Īlready, his lifelike skin was warm to the touch and as smooth as a child’s. Then sessions of download updates and personal preferences. It would take sixteen hours to fire him up. McEwan’s description of Adam’s unveiling is as compelling as those YouTube videos devoted to the fetishised art of ‘unboxing’:Īt last, with cardboard and polystyrene wrapping strewn around his ankles, he sat naked at my tiny dining table, eyes closed, a black power line trailing from the entry point in his umbilicus to a thirteen-amp socket in the wall. Against this counterfactual background, Ian McEwan introduces us to Charlie, an early adopter who impulsively decides to spend his life savings in order to acquire an ‘Adam’. Margaret Thatcher suffers a stunning defeat in the Falklands and is forced to resign Tony Benn’s Labour Party sweeps into the political vacuum, only to lead the United Kingdom out of the European Union and Alan Turing and Demis Hassabis are the intellectual icons of a technological revolution that has culminated in the creation of a limited series ‘synthetic humans’-’Adams’ and ‘Eves’. In Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan appears to have offered us an alternative history that leads to the same dispiriting moment we currently inhabit, writes The JRB’s Academic Editor Simon van Schalkwyk.
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