book were it not assigned to me in a literature class. That being said, "Tomorrow's Eve" is one of the best books I've read this year.

In a way, it is a very post-modern book, it doesn't have much in the way of plot or action. What it does have, however, is a deep sense of philosophy, questioning what it is to be human, the nature of technology and the role of God.

This book is over one hundred years old, and to the modern reader, the technology as described by Edison is laughably unrealistic, but the questions it raises are timeless. I bought this book as a textbook, planning to sell it back at the end of the semester, instead, I think, it has found a permanent home in my library.

[Ell · Rating 3 out of 5]

En av de första berättelserna om att bygga androider!

Lätt att avfärda som "snubbe blir kär i en tjej som är supersnygg men jättetråkig, vill därför ta livet av sig, hans polare Thomas Edison(löst baserad på den verklige uppfinnaren) säger: 'Nej, vänta, låt mig istället bygga en android som ser precis ut som din älskade! Men med bättre personlighet!" Vilken bror, denne Edison!

Men förstås står mycket mer på spel. Den 'tråkiga' Alicia representerar den moderna, kapitalistiska, avmystifierade borgerliga tillvaron. Och Hadaly, androiden, är trots sitt mekaniska inre en representant för det mystiska, romantiska och sublima. Men detta räddar inte den mycket negativa kvinno- och kärlekssynen som genomsyrar boken. Den verkliga kvinnan (och kärleken!) är här en tillgjordhet, medan den högsta kärleken bara kan nås genom Hadaly, genom en idealbild som fylls med innehåll av den manliga poeten. Den ideala kvinnan existerar bara när hon enbart är en drömbild.

Kul dock att boken plötsligt tar en ockult vändning, och börjar beskriva klärvojans, telepati och hypnos samt elektricitetens förhållande till andliga energier. Edison menar att han övat upp magiska krafter så att han kan "extert enough nervous energy to dominate another person almost completely"! Wow!!

Det slutar med att roboten och dess glade ägare ska åka båt till hans avskilda familjeslott, med Hadaly stämningsfullt dold i en kista. Tyvärr brinner båten upp och sjunker, och Hadaly med den. Detta påminner mig om slutet på första säsongen av Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, där vampyren Dio Brando går ett liknande öde till mötes. Jag hade önskat att romanen fortsatt som nämnda anime, med att några stackars fiskare drar upp Hadalys/Dios huvud, som är hungrigt och hämndlystet...

[Kamakana · Rating 3 out of 5]

021013: interesting view/conceptualization of essential female qualities of the era, and the man Edison as creator of this original sexualized android, unifying varied tech of the age eg. recording devices, photography, gives birth, awareness, feminine resistance, feminine anti-intellect: author as spiritualist, saw the romantic (as vs scientific) possibilities of modern technology, but this is implicit in a story very much told rather than acted out...

[Briana Grenert · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book hurt.
But at least we've made progress, right?

[Dante Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listen. This book is horrifically misogynistic. That part is devastatingly awful. But the writing, and some of the moments towards the end.... Damn.

[Rinstinkt]

Sex dolls/robots before we even knew they were possible.

[Elida Marie Gravklev · Rating 1 out of 5]

Endelig ferdig!!! Jeg er veldig glad for å ha lest den, men den var kjedelig, jeg synes den var dårlig skrevet og den var gjennomsyret av misogyni. De forsøker å lage en robot-dukke for å erstatte den "vakreste kvinnen i verden" som tydeligvis er en replika av venus fra milo bare med armer. Grunnen til at kvinnen må erstattes er at hun har hatt sex utenfor ekteskap, og hun skammer seg ikke en gang over det... boka er altså skrevet i en annen tid. Her er noen morsomme sitater (morsomme fordi de er SYKT misogyne):

"A woman who's lost all her stupidity, can she be anything but a monster?"

"Wouldn't you agree that a collected, believing, modest and slightly stupid woman, who with all her marvelous instinct divines the sense of a phrase as if through a veil of light, is a supreme treasure and a true companion, to exactly the same extent that the other woman is an anti-social scourge?"

"Her kiss rouses me to nothing but thoughts of suicide."

"Well, then, farewell to that so-called Reality, slut that she was from the start!"

"Name me two women who were friends, in all the course of human history. The thing is impossible. Why? Because each woman know her own mental emptiness too well ever to be the dupe of another."

Det kunne vært skikkelig kult å se denne boken bli filmatisert av en feminist. Det var noe jeg tenkte på mens jeg leste den.

[Espelunco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Discursiva, machista, digresiva. Un paseo por las fantasías masculinas acerca de la mujer. No diría que es entretenida, pero una vez dispuesto a aburrirse algo sale de ese aburrimiento que tiene algún sentido como experiencia. La figura de Edison es entretenida: el científico loco de Frankenstein es ahora un científico loco-empresario exitoso-experto en los sentimientos masculinos sobre las mujeres. Una curiosidad que vale la pena leer como eso, una curiosidad. No es poca cosa, creo.

[Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started reading this because I recently heard an interview on CBC about sex-robots being manufactured in Japan. In Villiers d'Lisle-Adam's novel, Thomas Edison has perfected exactly that (this was written in 1880, I believe). This is a novel about defying nature and the pursuit of perfection. And it is beautifully written: the story is engaging on every level; the characters utterly believable; the psychological drama perfectly presented (in my view) and the dialogue - even in the translation I am reading - real and perfectly logical. I have the edition in French, as well, and will look at the translation in the future.
My take on our modern age - today 2017 - I believe, exactly mirrors the fin de siecle in Europe - especially France - where the Decadent movement in Literature found its perfect flowering. All of the artistic conceits, political upheavals, and social controversies that played out between 1860 and into the turn of the century (1900 - 1920) are, in my opinion, at the root of our own social/political discords today. I won't go into the complexities of the comparisons I have discovered, but by golly, they are almost exactly the same (robot technology and the social consequences being explored being just one; the poetry of Beaudelaire and the current explosion of narcissism on Social Media is another subject worthy of comparison).
Anyway - this is a great read. Highly recommended if you are interested in our current fascination with social media and the expression of decadence within it.

[Scribh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite its absurd and disturbing misogyny advocating science as a means to establish control over women and femininity (in the same vein as "The Birthmark"), this book is far-seeing in anticipating the modern-day robot, sex-bot, blow-up dolls, cyborg, etc. The "Android" of Tomorrow's Eve is closer now than ever before, with all of its interesting moral complexities still very relevant (see the film Ex Machina (2015), for a similar scenario). Hopefully, if humans ever design robots that are physically indiscernible from themselves, these machines won't speak in melodramatic Victorian parlance like the dream-girl/robot Hadaly.

[alexandria · Rating 1 out of 5]

also read this for class. HATED IT! wrote a 15 page paper on how misogynistic it was and got a 97 so slay. basically just about how a man said he was suicidal bc his wife he picked solely on her looks was “too boring” for him so he had a friend hand make him a robotic android look alike to his wife tailor made to fit and submit to his every want, desire, and need. the villainization of women in this book was mental

[Daniel · Rating 1 out of 5]

if only it was good as the last 30 pages or so , author really has a problem with women (among other things)

[Matthew Dykkor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book "not of this world". You must be already dead in order to love this book and to love anything Villiers de l'isle Adam wrote.

[A · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh wow we finished it!
(Jeff Bridges's tone:) End of line man!

While reading the first hundred pages, I talked to a cool book-reader lady about how much I dislike this book because of the misogynistic characters. She said: "By reading the books of that era of how casual misogyny was and how women could only do what was expected of them, like being the servant of the husband, you see what kind of motive men had to create a robot."

Her words struck me. I decided to keep on reading and reminded myself that:
1) Humans are accustomed to their evolution. Anything else is uncomfortable to them.
2) Society moves much slower than technology. Up to this very moment of 2024, our world is still patriarchal and misogynistic.

The story pace was awfully slow. It dragged me like a prisoner whose ankle was tied to the ankle of a camel in a desert. The camel didn't walk much and the heat got worse every minute.
I know I had been waiting for the sci-fi parts but when the story did reach them in Book 4, they were horribly long and disinteresting. Just like how water is merely a mirage in the desert.
I don't think I have ever skipped such long explanations in a book. The Edison guy couldn't shut up.

I know, I know, I bought the book because of the first use of the word "android", but more importantly, Edison's and that English guy's motive hasn't changed in 138 years. Their dream is finally coming true in 2024. They would have cried in joy seeing sex robots; One of the many reasons why "Incel becoming scientist" is the extreme danger and produces Viktor Frankenstein from Frankenstein. Beware!

And so, 4 minutes of silence for Mrs. Anderson, Hadaly, Alicia and Evelyn.

P.S.: The university of Illinois printed this book on acid-free papers, which is a shame! The papers are awesome and I could draw stuff on them happily if most of them were empty!!!! (Wtf with this cover image?!)

[Temucano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Exigente novela de vocabulario sofisticado y ensoñaciones surrealistas, por lo que se debe estar cien por cien concentrado para poder seguir el hilo y tornar la lectura gratificante, sobre todo en el proceso de la creación de la androide. Esta concepción es algo único, desde las fuerzas creadoras involucradas hasta el resultado, la mítica Andreida, sublime autómata femenina que enamoraría a cualquiera.

Tiene ciertas asperezas mal envejecidas por lo que siempre es bueno recordar el año cuando fue escrita (1886), sino el machismo claramente puede atragantar.

Hubo un tiempo que quería una Andreida sólo para mí.

21.10.2004

[Alina · Rating 2 out of 5]

This would have received three or maybe even four stars, if not for the misogyny, racism, and ableism in the book. The misogyny is the worst I've ever encountered in literature! The philosophical themes and inter-textual references were, however, quite interesting, so I won't give the novel 1 star.

Does this book have merit? Undoubtedly, yes. It is one of the first works of science fiction ever published. In our age of AI, the subject matter (androids) has wide-appeal. The prose isn't too bad either. But misogyny is not simply a feature; it is the heart and soul of the work.

[Jose Camps · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es un libro corto, pero duro de leer. Eso sí, siempre es interesante el retrofuturismo.

[FrankyReadsBooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at I don't even know.

This book was terribly boring and I couldn't bother picking it back up after my Gender Studies class ended.

[Il lettore sul trespolo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro molto bello quanto complicato.
Mi è piaciuto come trattato sull'impossibilità dell'artificiale di superare il naturale, ma sicuramente è un libro denso di messaggi e di prosa molto colta.
4 stelle.

[Guillaume · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5
L'histoire en sah pas mauvaise mais par contre j'ai jamais lu un livre aussi imbuvable.
PS : élu oeuvre la plus misogyne félicitations ! Même en big XIXe je suis pas sur c'était légal.

[Megan Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Misogynist and racist like any book by a male author in this time but really interesting way of seeing how they viewed technology back in the 19th century. What is perfection? Can we achieve perfection using technology? Science vs religion vs modernity.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tomorrow's Eve is a French novel, first published in 1886. It is, equally, a hard science-fiction philosophical page-turner -- the story of how Thomas Edison invents a robot girlfriend for an Englishman to whom he owes a favor. The conjunction of the novel's age, Frenchness, and subject matter may seem astonishing, and it is; yet their synthesis, as it turns out, makes for a plot that is contemplative yet riveting, peopled by characters who are exaggerated yet nuanced.

At heart, Tomorrow's Eve is concerned with exploring human nature, and in particular the nature of love, the soul, and (since this is a French novel) women. Author Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam is an unrepentant cynic on these themes, and his pessimism percolates into his Edison; Edison's excitement about his robotic creation derives from his conviction that a guileless machine is actually an improvement on certain humans. Some women, he argues, are walking pharmacies, treated with so many chemicals that the admirer falls in love with a facade; then why not fall in love with a robot, who is equally artificial and less duplicitous? Villiers, a devout Catholic, seems to regard his fictional Edison's work as sacrilege, but keeps his religious undertones subtle and allows the reader to form his own judgments.

And there is plenty to judge! Villiers doesn't neglect characterization; everyone brims with personality, from the darkly intense Edison to his noble but desperate English friend to his tragic creation Hadaly. Despite a superficial resemblance to the earlier character, Edison is no clichéd Dr. Frankenstein takeoff. But don't take it from me, take it from Villiers:

"Drops of sweat stood like tears on the brow of Lord Ewald; he looked upon the features, now glacial in their austerity, of Edison. He felt that beneath this strident, scientific demonstration two things were hidden in the lecturer's infinite range of severely controlled secret thoughts.

The first was love of Humanity.

The second was one of the most violent shrieks of despair -- the coldest, the most intense, the most far-reaching, even to the Heavens, perhaps! -- that was ever emitted by a living being." (p.143)

Perhaps most astonishing is the way Villiers integrates his philosophy and characters with his science-fiction; Tomorrow's Eve is possibly the most detailed sci-fi novel ever written up to its time. The operation of Edison's "Android" -- a term this novel is credited with popularizing -- is described in loving, even prurient, detail. Edison's frequent and lengthy exposition is both ingenious and diabolical; it is also the weakest aspect of the novel. I don't feel like knowing how Hadaly keeps her balance really helps me interpret the story. But then, I'm not a hard science-fiction fan. Tomorrow's Eve may be Jules Verne in diction, but it is Robert Heinlein in detail.

All in all, Tomorrow's Eve is a great read -- not life-changing, at least for me, but frank and thought-provoking. I suspect I'll find myself pulling it from my bookshelf occasionally to look up an especially incisive quote, but I probably won't reread it in its entirety.

[Dfordoom · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the more interesting of 19th century writers is Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. His work blends elements of Romanticism, the gothic and the decadent, and what the French call the fantastique. Some of them would also fit into category of weird fiction. The one thing he had no patience with was realism. So far I’ve only managed to track down a handful of his stories, but they’ve absolutely captivated me. His 1886 novella The Future Eve is included in an anthology called The Frankenstein Omnibus, and what a strange little tale it is. As its inclusion in such an anthology would suggest it’s about the creation of artificial life. In this case it’s an artificial woman, created by a mysterious combination of science and mysticism. A brilliant scientist builds an android (he actually calls her an andraiad). She has intelligence and a personality of sorts, and in fact she has a soul, but her body is just a metal shell. The scientist happens to have a friend, and the friend is in love with a woman possessed of extraordinary beauty, but a sadly commonplace soul. So why not combine the noble soul of the metal woman with the superb body and face of his young friend’s mistress? So far it may sound like a fairly typical mad scientist gothic tale, but it isn’t. It’s much stranger, and much more metaphysical, with all kinds of speculations about the nature of reality, about dreams and life, what it means to be human, and suchlike matters.

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, Tomorrow's Eve is certainly something. Yes, that banality, but here...

We've got the totally interesting premise of an "Edison-like" (seriously, back cover, just give in, it's the Magician of Menlo Park) inventor who creates an Android to save his friend's life by giving his friend someone new to love. Who isn't, you know, a human female, and thus beautiful but crass, common, and totally superficial. Re: Swift. And wait, this is totally aristocratic fantasy, read for class and there's not too much that isn't some form of (attempted) gratification of upper-class desire. And then go back, yes, "Tomorrow's Eve", the conceit of playing God, hell, let's get Edison to claim that he IS a God to this Android, and she subsequently pleads with her God, the aristocrat.

To be fair, this is the first use of the term Android.

To be fair, this novel seems to want to move past its sexism and aristocratic bias, sometimes. But it's also really, really, really sexist. And the final twist, the real deux ex machina, well, that's just the cap.

Biography check: a penniless, hopelessly aspirant French aristocratic scion, the end of the 19th century, strongly conservative, and strongly Christian. It all, sort of, makes sense. Which makes the motions toward moving beyond the class-based fantasy and sexism that much more intriguing...

Read it for yourself. You'll do better than this hackneyed 'review'.

[Marsh "Bad Sci Fi" Bloom · Rating 3 out of 5]

This review includes excerpts and a basic summary that is established early in the book, but avoids any spoilers of the ending. And if you need a reason to hang on reading the book, there is some excitement at the end to try and reward you for making it that far. (TW: s__icide ideation)

I needed context for Edison's Conquest of Mars, so I went to my local university library for a translation into English of what might be the most well-known Edisonade: Tomorrow's Eve by Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste, Count Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. It was published earlier than Conquest, in 1886, and begun in 1878. Villiers was a Frenchman, a noble-born whose father squandered the family fortune on scams and died deluded that he'd made a fortune instead of losing it all. He left his son a pauper who turned into a kind of writer vagabond.

For those interested in what the contemporary attitudes toward Edisonades was, Villiers introduces his collected work starring Thomas Edison thusly:

"Let it be understood, then, that I interpret a modern legend to the best advantage of the work of Art-metaphysics that I have conceived, and that, in a word, the hero of this book is above all "The Sorcerer of Menlo Park." and so forth and not the engineer, Mr. Edison, our contemporary"

"Eve" is a far more cerebral read than "Conquest". The entire book takes place in Edison's Lab in Menlo Park, as well as below it in a cavern a bit too much like that owned by the Count of Monte Cristo. Like Conquest it manages some sci-fi firsts and technical foresight such as flash photography, and the first use of androids in the modern sense of them.


The second major character is Lord Ewald, a lovestruck, red pill seeker who chooses the blue pill in the end, sort of. He is an Englishman visiting Edison because he has fallen in love with a woman of the stage whom he deems spiritually vapid, a hollow insult to her physical form, which all of the Tex Avery wolves agree rivals Venus. Hence he wants to off himself rather than love her and will do so that night unless Edison can help him out.

Edison's cure for this is to take his existing generic android companion and painstakingly recreate Ewald's love as an Android. Either Ewald will realize the folly of falling in love with a machine and be cured or he will fall for the Android and live happily with her forever. Edison proceeds to lure Ewald's love to his lab so she can be copied down to the last eyelash by a vast team of experts, sculptors (a female sculptor with some interesting skills, actually), jewelers and a dentist, and get her to record hours of intellectual conversation onto cylinders to be mounted in the Android.


I will give the book credit for dedicating many many pages to how it might work to pretend-converse with such a machine and what the meaning of meaning really is anyway given we are all a bunch of narcissists who only want to hear ourselves talk and have our ideas reflected back to us by others, anyway. (Probably the unstated theme of the book.)

I searched the Edison Letters site, and the "Ewald" I found there was Edison's realtor in Florida. The banality of that is just *chef's kiss*.

In terms of the book as Sci/Fi... unlike Conquest, Tomorrow's Eve is eager to explain to the reader how EVERYTHING works. For example, On Android Walking:

"...
In a state of rest, the upper part of these two shafts surmounts the height of the femur by about two millimeters, which produces a separation of the two little golden discs from the necks of their respective femurs.

The dimension of their diameters marked B -which corresponds to dimension A of the Android's inner hip joint is joined by a concave track of stainless steel, along which moves freely a crystal spheroid which is chiefly responsible for the action of walking. This globe weighs about eight pounds, because its center is filled with quicksilver. At the least motion made by the Android it slides along the track from one to the other of these two golden discs.

Consider now, at the top of each leg, this little steel rod, hinged at the center, its two halves, opening below, play freely about a steel axle or hub. One end is solidly fastened to the dorsal interior of the plastic me-diator-that is, above the zone of flexibility-_the other to the anterior limit of each leg.
..."

This incredible engineering detail goes on for 3 and a half pages, interrupted only by reassurances that other things that are cropping up will also be explained as soon as Edison gets the chance. The Author can't wait to tell us the length of every rod in this android.

In between the slim bits of action, the two characters vomit long verbal manifestos about love, the uselessness of the human condition as seen by an extremely biased someone living outside human society, and how helpless men are to avoid being destroyed by superficial women, therefore it is always the woman's fault.


Edison, in fact, has been working on the perfect female android so he can market it to prevent the tens of thousands of men brought to destruction each year because they threw away their lives for those empty beautiful women (who were probably wearing heavy makeup, padding, and whalebone and weren't really created beautiful by God anyway so the whole setup smacks of evil on top of it).


Most amazing thing about the book is how little diatribes of this redpill sort have changed in the intervening 120+ years. Including that the entire book is a response to Villiers getting told to bug off by a beautiful woman of entertainment that he fell for. Rather than accept that these things happen and no one has to like you, he pens a forward looking InCel/MGTOW screed against all of womankind who don't simply exist to serve men or God (those women, of course, harrumph harrumph are just fine). Villiers accomplishes this while homeless and squatting in a half-finished house.

It's quite a ride, nevetheless. Just likely not the one the author set out to write. More, like, oh this again, surrounded by some interesting incites only a full on anti-social, highly educated homeless man from the 1800s could put on paper.