L'Eve future (The Future Eve)

'''Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-August, comte de. L'Eve future (The Future Eve).''' 1880. Serialized in La Vie moderne, 18 July 1885 to 27 March 1886. Published in book form in 1886. Included in Villiers's Oeuvres (1957). Trans. Robert Martin Adams. Tomorrow's Eve. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1982. Eve of the Future Eden. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, trans. Lawrence, KS: Coronado, 1981.

Discussed by Raymond Bellour in "Ideal Hadaly," q.v. under Literary Criticism, who presents the work as "the 'First Instance of the Machine in Human Form'"—and we'll note it's a female android some forty-six years before the robot Maria in the film METROPOLIS (1926) and fifty-eight years before Lester del Rey's Helen O'Loy. According to Bellour, "Man and woman . . . become God through each other" in this book, with woman as "the ideal machine invented by man" (in Penley 109). See also Arthur B. Evans, "Science Fiction in France . . . ," SFS 16.3 (Nov. 1989): esp. 257 and 269; and see the revs. of the Adams and Rose trans by Inga Mullen, with a "Second Opinion" by Brian Stableford (who denounces the work as "one of the must insultingly misogynistic books every written") SF&FBR #15 (June 1983): 39-42.