A plunge into otherness: Ethics and literature in "Machines Like Me" by Ian McEwan

The paper intends to propose a reading of Ian McEwan’s 2019 novel, Machines Like Me, qua insightful reflection on the topic of Artificial Intelligence and its bearings on different aspects of human life, from interpersonal relationships to moral behaviour. The novel also engages in a reflection on the value and the prospects of literature, whose very premises might be called in question in a posthuman context. Machines Like Me is set in a 1980s world whose contours radically deviate from historical facts. The novel introduces the simulacrum in the form of an android, Adam, a hypersophisticated machine that enters the characters’ life and upsets it thoroughly. The troublesome relationship with Adam forces Charlie, the protagonistnarrator, to ponder on his own system of values, posing questions about the Other which inevitably end up throwing new light on the Self and on what it ultimately means to be human. By way of his “What if novel” set in an alternative past, McEwan tackles pressing issues of our present, while trying to envisage a future that is not far to come. The paper intends to explore both the ethical and the metaliterary level of the story on the background of the contemporary theoretical debate on transhumanism and posthumanism, pointing to the simulacrum as the uncanny catalyser of the major topics the author intends to address.