![]() The novel focuses on a young couple, Charlie and Miranda, grappling with ownership of and their relationship to Adam, one of the first androids sold to consumers. ![]() Critics derided the Beatles’ 1982 reunion album, “Love and Lemons,” for its reliance on orchestration, but Charlie Friend still enjoyed the songs, the way John Lennon’s voice sounded like it was coming from “beyond the horizon, or the grave.”Ĭharlie Friend, the critics, the album and the Beatles reunion (two years after Lennon was actually assassinated) are all figments of Ian McEwan’s fertile imagination in his latest novel, “Machines Like Me.” The Beatles’ presence is a tiny diversion in a counterfactual novel by the author of books including “The Innocent,” “Amsterdam,” and “Atonement.” Set in a world where the atom bomb was never dropped and John Kennedy survived his Dallas shooting, the crucial alternative reality is that Alan Turing, the genius who broke Nazi Germany’s secret codes during World War II, was not hounded into suicide for being homosexual - instead, he lived to spark huge technological breakthroughs that led to an earlier Digital Age, with progress sped up by Turing’s generous open sourcing. ![]()
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