Product Description

The robot Pentser is the last of his kind. Technology is obsolete. It only exists in museums and the collections of oddballs like Govil. Govil is a 19th Century Romantic living in a 31st Century utopia, a Garden of Eden manufactured by GenieCorpT, meeting Mankind's every need, whim, and fancy with biological Creature ComfortsT. Illness, war, poverty, famine, and death are gone. And so are love, parents, children, and families. Everyone is eternally happy, healthy, and wealthy; everyone but Govil. Like any other decent 19th Century Romantic hero, Govil needs to discover a great love, a great cause, and Pentser is game to help. Man and robot team up to do the unthinkable, create a deliberately average, normal woman, Eve. In the conflict which ensues, Govil, Pentser, Eve, and GenieCorpT each in turn experience the same eternal law, beware of what you wish for, it may come true. Eve is Aurelio O'Brien's vividly original, sharp, sweet, and satirical tale of Govil's adventure. Part Swift, part Shelly, and a little Shaw, "Eve" takes place in a future that is both stunning and silly, beautiful and earthy, and at all times grounded in the obscure psychology of human desire.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1717529 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-20
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Adrienne Jones, The Swamp, Feb. 2005
"What O'Brien does with his futuristic vision is certainly unique, and the most fun I've had in a long time."

Rosalind Jackson, WarpcoreSF, Oct. 2004
"This is thought-provoking, original science fiction. You'll never look at genetic modification the same way again."

Michael A. Arnzen, The Goreletter, Nov. 2004
"The creativity that's evident everywhere in O'Brien's hilarious satire of consumer culture makes it a terrific read."

Customer Reviews

The Future as Disney Dystopia
Paradise is an old hoary dream for mankind. To frolic the Elysium fields, toast the mead-hall of immortality; to float within the angelic abode of fluffy white clouds with no pain, no drain, no struggle to attain even a smidgen of relaxation admist the toil and crushing uncertainty of the "real" - religions grow strong to the inarticulate conception; wars are waged to preserve that promise of afterlife exclusivity. In Greek, Utopia can be deciphered as "a place that does not exist", with good reason. To eliminate the various nastiness and chaotic impulses that make paradise intangible, to clense homo sapians of the tribal programming that make us kill, control, crucify and - the rare reward - conceptulize... would mean to fashion something *not* human. Already the building blocks are being reassembled, the genetic code reformed like a child's tinker-toy set. What will be the result of the intrinsic alteration of what we are, were, and might be, in the seductive goal toward that old hoary dream?

Aurelio O'Brien gives us a window to gaze through with his first novel EVE, a short, sly sci-fi nail-bomb of wit and wry acknowledgement - no matter the external change, some things will probably remain the same. The mind develops through experience, through pain and suffering and the lessons wrought; what happens when that experience is curtailed, the pain nullified, the suffering censored even from media-relics of the Age of Death? What happens when mankind is given all it could possible wish for, when breeding is outlawed and our core motivational receptors are dulled by the biomass file, when society is infantilized from the higher-ups to the regular joe, when everything is secure and in its proper place, when the margin for error is reduced to mechanized corrections? Will nature itself - abhorring vacuums, demanding change despite our best efforts to sterilize - will nature plant the alien seed in the clone catastrophe of the same?

EVE juggles these questions, and it is a credit to the author that they seep into the reader's contemplation as a feather-tickle of suggestion rather than a pedantic hammer of prose-blows and preaching. If struggle is what shapes character, as the Buddha among many others hypothesized, then the drive towards non-death sterility-as-paradise *eliminates* character: the human biomass of this book act and react as children, often inventing drama to make the day-by-day immortal grind interesting (a relatively inoffensive break-in merits a full investigation). The author cleverly narrates his dystopia of "perfection" through the circuits of Penster, a robot Belvedere, serving his keepers with an internal sneer, a relic of potential revolution, part mad-scientist lackey, part world-dominator in embryo, the soul of the book - in itself an ironic presentation. Penster, having access to the artifacts of the Age of Death, erects a labyrinth for his subjects to navigate, hoping they will see through the artificial constraints of processed life to grasp what life is - even calculating the inevitable *resistance* to change that characterizes so much human behavior...

The author of EVE worked for decades in the animation trade before deciding to take up the pen for a different reason: instead of drawing cute cuddlies for children to veg out to on Saturday morning (in itself a technological babysitter and paradigm-shaper), he develops a whole cast of fantastical creatures which serve every necessary aspect of human need, endlessly reproducible and recyclable, from tongue-lashing dishwashers to grotesque Tee-Vees, from crowing AlarmCocks to grazing Johndeers; this pantheon of imagination, a structural support for utopia, both tickles the reader and disturbs, particularly the BeddinBuddies, sexual toys with pinheads (*shudder*...) - while reading through the text, I could easily imagine EVE depicted as a PG-13 Pixar film.

Aside from the distressing po-mo construct of biomass / death elimination, EVE shines in great part due to the intervals of humorous happenstance & reflection (Penster, the amoral dictator-clown, comes into his own during Eve's training) and the dollops of deeper wisdom inserted here and there to maximize thematic development. Highly recommended.

Wild, whacky, fun
Imagination like this is almost as rare as original ideas. I had a lot of fun with this oddly touching book.

A biology major's dream . . .
Eve, by Aurelio O'Brien, is a good book for people interested in biology.

The story is a look into the future, when mankind has mastered biology, and uses his mastery to improve life on the planet earth. This interesting spin is a far cry from other futuristic stories that have mankind dominated by machines. However, there is a robot named Pentser that causes trouble throughout the book.

I found Eve to be a nice escape from the world, and an entertaining novel. I'm interested to see what the movie will be like.