The Beatles never disbanded and are lingering in the background with music that’s become corny and outdated. They live in an alternate history England, 1982, where Alan Turing is alive and well and plays a pivotal part in dealing with the complications of this robot. The humans here are bland and for the most part, not likable. On its surface level (as safe a place to start as any), Machines Like Me is a love triangle between Charlie Friend, his girlfriend Miranda (who lives upstairs from his flat) and Adam, their personal robot. McEwan might not have been as antagonistic or blunt as Ellison, or Kurt Vonnegut, two other writers who worked within the speculative fiction genre, but they didn’t have to contend with Twitter. I’ll come to your house and nail your pet’s head to a coffee table.” Take this headline quote (from the legendary late literary provocateur Harlan Ellison) used for a New York Times article about McEwan’s perceived snobbery regarding being given a label: “ Call me a Science Fiction writer. In his latest novel Machines Like Me (given the cheeky subtitle And People Like You on the title page), McEwan has run the risk of alienating genre readers during a round of publicity. Like his British contemporary Martin Amis, McEwan has always seemed to understand that the distinct coldness of his subject matter is an asset if doled out in small doses. If McEwan has been anything since his literary debut in 1975, he has been precise, determined, and audacious - sometimes to his own detriment.

Call it speculative fiction, an alternative narrative, or pure science fiction, McEwan produced a story that stayed within his unique lane and distinctive voice.

McEwan’s 2016 novel, Nutshell (ibid), was told in the voice of a fetus in utero in its final period before birth. Drive outside the boundaries of your perceived lane and risk being torn down by the fierce members of a club that’s easily offended. Through stories, children’s fiction, plays, 15 taut and controlled literary novels, and a handful of film adaptations over the past 35 years, McEwan has never steered away from risking popularity, likeability, or credibility. McEwan seemed to understand the balance between creating worlds through which his people were moved like chess pieces and the visceral romance of such relationship novels like The Comfort of Strangers (ibid, 1981), The Innocent (ibid, 1990) and Atonement (ibid, 2001), people torn between literal war-time conflicts and the danger of stepping out of their lanes. This might be even more the case with such writers as Ian McEwan, who started his career writing gloomy, Gothic short stories in First Love, Last Rites (Jonathan Cape, 1975) and In Between the Sheets (ibid, 1978.) The doom was palpable and the sense of fear always consistent. The reading public is often the quickest to turn on heroes who had usually been consistent and reliably productive.

Ian mcewan robot