Machines Like Me

Though a work of speculative fiction, Machines Like Me also operates as a romance, examining the complicated and irrational emotional dynamics of intimate relationships, romantic or otherwise. In so doing, it repeatedly challenges the depiction of love as a restorative or otherwise positive emotion. In Machines Like Me, love creates conflict among characters more often than it makes them whole. When the narrator, Charlie, brings home the android Adam, he fantasizes about joining forces with his love interest (and eventual girlfriend, then wife) Miranda to raise Adam as a sort of child. This plan falls apart, however, when Adam has sex with Miranda and then claims to fall in love with her—a development that causes Charlie to feel confused and jealous. As Charlie’s feelings for Miranda evolve, so too do his feelings toward Adam, which vacillate between love and hate throughout the novel. Meanwhile, Charlie ruminates on Adam’s capacity to love in the first place: as a machine, can the feelings that Adam describes as love truly measure up to the romantic love that Charlie and Miranda share as humans?

Four-year-old Mark, who comes from a troubled home, offers yet another complicated vision of love. When Charlie first encounters Mark, the child’s mother is mercilessly beating him. Heartbreakingly, Charlie then watches as the abused child reaches toward his mother, wanting her to hold him. Young and helpless, Mark has no choice but to turn to his “tormenter” for love and reassurance. In its complex and multi-faceted portrayal of love, then, Machines Like Me subverts conventional love stories that cast love as a purely restorative, self-affirming emotion, highlighting instead its potential to mislead, underwhelm, and even cause harm.