And, quite frankly, hearing the writer’s take on his own book is less interesting to me than hearing what the book itself has to say I don’t like going into it with preconceived notions hand-delivered by the author. As I see it, a good story is a good story, call it what you will. There a number of online reviews that take aim at the author rather than the book, particularly regarding his unfortunate comments in a Guardian interview in which he appears to want to distance himself from the Sci-Fi genre.
But anyway, these are fairly minor grievances. Some might say this info-dumpy stuff is perfectly fine in Sci-Fi-I don’t. Plus, pages and pages were devoted to explaining the alternative history when it could’ve been more integrated into the plot-details only appearing when relevant-or at least summarized with far fewer words. My main gripe with Machines is the long digression on the P versus NP problem, which could’ve been boiled down to a paragraph for the sake of moving the story along. If he were tasked with writing instruction manuals, they’d be page-turners. As one member of my book club put it, “I’d read anything he wrote.” Yes. I can’t say it was my favorite of his, but he set the bar pretty high with Atonement and On Chesil Beach.
Ian McEwan’s first “sci-fi” novel, Machines Like Me, published earlier this year, has not been getting the best reviews, but I found it enjoyable to read.
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