comte de Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam

Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889) was a French Symbolist whose novel L’Ève future (Tomorrow’s Eve, 1886) imagines a fictionalised Thomas Edison building a perfect artificial woman, an ‘andréide’, and did much to popularise the very word ‘android’. His Cruel Tales are masterpieces of ironic and macabre short fiction. A refined, prophetic ancestor of science fiction’s artificial-being theme.