The Future Eve

by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Ron Miller (Editor)

Now with an Historical Afterword by Ron Miller Includes the original illustrations
Featured in Ron Miller’s “The Conquest of Space Book Series.” Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's classic novel of the creation of an artificial woman is one of the earliest science-based descriptions of a robot in SF literature. This edition is based on the 1926 adaptation by Florence Crewe-Jones.

At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

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

146 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1886

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...

[Alice Rovani · Rating 5 out of 5]

naissance hautaine de la science-fiction oh ces entrelacs de jargons obscurs (ce doit aussi être ma reliure toute de velours cramoisi qui en rend confortables les épines + à court de papier griffonner les citations sur des mouchoirs à la dérobade un certain air de misanthrope barbouilleur)
(« son baiser n’éveille en moi que le goût du suicide »)

[ethel — · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) Assez impressionnant d'actualité sur le réel et l'artificiel, et c'est très troublant qu'on nous conduise à préférer l'Andréide à son modèle humain...
Lord Ewald je relate beaucoup à tes problèmes personnels help

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

End-of-Year “Loose Ends Bother Me” Microreview — Three Sentences or Less:

Perhaps the fin-de-siècle novel—or every bit as much as anything by my beloved Huysmans—The Future Eve is to speculative science what Huysmans is to Catholicism: motherfucker is here to testify to the probity of his subject matter. Whereas my Joris-Karl (there are many Jori) wanted to take you higher with the prodigious girth and depth of his ecclesiastical cucumber—maybe weigh its properties in hand—the Comte de l’Isle’s got a cyclopean insistence that this newfangled invention—Science!—will roll away the stone from the analogical tomb impeding Man’s ascension into immortality’s ether. Day’s end, he forgot the one bugaboo Huysmans never did: how to write an actual, y’know, novel—rather than an instruction manual for the world’s first Real Doll.

[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.

[Archie Hamerton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dire. Spent the whole time saying to myself ‘well it’s no Monsieur Venus’, ‘well it’s no Dorian Gray’, ‘well it’s no Metropolis’, ‘well it’s no Jekyll and Hyde’, ‘well it’s no Pygmalion’. Crap!

[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.

[Catarina · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was perfectly aware, when I started this book, that it was going to be, in some way or another, profoundly misogynistic and that I would most likely not enjoy it. How could a story about the creation of Humanity's very first sexbot be anything but? Even so, I grossly underestimated just how insidiously misogynistic this would truly be.

Warning: my review contains spoilers, but, quite honestly, reading this book is a waste of anyone's time and a test to even a saint-like patience, so if anyone's curious about the story but not yet committed to reading it, I truly think they'd be better off reading a summary/review such as this.

This book is, from start to finish, a violent attack on women—their bodies, their identities, their agency, their rights, their very soul.
Villiers believes, wholeheartedly and with horrifying intensity, that women are all creatures, something other, not as human as men. He also believes that their nature, as creatures, is something for men to judge and decide—are they unintelligent and submissive, and therefore good? Or are they promiscuous and clever, and therefore evil? The answer is up to men, and it is also up to them to then treat women according to the labels they have given them. What makes a good women, then? According to Lord Ewald, one of the main characters of the book (and the man the sexbot is built for) "One’s only good when one’s stupid." Right. Then, what are bad women? Evidently, they're the seductive temptresses, the independent ladies, the cheap whores, the vain socialites, the clever women—in the words of Ewald "What is more depressing, more debilitating, than that hateful creature they call a 'clever woman'?". Bad women are—the men in this story agree—soulless beings, and like in the case of Alicia Clary (the woman who the sexbot is built to copy) they do not deserve the beautiful body they inhabit. "What right does anyone so beautiful have to be so devoid of spirit?", says Ewald in indignation.
And yes, sexbot it the correct term—not Android, not Ideal, not Phantom or Shadow or whatever other nonsense the author claimed. This story revolves around the creation of a robot built in the uncanny image of a real woman and created with the specific purpose of pleasuring that real woman's unsatisfied boyfriend—it is a sexbot. Ewald pursued a relationship with Alicia—enchanted by her divine-like beauty—but he quickly determined that her personality did not fit his standards of what a woman should be. In his words: "You would think she was some dreadful mistake of the Creator’s! I never supposed my heart would be locked in the pillory of this freak. Did I ever ask for so much beauty at the price of so much misery? Never. I’m entitled to complain." This paradox—this unsatisfactory identity in this dream body—caused him a comically absurd amount of suffering. His pain was so great that he was, indeed, ready to kill himself. If only he had done precisely that at the beginning of the story, and saved all sensible readers a headache. But alas, Ewald soldiers on, with the help of Thomas Edison (yes, that Thomas Edison, or a fictional and decidedly unsettling version of him) who—eager to aid his friend and move forward with his scientific experiments—eagerly offers to build him a robotic version of Alicia: an exact copy down to the smallest detail, only this version would have whatever personality he well liked."I will duplicate the living woman in a second copy, transfigured according to your deepest desires!", stated Edison with enthusiasm. After all, this was the perfect solution to Ewald's problem, as he actively wished that the real Alicia Clary maintained her otherworldly appearance but assumed the personality of an unthinking, mentally challenged woman: "The only misfortune that has befallen Miss Alicia is thought! ... If she were deprived of all thought, I could understand her. The marble Venus, in fact, has nothing to do with thinking. The goddess is veiled in stone and silence." It's actually terrifying to see modern incel ideology so plainly presented in a novel as (relatively) old as this, with quotes such as: "The bitter thoughts to which this first love has given rise have inspired me with a profound distaste for all women, and sunk me in the depths of an incurable melancholy.", something said by Ewald, and then with Edison, regarding the topic of seductive women who dare to use makeup to enchant innocent men into bed "Such are these “women,” modern Furies of a sort, for whom the man they select is simply a victim to be weakened and degraded. By a kind of fatality, they obey blindly the obscure urgings of their malignant essence." There are countless other examples of textbook incel mantras all throughout the story, but I'd seriously end up writing a whole thesis if I analysed them all. The story, agonizingly, continues.
Edison's tantalising offer is made, and after much thought, Ewald agrees—and how ironic it is, the debate behind this well-pondered decision, which analyzes every imaginable philosophical school of thought, yet glaringly fails to consider, even once, Alicia's possible thoughts regarding this revolting violation of her identity. The macabre experiment is soon in march, and things only get worse from there on: Edison, who quickly reveals himself a cartoonishly evil scientist, presents an awe-struck Ewald with tales of all the evil creatures (translation:women) he has encountered in the past, and the specific beast who finally infuriated him into action—the first woman he turned into an Android, his first successful experiment. Shockingly, this first robot's purpose was not to provide sexual services—Evelyn Habal's "phantom" existed for the mere purpose of allowing Edison to properly control and humiliate her, even without her knowledge. Control is a fitting way to put it, because that's what this whole entire horror show of a novel is about: forcefully obtaining complete control over women.
Edison then applies his successful method to Alicia Clary, and after a bizarre and inexcusably cruel series of events—which range from tricking her into posing as a nude model for a supposed sculpture, to drugging her into unconsciousness and leaving her alone with a rapist dentist who was tasked with copying all her teeth—a sexbot of her, with the name of Hadaly, is "born". Ewald has no problem with any part of this whole process—which is not surprising in the slightest, as his hatred for his own girlfriend is nothing short of prolific. In his own words "What I really would like would be to see Miss Alicia dead, if death didn’t result in the effacing of all human features. In a word, the presence of her form, even as an illusion, would satisfy my stunned indifference, since nothing can render this woman worthy of love." Edison feeds into Ewald's hatred, affirming time and time again that the young Lord has the "right" to "possess" Alicia in her most pleasing form—what he argues is actually her true, if not slightly improved, form. He describes Hadaly as the perfect version of Alicia, the vision "God" intended to create in the first place, and he goes to great lengths to explain how the human Alicia is, in fact, the true imposter:"In her all these qualities were dead, deceptive, degraded, because enslaved to vulgar, selfish reason; beneath their veils now lurks a feminine being who is, and perhaps always was, the true and rightful possessor of this extraordinary beauty, since she has shown herself worthy of it."
The experiment ends up being a great success, and after a few more ridiculous details—which are not only inconceivable even in the context of fiction, but are, more worryingly, terribly written—a completely unaware Alicia, a deliriously satisfied Ewald and his sentient (and?maybe possessed by an actual spirit?) sexbot depart via ship for Ewald's home, in England. The novel—in a mediocre yet laughter inducing turn of events—ends with absolute disaster: the sexbot is destroyed in a fire started below deck, Alicia escapes the ship but sadly ends up drowning, and Ewald, the unlucky survivor, finally commits suicide over the loss of the sexbot he never even got to fuck.
All in all, this book, which, scarily, was written in the 1800's, is unfathomably misogynistic—and most exhaustingly, it drags on for fucking forever. Pages upon pages of ridiculous monologues, provided with the purpose of aweing the reader into believing the supposedly rational mumbo jumbo being word vomited every other paragraph, which in actuality is nothing but a bunch of scientific jargon being thrown around carelessly and without meaning. One could argue that, if the reader manages to ignore the raging misogyny (which is nothing short of impossible for anyone who cares even slightly about women's rights, btw) the book actually provides a very interesting look into the big questions of life: humanity, mortality, and the big unknown. To that I would answer: Mary Shelley wrote a much, much, better book (which predates this one by a few decades, actually) which analyzes all of that without calling women "soulless creatures" every three sentences. If anyone's interested in reading about the limits of science, the dangers of hubris, and the nature of Men (as in, Humanity, and not just an elitist, privileged group of white men), I suggest they read that, and leave this horrid book in obscurity where it belongs.

Oh, and side note: this whole book was inspired by a real life experience Villiers had with a woman who rejected him—Alicia Clary (though that was not her real name) and this desire to own her, is very much real. So yeah, Villiers wrote a two-hundred-something pages long revenge fantasy, and decided to call it a science-fiction novel.

Yup.
-5⭐

[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.

[soeluhtet · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Future Eve is French fantastic Writer/Poet Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's science fiction novel. First published in 1886. It is one of the earliest sci-fi works about the Android Woman. In the novel, he described some of the devices, such as the wireless telephone, sound motion picture, and elevator, before they were invented. Although the novel's plotting is lazy and timid, the characterization is two-dimensional. Although the Future Eve has some interesting points. But generally speaking, this English adaptation isn't worth reading.

[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.