Machines Like Me

McEwan, Ian. Machines Like Me: A Novel. London: Jonathan Cape imprint, Penguin Books, 2019. New York: Penguin-Random House, 2019. Also available as a Random House audiobook (from Audible.com).

Most of the UK publisher's summary: Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. 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?

Most of the publisher's summary for US distribution: Set in 1980s London, the story revolves around Charlie: young and reckless, and in love with his upstairs neighbour, the enchanting Miranda whose hidden, murky past hangs between them. He has spent his inheritance on the acquisition of one of twenty-four highly developed new robotic humans – named Adam or Eve, each one beautiful, strong and clever – developed by Alan Turing after his success on the legendary WW2 Enigma codebreaking machine.

One stressed point of departure from our time-line to that of the novel is that the novel's Turing rejects "chemical castration" for "treatment"/punishment of his homosexuality, goes to prison, and uses the time to work on mathematics (etc.) that lead to breakthroughs not only in cybernetics but biology, allowing for the development of androids that can pass the Turing Test, easily, an internet in the 1980s, and other advances. Perhaps more so in the Random House audiobook with Billy Howle's reading, the protagonist-Narrator Charlie Friend comes across like a J. Alfred Prufrock who's finally managed to do something and gets laid, gets married, gets — not begets, but gets — a child and commits a kind of murder. Self-conscious and self-involved to a fault, Charlie insists we deal with the questions raised by conscious and self-conscious forms of artificial life (and from there the question of what "life" means), including questions mentioned above plus, of course, free will, identity, and guilt.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 4May19