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Rating: 
Summary: look to the past to preview the future
Review: this book is brilliant. it captures perfectly the obsession of the french decadent movement with the female and what the male will do to control "woman." I will not give away any details of the story, but i must say the female as vampiric, hysterical, and simply put, sick, is what the character of thomas edison in this novel tries to put an end to by making his own version of "the female" that will be better suited to the world and society, but actually selfishly, to the needs of the male, and in particular mr. edison in the novel. it is a brilliant novel and i recommend THE DECADENT READER, from which i read this novel, it contains more unknown and unfortunately unread literature from this extremely fascinating movement at the end of the nineteenth century.
Rating:
Summary: look to the past to preview the future
Review: this book is brilliant. it captures perfectly the obsession of the french decadent movement with the female and what the male will do to control "woman." I will not give away any details of the story, but i must say the female as vampiric, hysterical, and simply put, sick, is what the character of thomas edison in this novel tries to put an end to by making his own version of "the female" that will be better suited to the world and society, but actually selfishly, to the needs of the male, and in particular mr. edison in the novel. it is a brilliant novel and i recommend THE DECADENT READER, from which i read this novel, it contains more unknown and unfortunately unread literature from this extremely fascinating movement at the end of the nineteenth century.
Rating:
Summary: Decadent masterpiece
Review: 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."
Rating: 
Summary: Excruciatingly slow
Review: 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.
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