For example, readers may notice a callback to the partitioning of Berlin as a backdrop to his book The Innocent where a body is dismembered in the foreground – a depiction of a violent rift in the physical body and the body politic. These books, like McEwan’s Machines, explore far beyond the dangers posed by highly-developed robots to examine the notion of personhood as well as broader philosophical questions posed by artificial life.Ī staple of McEwan’s books is the use of reoccurring parallel scenes events mirrored between plot and subplot. World-building aside, McEwan puts the most riveting spin on the robot-humanoid story since Margy Piercy’s Body of Glass (1991) and Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 (1995). Dick’s counterfactual classic, The Man in the High Castle, for example. Losing the Falklands war is hardly as engaging as the Nazis winning the Second World War, as they do in Philip K. The idea underpinning the novel is not in itself extraordinary – it’s pretty run-of-the-mill as far as alternative pasts and futures go. Its most compelling counterfactual is the survival of Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, who, instead of committing suicide in 1954, lives on to perfect artificial intelligence to the point where it not only matches, but surpasses human intelligence. The novel is set in and reimagines the 1980s, in an alternative timeline in which Britain loses the Falklands war and Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power. While there is a political dimension to Machines Like Me, politics bubbles beneath the surface, providing moments of suspenseful pause in the main plot. Both novels look to uncanny resemblances – whether android or insectoid – to comment on human nature.

The Cockroach, on the other hand, is a pointed political satire, skewering Brexit and the politicians who orchestrated it. Machines envisages a counterfactual sci-fi world in which AI has advanced to the point where anthropoid robots have surpassed humans. Firstly, there’s size: Machines Like Me clocks in at a reasonable 306 pages, while The Cockroach, a much slimmer work, is novella-length and can easily be read in one sitting.

Not without their flaws, as some critics noted, they are nonetheless highly enjoyable and sure to leave even the ultra-demanding and fastidious reader hankering for more. The Cockroach, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Cape, 2019, 100pp, £7.99 (paperback)įor fans of Ian McEwan’s writing, 2019 presented two rough-cut diamonds: Machines Like Me and The Cockroach. Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Cape, 2019, 306pp, £18.99 (hardback)

Machines like us