Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life [Hardcover]

Gaby Woods' Living Dolls is a playful exploration of the history of artificial creatures and their inventors, which starts in 17th-century France and ends in the robotics laboratories of Tokyo and Massachusetts. Ultimately the book is concerned to provide a Freudian account of "what troubles us when we are faced with certain versions of ourselves--bionic men, speaking robots, intelligent machines or even just a doll that moves". The dolls, robots and androids that Woods explores all create anxieties that offer "a fundamental challenge to our perception of what makes us human".

Woods' fascination with artificial intelligence begins in the 17th century, with Descartes' formulation of man as a machine, and Jacques de Vaucanson's flute-playing android, accompanied by an artificial duck that digested its own food, first exhibited to popular amazement in Paris in 1738. The book then tells the bizarre stories of other examples of artificial bodies, including Wolfgang von Kempelen's Automaton Chess Player, attired in the manner of a Turk, Edison's Talking Doll and John Nevill Maskelyne's 19th-century automaton, Psycho. Living Dolls is an amusing and well written story of the "uncanny" nature of artificial life, although some readers might feel that it is higher on entertainment than serious philosophical reflection, in dealing with a subject that many postmodern scholars have explored in greater depth. --Jerry Brotton

Living Dolls tells the remarkable true history of how ingenious inventors and magicians laboured for centuries to simulate life mechanically.

A rigorously researched and grippingly narrated weaving of tales of the quest for mechanical life. . . A captivating read.

A masterly, elegant and thoughtful cultural history of the life-imitating machine.

Wood seems peculiarly sensitive to the fantastic flirtatiousness which envelops dolls, miniature machines, seemingly living constructs.

A haunting account of the wilder fringes of mechanical ingenuity and human self-absorption.

The remarkable story of humanity's age-old obsession with moving dolls and speaking robots, intelligent machines and bionic men.

For centuries, inventors and magicians have tried to simulate life mechanically. Each attempt to build an android is a fundamental challenge to our sense of what makes us human: could an 18th-century mechanical duck really digest and excrete its food? Was the 'Automatic Turk', a celebrated chess-playing machine that toured around Europe, a fake? Why did the great inventor Thomas Edison go to so much effort to mass produce a speaking mechanical child? What happened to the family of midgets who pretended to be dolls? And how can a twenty-first century robot express human emotions?

Taking up a theme long familiar from the realms of fairytale and science fiction, Gaby Wood unearths the hidden pre-history of a modern idea. This is the true story of ingenious inventors and their fantastical creations - of men who wanted to play God.

Gaby Wood was born in 1971. She read French at Cambridge University and is the author of a short work of non-fiction, The Smallest of All Persons Mentioned in the Records of Littleness. She has contributed to the Guardian and the London Review of Books, and is now a staff writer on the Observer. Living Dolls is her first full-length book.