And he's just spent his inheritance, £86,000, on an artificial human.Īdam is one of twenty-five (Adams and Eves): “the first truly viable manufactured human with plausible intelligence and looks, believable motion and shifts of expression.” When Adam is all charged up and turned on for the first time, still on his factory settings, as it were, he begins to warn Charlie about trusting Miranda, but is interrupted.

He staves off poverty by online share and currency trading. He’s infatuated with his upstairs neighbour, a twenty-two-year-old student named Miranda. He’s good at losing money and self-delusion. He's thirty-two, unemployed and living in a damp and dingy flat in Clapham. The Falklands war lost to the Argentines, with Maggie Thatcher (for a while) somehow holding onto power grumblings about Poll Tax and rumblings about leaving the European Union the Beatles re-formed and AIDS a short-lived, well-treated, illness.Īnd this is Charlie Friend’s Britain. Alan Turing alive and celebrated, and (probably consequently) technology is as far advanced as that known in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It’s England in 1982, but a very different 1982 from the one with which most readers are familiar. Machines Like Me is the seventeenth novel by award/prize-winning British author, Ian McEwan. Nothing deep or predictive that could give psychoanalysis or economics a good name.” Freud, behaviourism, cognitive psychology. The mind in science has been little more than a fashion parade. But so far, science has had nothing but trouble understanding the mind. “We learned a lot about the brain, trying to imitate it. A fascinating read, highly topical and incredibly thought-provoking.

Ian mcewan machines like me