This week, Ian McEwan said his new AI novel was not science fiction – and the world went mad. Sarah Ditum looks at why the genre retains its outsider status
Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Machines Like Me, is a fiction about science – specifically, artificial intelligence. It is set in an alternative reality where Alan Turing does not kill himself but invents the internet instead; where JFK is never assassinated and Margaret Thatcher’s premiership ends with the beginning of the Falklands war. The near future of the real world becomes the present of the novel, giving McEwan the space to explore prescient what-ifs: what if a robot could think like a human, or human intelligence could not tell the difference between itself and AI?
Machines Like Me is not, however, science fiction, at least according to its author. “There could be an opening of a mental space for novelists to explore this future,” McEwan said in a recent interview, “not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas.” There is, as many readers noticed, a whiff of genre snobbery here, with McEwan drawing an impermeable boundary between literary fiction and science fiction, and placing himself firmly on the respectable side of the line.
In 1968, Vladimir Nabokov told the BBC: 'I loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories'
Science fiction retains a rather juvenile set of associations that can make readers embarrassed to enjoy it. Some decide, if they like a book, it’s too good to be SF
Continue reading...via Science fiction books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2GupvpL
0 comments:
Post a Comment