He is right to think this, depressing as it might be. By contrast, “a man buying an artificial woman just takes me into the realm of the pornographic”. Charlie and Miranda’s argument was the scene he wanted to write all the abstract debates clarified by raw, primal emotion. It was interesting to ask, if there was an object somewhere between a person and a machine, “whether you are actually cuckolded when it runs off with your girlfriend, even only for a night”. He chose to write an Adam because “it got me off many hooks, really”. On a cloudy spring afternoon, I arrive at McEwan’s Bloomsbury mews house burning to ask him one thing: would you buy an Adam or an Eve? Settling down on the sofa with a mug of tea, the 70-year-old answers a subtly different question. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.

Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.All these trappings of humanity leave Charlie unable to calibrate his relationship with his new… possession? Guest? Friend? Slave?

First, a heartbeat, faintly rhythmic below the realistic skin that nonetheless can’t be left out in the rain. He isn’t.Īs Adam’s battery slowly charges, there is a longueur familiar to anyone who has bought an Apple device.

(The 13 Eves in the original production run sell out before the Adams seven go to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.) He has access to the entirety of human knowledge – this version of the 1980s has the internet – and he can do the dishes. He falls in love with his upstairs neighbour Miranda, and spends an £86,000 inheritance on Adam, one of a new breed of humanoid robots “with plausible intelligence and looks, believable motion and shifts of expression”.Īdam is 170lb, looks Greek or possibly Turkish, and is “not a sex doll”, although he can have sex. As Britain loses the Falklands war and Tony Benn is elected prime minister, a 32-year-old Londoner called Charlie embarks on two new relationships. The book is set in an alternate version of the 1980s, where artificial intelligence research has far outstripped its current limits. “It was religious yearning granted hope, it was the holy grail of science,” begins Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Machines Like Me.

Machines like me