Book Review
Ian McEwan wields his technical genius in tale of robots and humans
A new genre of futurist nostalgia emerges in a masterful if occasionally bloodless novel
By conjuring a 1980s that is more technologically advanced than our present, Ian McEwan has established a promising new genre of fiction: futurist nostalgia. Machines Like Me evokes Falkands-era London, except the internet is already commonplace and artificial intelligence (AI) is available for retail in android form. There are other counterfactuals — the war is lost, the left is rampant — but these amount to so much circumstantial dressing for the rise of the machines. It is in this old-new world that Charlie, a drifter and online trader, takes delivery of a synthetic human. He is called Adam. What the robot lacks in banter he redresses through good, ethnically ambiguous looks, a way with chicken tarragon and formidable sexual competence. He is, without drawing you a diagram, very giving.
A romantic triangle is briskly formed with Charlie’s girlfriend, Miranda, at which point jealousy and other human vagaries drive the story. Is AI, wonders the book’s promotional material, ...
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