Machines Like Me
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Narrated by:
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Billy Howle
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By:
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Ian McEwan
About this listen
Random House presents the audiobook edition of Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, read by Billy Howle.
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.
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? This provocative and thrilling tale warns of the power to invent things beyond our control.
Critic reviews
Machines Like Me reminds us that McEwan is a once-in-a-generation talent, offering readerly pleasure, cerebral incisiveness and an enticing imagination.
[Machines Like Me] is right up there with his very best [novels]. Machines Like Me manages to combine the dark acidity of McEwan’s great early stories with the crowd-pleasing readability of his more recent work. A novel this smart oughtn’t to be such fun, but it is. (Alex Preston)
Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me is a dazzling account of our interaction with technology… He marries a gripping plot, handled with rarefied skill and dexterity, to a deep excavation of the narrowing gap between the canny and the uncanny, leaving the reader pleasurably dizzied, and marvelling at human existence. (Philip Womack)
Compelling… unforgettably strange… there are many pleasures and many moments of profound disquiet in this book, which reminds you of its author’s mastery of the underrated craft of storytelling… [Machines Like Me] is morally complex and very disturbing, animated by a spirit of sinister and intelligent mischief that feels unique to its author. (Marcel Theroux)
[McEwan's] fierce intelligence [crackles] like a Jumping Jack on Bonfire Night… Arguably the finest English writer of his generation, the ideas he explores are important, now more that ever. (Richard Dismore)
[McEwan is] as mordant a chronicler of the age as we have… Machines Like Me offers as good a primer on the multifarious anxieties that should afflict us all as anything catalogued as “non-fiction”. (Bill Prince)
Machines like Me displays… impressive richness. Excited by ideas and perceptive about emotions, encompassing cutting-edge science, philosophical speculation and lively social observation, it is funny, thought-provoking and politically acute… In this bravura performance, literary flair and cerebral sizzle winningly combine. (Peter Kemp)
Original, and as always with McEwan’s novels, beautifully written.
McEwan knows all the novelistic rules… [and his] restlessness when it comes to subject matter, even as he enters his seventies, is stunning… [Machines Like Me] shimmer[s] with relevance. (Janan Ganesh)
[Machines Like Me] traverses the muddled morality of Artificial Intelligence... This is new and exciting ground for McEwan, one of Britain's most consistently brilliant writers. (Olivia Ovenden)
Great
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The different timeline is intriguing, and the historical references are fascinating; how much would one great mind influence culture if he had not committed suicide would he have been any more of a force or just retire into a scientific life with no significant influence?
The characters are interesting, and the plot is well developed, but it felt mechanical and without the passion of the subject or as it probably was intended.
I will reread it because it deserves a second reading and then I will see if I have had a change of perspective
A very different past.
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Alan Turing didn't commit suicide. Tony Benn became leader of the Labour Party. Shake your head a few times and a skewed vision of the twentieth century comes into focus, where Turing lived to develop synthetic humans and they have integrated into society.
This book contains several related narratives, all connected through Turing, his work and through Adam, Charlie and Miranda. Charlie buys Adam, the couple design his personality, and almost immediately a complex triangle of emotion forms between the three.
We also see the wider scope of this Britain, as synthetics have their effect on the wider political landscape, and how technology might have been very different should Turing have survived the 1950s.
Adam is a unique character, I liked hearing his thoughts, as an artificial lifeform, hearing how his logical mind saw humanity and its accomplishments. I could fully understand Charlie's feelings about his 'purchase', and it was amusing at times and absorbing to watch the interaction between human and synthetic.
The creation of the alternative history was a clever one, a familiar terrain and characters, but branching off in new and unknown directions.
The voices came over well in the audiobook, clearly distinct, Adam's especially sounded other-worldly. The story was not lost through lack of printed words, and the change from the personal story of Charlie to the wider country's gave breaks that helped me concentrate.
A very stimulating concept and construction, with lots of questions to ponder over.
With thanks to Nudge Books for providing a sample Audible copy.
Alternative modern history...
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One of his best
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I would recommend this book and I will be looking at more of Ian McEwan's novels in the near future.
My first audio book
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