Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan - More2Read Reviews
 

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding.
     Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong, and clever—a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma.
     Ian McEwan’s subversive and entertaining new novel poses fundamental questions: What makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns against the power to invent things beyond our control.

Praise for Ian McEwan:

“Ian McEwan is a master prose stylist.”
—The Walrus

“[McEwan is] intelligent, has popular and literary appeal, manages credibly and interestingly to include politics in his writing, and has a gift for making an enormous range of readers feel as though he is writing about them, about their own particular life of the mind. He observes the tiny tragedies of growing up and growing old with humour and insight. And who could fail to be impressed by his great, sweeping openings, the grand settings, the incisive character portraits, the promise for the reader of finding a mirror in his protagonists, no matter how unlikely? . . . A writer with such a gift for understanding the human mind.”
—The Globe and Mail

“McEwan has shown himself to be a master of the smart, cynical tale.”
—Montreal Gazette

“When McEwan addresses an issue, people take notice.”
—National Post

“Sentence by sentence, for the jewel-like precision of his description and razor-sharp psychological acuity, there is a consensus that [McEwan] is among the very best.”
—Financial Times

“Easily the brightest fictional mind we have.”
—Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times

“Ian McEwan is a master storyteller—he makes readers laugh, he makes them cry and he makes them wonder.”
—The Vancouver Sun

“I read pretty much anything he writes.”
—Anthony Horowitz, bestselling author of The Word is Murder and the Alex Rider series

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian McEwan is the bestselling author of seventeen books, including the novels Nutshell; The Children Act; Sweet Tooth; Solar, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and In Between the Sheets.

 

 

Reviewed by Lou Pendergrast on 19 January 2019