Tomorrow's Eve

Tomorrow's Eve is a French innovative, first released in 1886. It is, identically, a hard science-fiction philosophical and fictional story of how Thomas Edison invents a robot woman companion for an Englishman to who he is obliged a favor. The conjunction of the novel's age, Frenchness, and subject issue may appear astonishing, and it is; yet their synthesis, as it turns out, makes for a contrive that is contemplative yet riveting, peopled by individual characteristics who are overstated yet nuanced.

“Now we are about to examine seriously the organ of this new electro-human creature, Tomorrow's Eve, if you will, who with the aid of Artificial Generation […] seems destined within a century to fulfill the secret purpose of our species” (98; Raitt 175).

As compared to Biblical portrayal of Eve, the symbolist action is founded on the ineffable, the unidentified, the sacred and/or profane, the irrational, on reality that is obscured behind veils of metaphor, one-by-one consciousness, the occult, and the aesthetic. Symbolist works oppose investigation to some degree--many can only be finished fairness by the initial text. Some even are too opaque for good descriptions. In compare, research fiction, while fictional, is founded on living technical values, probable but unproven idea (or unproveable idea, for example Einstein's idea of relativity), discerned but actually unexplained phenomena, present or projected expertise, in short, on some sort of fact. Science fiction is reasonable, ordered to the farthest (like the Vulcans of Star Trek), even in its fantasy. These two genres therefore appear diametrically opposed: reality versus detail, the research of the occult versus the research of the material. Yet the symbolists made research fiction: Villiers de l'Isle Adam composed the android innovative Tomorrow's Eve.

Comte Jean Marie Mathias Philippe August Villiers de l'Isle Adam is often glimpsed as the dad of symbolism; his Axël has ...