Can Androids Write Science Fiction? Ian McEwan’s Machines like Me

McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me was met with lukewarm reviews and open hostility of the sci-fi genre adherents. It seemed to have appropriated some of the key issues of the genre discourse – the question of what constitutes humanity, of the possibility of coexistence between humans and AI, of the problems of morality and consent. It also made use of time-honored devices of alternative history without treating it too seriously. Instead, the characters are enmeshed in personal problems and conundrums of science and politics, justice and empathy – and love. McEwan’s commentary on the novel in various interviews only aggravated the critics who were all too ready to conclude that Machines Like Me offered little originality. This essay will demonstrate that the text is carefully layered as if to protect its own novelty hidden beneath rather conventional love triangle plot, ponderous political commentary, and genre-specific topicality. It will be an effort to understand the complex relation between the writer and conventions which come into play in his novel, and it will proceed to read the text against the authorial comments, finding suppressed hints that invite an interpretation of the text as narrated by its android hero rather than human subject.