ABSTRACT
In Machines Like Me Ian McEwan uses the speculative genre not only to explore some psychological, ethical, and philosophical issues related to artificial intelligence, but also to look upon the unbearable heaviness of being human. The chapter endeavours to analyse the novel within the framework of posthumanist thought, tracing McEwan’s signals which indicate the crisis of anthropocentric viewpoint. The parallels between the robot character of Adam and Donna Haraway’s notion of the “cyborg” are used to examine how the novel approaches the problem of the humanist—i.e. patriarchal and Eurocentric—segregation of unprivileged others.
