L'ève Future
1886
L'ève Future
Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
1886
What if the perfect woman could be manufactured to your exact specifications? This is the audacious question at the heart of L'Ève Future, an 1886 proto-science-fiction masterpiece that predates the genre's familiar tropes by decades. Thomas Edison, cast as a quasi-magical inventor, toils in his laboratory at Menlo Park to create Hadaly, an android so perfected she blurs the line between artificial and authentic. When a lovelorn aristocrat falls for this manufactured woman, the novel becomes a biting satire on romantic desire, a meditation on what makes us human, and a darkly funny critique of the men who would design women to their own taste. Villiers de L'Isle-Adam wrote this over a century before artificial intelligence entered the cultural consciousness, yet his portrait of technological yearning and emotional hollowness feels startlingly prescient. For readers who enjoy their science fiction with philosophical weight and sardonic wit, this is an ancestor of HAL 9000, Ex Machina, and every cautionary tale about the loves we build from circuits and code.
Editions
X-Ray
“Brunettes are full of electricity.””
— Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
“Thoughts and feelings change sometimes, as one crosses the frontiers.””
— Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
“My own self-consciousness cries out to me coldly: how does one love zero?””
— Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
“I have come with this message: since our gods and our aspirations are no longer anything but scientific, why shouldn't our loves be so too?””
— Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
“There are even some stars so remote that their light will reach the Earth only when Earth itself is a dead planet, as they themselves are dead, so that the living Earth will never be visited by that forlorn ray of light, without a living source, without a living destination. Often on fine nights when the park of this establishment is vacant, I amuse myself with this marvelous instrument (telescope). I go upstairs, walk across the grass, sit on a bench in the Avenue of Oaks – and there, in my solitude, I enjoy the pleasure of weighing the rays of dead stars.””
— Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
“Every human occupation has it repertoire of stock phrases, within which every man twists and turn until his death. His vocabulary, which seems so lavish, reduces itself to a hundred routine formulas at most, which he repeats over and over.””
— Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
“Dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss and now too distant ever to be recaptured!...What sort of arrows would be able to transfix such birds?””
— Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
“If I could record them and transmit them to the present age, they would constitute nothing more, nowadays, than dead sounds. They would be, in a word, sounds other than what they actually were, and from what their phonographic labels pretended they were – since it's in ourselves that the silence exists. It was while the sounds were still mysterious that it would have been really interesting to render the mystery palpable and transferable.””
— Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
“The Android, as we've said, is only the first hours of Love, immobilized, the hour of the ideal made eternal prisoner””
— Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/l-ve-future-3aa8e6d5-a218-4c2c-bb52-d576b9397039"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read L'ève Future by Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/l-ve-future-3aa8e6d5-a218-4c2c-bb52-d576b9397039)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/l-ve-future-3aa8e6d5-a218-4c2c-bb52-d576b9397039][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read L'ève Future by Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/l-ve-future-3aa8e6d5-a218-4c2c-bb52-d576b9397039Cite this book
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Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. L'ève Future. Lex, lex-books.com/book/l-ve-future-3aa8e6d5-a218-4c2c-bb52-d576b9397039.Auguste, C. D. V. D. L. (1886). L'ève Future. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/l-ve-future-3aa8e6d5-a218-4c2c-bb52-d576b9397039Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. L'ève Future. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/l-ve-future-3aa8e6d5-a218-4c2c-bb52-d576b9397039.
