comte de Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam ~6 hr read

To cure a friend's despair over his shallow beloved, the inventor Edison builds an exquisite female android, an artificial woman with the beauty he adores and none of the soul he cannot bear.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's 1886 'The Future Eve,' which gave us the word 'android,' is a landmark of early science fiction. Strange, philosophical, prophetic. Read it for the visionary novel that first imagined the manufactured woman, probing love, artifice, and the soul, in French.

In its time

Published in 1886, during the 1880s, lost races and dying earths.

Reading it

~6 hr read (a novel-length work, settle in).