Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 359 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Ian McEwen.

He's the author of more than a dozen novels,

including Saturday, Solar, and Nutshell,

and its most popular novel, Atonement, was adapted into a feature film starring

Cur Knightley and James McAvoy. He's also been listed by The Times of London as one of

the 50 greatest British Writers since 1945.

And we'll be speaking with him today about his new novel,

Machines Like Me.

An alternate history set in the 1980s,

in which a man and a robot compete for a woman's affections.

And now here's our interview with Ian McHughan.

All right, so we're here with Ian McHughan. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Okay, so I want to start out and talk about your story, Dusil, which appeared in the New York Review of Books. So how did that story come about? Yeah yeah well really was a

Fyfinger exercise to get me into the state of mind for writing the novel and so it was just a way of surveying the material

really and thinking about what it would mean to have among us fully conscious artificial human beings.

Well and so then how about this image of this future world where robots are so common and so indistinguishable from humans that it's become

almost politically incorrect to even ask anyone?

Yes, I mean, I, I mean it was a serious point behind this which is once we build creatures that we now

suspect or even believe of wholly sentient and conscious like us.

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