ABSTRACT

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.

摘要

麦克尤恩的小说《像我一样的机器》受到了不冷不热的评论和科幻类型追随者的公开敌意。它似乎挪用了体裁话语的一些关键问题——什么是人类的问题，人类与人工智能共存的可能性，道德和同意的问题。它还利用了历史悠久的另类历史设备，但没有太认真对待它。相反，这些角色陷入了个人问题和科学与政治、正义与同理心——以及爱的难题。麦克尤恩在各种采访中对小说的评论只会激怒那些已经准备好得出结论的评论家像我这样的机器提供很少的独创性。本文将证明文本经过精心分层，似乎是为了保护隐藏在相当传统的三角恋情节、冗长的政治评论和特定类型的话题之下的自身新颖性。这将是一个努力去理解作家和在他的小说中发挥作用的惯例之间的复杂关系，它将继续阅读与作者评论相反的文本，找到被压抑的暗示，从而引发对文本所叙述的文本的解释。 android 英雄而不是人类主体。