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The novel is set in the 1980s in an alternative history timeline in which the UK lost the Falklands War, Alan Turing is still alive, and the Internet, social media, and self-driving cars already exist.[1][2] The story revolves around an android named Adam and its/his relationship with its/his owners, Charlie and Miranda, which involves the formation of a love triangle.
Machines Like Me – Wikipedia by Machines Like Me – Wikipedia
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan is an exploration of what it actually means to be human through an examination of machines. The novel revolves around the purchase of Adam, a humanoid robot, whose perfect logic and moral clarity, often highlights the flaws and inconsistencies of human nature.
The novel can be understood as fantasy, set in the real. Situated in the 1980’s, McEwan provides a counter-history where Alan Turing did not die and the UK lost the Falkland War. It is also set the same year that Philip K. Dick released Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
The novel explores a number of questions, including Who is the actual machine? With the food we eat and what it tells us, are we all already templated selves? What is the difference between curiosity and algorithms? What is intelligence? Really, once it feels like once you question one aspect of life, everything comes under question. For example, is serving wine with arm behind the back machine-like? Politics? Bureaucracy? Cultural tradition? In the end, there is something about McEwan’s writing that is one part enthralling, while at the same time uncomfortable.
MarginaliaReviews
“It was religious yearning granted hope, it was the holy grail of science,” begins Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Machines Like Me. The book is set in an alternate version of the 1980s, where artificial intelligence research has far outstripped its current limits. As Britain loses the Falklands war and Tony Benn is elected prime minister, a 32-year-old Londoner called Charlie embarks on two new relationships. He falls in love with his upstairs neighbour Miranda, and spends an £86,000 inheritance on Adam, one of a new breed of humanoid robots “with plausible intelligence and looks, believable motion and shifts of expression”.
Adam is 170lb, looks Greek or possibly Turkish, and is “not a sex doll”, although he can have sex. (The 13 Eves in the original production run sell out before the Adams; seven go to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.) He has access to the entirety of human knowledge – this version of the 1980s has the internet – and he can do the dishes. He sounds like the perfect housemate. He isn’t.
Source: Ian McEwan on his “anti-Frankenstein novel”, Machines Like MeBy Helen Lewis
The plot of Machines Like Me allows McEwan to go back not just to Frankenstein, but to the birth of modern ideas of selfhood in the Renaissance. As he cheerfully admits, the genre is secondary, merely the best vehicle for the ideas. “The science fiction of this bores me rigid,” he tells me at one point. “What I’m interested in is what it would be like to be close-up to this person.”
Source: Ian McEwan on his “anti-Frankenstein novel”, Machines Like MeBy Helen Lewis
Believability is never a requirement in a McEwan novel, but he likes to ground even the most far-fetched fantasy – like the foetal narrator of his previous book, Nutshell – in an everyday world, usually a tastefully middle-class one. At times the novels can feel more like essays pinned on to a fictional character’s thought. In Saturday, published in 2005 and set in 2003, the neurosurgeon protagonist has firm views on terrorism, religion and the fanaticism of anti-war protesters. In Nutshell, the precocious foetus holds forth in an overheated and underdetermined way about everything under the sun: climate change, the Middle East, the US, China, art, identity politics and the decline of the university. The book tries to hedge authorial attitudes by surrounding them with narrative irony, but in trying so evidently it ends up exposing the author to view: it’s like watching a Punch and Judy show from behind the tent.
In Machines like Me, another first-person narrative, the alternative 1982 is an excuse for similar musings, as is the presence of AI, with all the ethical issues it raises.
Source: Sexy RobotsBy Ian Patterson
a retrofuturist family drama that doubles as a cautionary fable about artificial intelligence, consent, and justice. Though steeped in computer science, from the P-versus-NP problem to DNA-inspired neural networks, the book is not meant to be a feat of hard-sci-fi imagineering; McEwan’s aim is to probe the moral consequences of what philosophers call “the problem of other minds.” The deceptively light plot revolves around parallel violations: one buried deep in Miranda’s past and another that she and Charlie perpetrate against Adam.
Source: Man, Woman, and Robot in Ian McEwan’s New NovelBy Julian Lucas
“Machines” is a sharp, unsettling read, which — despite its arteries being clogged with research and back story — has a lot on its mind about love, family, jealousy and deceit. Ultimately, it asks a surprisingly mournful question: If we built a machine that could look into our hearts, could we really expect it to like what it sees?
Source: Love, Sex and Robots Collide in a New Ian McEwan NovelBy Jeff Giles
“Machines Like Me” is no more out-and-out science fiction than Kazuo Ishiguro’s elegiac novel about clones, “Never Let Me Go.” In fact, “Machines” is about what most literary novels are about: the godawful messiness of being human.
Source: Love, Sex and Robots Collide in a New Ian McEwan NovelBy Jeff Giles
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