Tomorrow's Eve [Paperback]

Villiers de L'isle Adam (Author), Robert Martin Adams (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0252069552 | ISBN-13: 978-0252069550 | Publication Date: November 30, 2000

Take one inventive genius indebted to the friend who saved his life; add an English aristocrat hopelessly consumed with a selfish and spiritually bankrupt woman; stir together with a Faustian pact to create the perfect woman-and voil! "Tomorrow's Eve" is served. Robert Martin Adams's graceful translation is the first to bring to English readers this captivating fable of a Thomas Edison-like inventor and his creation, the radiant and tragic android Hadaly. Adams's introduction sketches the uncompromising idealism of the proud but penurious aristocrat Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste, Count Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a friend and admired colleague of Charles Baudelaire, Stphane Mallarm, and Richard Wagner.Villiers dazzles us with a gallery of electronic wonders while unsettling us with the implications of his (and our) increasingly mechanized and mechanical society. A witty and acerbic tale in which human nature, spiritual values, and scientific possibilities collide, "Tomorrow's Eve" retains an enduring freshness and edge.

Editorial Reviews

Review

An interesting and controversial novel. . . . This first translation is graceful and smooth. -- Library Journal

This surprising and fascinating science fiction tale has lost none of its charm and vitality even after 100 years. -- Choice

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (November 30, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252069552
• ISBN-13: 978-0252069550
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #375,911 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars entertaining and unexpectedly deep, July 7, 2005

By 

not your tim (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tomorrow's Eve (Paperback)

Is birdsong still beautiful once it has been scientifically explained as the product of bland mechanical phenomena, acoustic vibrations, and animal tissues, cells, and atoms? Is it better not to know these details, and simply enjoy the sound? Is it better to reject reality and live in a fantastic world of your own imagination? When waking from a dream, it is easy to use reason to convince oneself that the dream was not real. But if the dream made you happy and reality makes you sad, why would you want to do so? Could an escape into dream be so wrong? Even when in a rational state of mind, how much of your perception of the real world is filled in by your imagination, anyways?

Such are the questions addressed in this English translation of Villier's L'Eve Future---Tomorrow's Eve. The novel relates the story of a fictionalized Thomas Edison's efforts to create an Ideal artificial woman to rescue a dear lovesick friend from ending his own life in order to escape loneliness. The Ideal in this case encompasses more than physical beauty; Edison's quest focuses on endowing the machine with a beautiful soul capable of joy, sorrow, love, and an appreciation of the tragic limits faced by all mortals. But how can a machine have such human attributes? Or is it merely necessary for the lonely man simply to believe that it has?

Beneath the novel's strange love story, beneath its adventure into the frontiers of an imaginary 19th-century science, an equally engrossing philosophical argument plays itself out pitting idealism versus practical materialism, spirituality versus rationalism. Who is really the puppet, Edison or his creation? Is the artificial woman actually the product of science, or of the supernatural? Will the lovers' fate ultimately be triumphant or tragic? Tomorrow's Eve is an unusual combination of entertainment and edification.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Decadent masterpiece, February 15, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Tomorrow's Eve (Paperback)

This little known novel is a masterpiece of Decadent literature (a brief movement localized in France around the turn of the last century that was influenced mainly by the poetry of Baudelaire and the theories of evolution put forth by Darwin). It tells the story of a fictionalized Edison who builds a female cyborg to exist in place of the unattainable love object of a tortured young man. She is animated by the spirit of a ghost and has the appearance of a Venus statue. Villiers, in the decadent tradition, lauds artifice above "nature," writing characters who traverse the world of illusion as that which is more real than real, a world in which appearance and the material are everything. This book might be of particular interest to feminists: Villiers only writes women as artifical beings, hysterics, ghosts, objects of fetishism. This book is a must read for any one interested in metaphysics and the rhetoric of "image" versus "being."

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Excruciatingly slow, February 12, 2004

By 

AMH (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tomorrow's Eve (Paperback)

This novel is hard to read because most of the 220 pages consists of a conversation between the Thomas Edison character and his friend--and Edison is a very verbose speaker. In this conversation Edison is persuading his friend to go along with the idea of replacing his fiancee with Edison's android, who can be made to perfectly resemble the fiancee but who will not be an airhead. The highlight of this dialog is when Edison catalogs a bunch of feminine beauty products to demonstrate that his friend is already dealing with the artifical: "in that case, one artifice for another, why not have the android herself?" Later on Edison makes this statement: "Since our gods and our aspirations are no longer anything but scientific, why shouldn't our loves be so, too? In place of that Eve of the forgotten legend, the legend despised and discredited by Science, I offer you a scientific Eve....In a word, I have come, I, the `Sorcerer of Menlo Park,' as they call me here, to offer the human beings of these new and up-to-date times something better than a false, mediocre, and ever-changing Reality; what I bring is a positive, enchanting, ever-faithful Illusion." This seems very relevant to today, with our browser-mediated lifestyles.

If you are patient, and are not repulsed by full-on Victorian sexism, and can overlook a lack of character development and plot, and won't be irked by a throwaway ending in the last page, then you may find this novel worthwhile. It is one of the earliest science fiction works and can be read for its curiosity value. There are a number of interesting ideas and sparkling moments.