He is in his early thirties and lives in a dingy ground floor flat in north Clapham (a suburb of London). More importantly, many of the technological advances that we saw starting in the mid 1990s are already well advanced in 1982. Thatcher has lost the Falklands War, John Lennon is not dead, the Beatles have reformed and Turing did not kill himself but invented the Internet and is now Sir Alan. This book opens in London in 1982 but it is not quite the London/world we knew. As the title puts it, do robots like us and are they similar to us? The second is an alternative future. The first is the main subject of the book, namely artificial intelligence and what it means to us as humans. There are two science fiction tropes we are primarily dealing with in this novel. Yes, he is making a distinction between hard science fiction – what he calls travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots – and the more cerebral type of science fiction focussed on human interaction with various science fiction tropes.

What he is saying is that he is concerned more with the human aspect – actually looking at the human dilemmas of being close up to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you. I do not think McEwan is saying exactly that. In this article, Sarah Ditum complains that the book is not, however, science fiction, at least according to its author. It will be interesting to see how the title is translated into other languages where it is not possible to use this play on words.Īccording to this interview, McEwan has little time for conventional science fiction. Interestingly, the subtitle is And People Like You, which carries the same ambiguity. So how did you interpret the title of his novel? Does it mean that machines are similar to me or are partial to me? Well, without giving too much away, both could well be applicable. Home » England » Ian McEwan » Machines Like Me Ian McEwan: Machines Like Me

Ian mcewan machines like me