For years, I’ve avoided Ian McEwan’s novel, Machines Like Me, partly out of ambivalence about other McEwan novels I’d read, but mainly in response to an interview in The Guardian, where McEwan was quoted as saying, ‘There could be an opening … for novelists to explore this future, not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas of being close up to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you.’

To anyone engaged with science fiction’s rich tradition of exploring ethical and societal dilemmas, comments like these read as wilfully ignorant and snobbish.

Lately, however, I’ve been asking myself – do I really want to be the blogger who avoids reading an on-theme book just because of a quote that may (may) have been taken out of context? No, I do not want to be that blogger.

And so, I borrowed Machines Like Me from my local library, and I read it from cover to cover. Here’s what I made of it––

Continue reading “Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan” →