L'Eve Future

Paris: M. de Brunhoff, 1886. First Edition. 8vo (186x 120mm), pp. [4], iii, 379, [1]. Some soiling, creases, and a couple of short tears, else a very good copy of a scarce book in the original publisher's wrappers. The first novel about an android, and the book that popularized the word itself. A fictionalized Thomas Edison, brooding in his laboratories at Menlo Park, undertakes to build an ideal mechanical woman (Hadaly) for his friend Lord Ewald, whose fiancée is physically irresistible but spiritually vacant. The premise descends from the Pygmalion myth through Frankenstein and forward toward Metropolis, Blade Runner, and Ghost in the Shell, but Villiers's treatment is entirely his own: part metaphysical argument, part Gothic romance, part extraordinarily detailed technical fantasy, the novel dissects its android with a precision that anticipates hard science fiction by decades while embedding the whole enterprise in the Symbolist conviction that the ideal, even when fabricated, is superior to the real. Villiers was a proudly impoverished Breton aristocrat, a friend of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and a central figure of the Decadent movement. L'Ève future is the first of his two most influential works, the other being the Symbolist drama Axël (1890), which so embodied the movement's inward turn that Edmund Wilson named his landmark study of literary modernism after it. He died in 1889 at fifty, having lived most of his life in destitution, and saw neither book achieve the recognition it deserved. L'Eve future poses questions (about the nature of consciousness, the ethics of creation, the possibility that a manufactured soul might be more authentic than a human one that have only grown more urgent in the century and a half since it was written, and it remains the founding text of a literary tradition that now dominates popular culture.