Dear Reader,Rudyard Kipling is one of those literary names that makes us post-colonials squirm. But it might be a tad unfair to box him as an imperialist and close the lid. There was more to him than that identity. While he definitely wore the tag and owned it, other sides did spill out, consciously or unconsciously.For instance, he was very interested in science and technology, albeit as “gifts” of the Empire, and wrote on these “non-literary” topics in his fiction and non-fiction. As a motoring correspondent for the British press, he wrote copiously about his car rides around England and abroad at a time when motoring was still at a nascent stage. He described the car rapturously as “swifter than aught ‘neath the sun”, outdone only by “Death and a Woman who loved him”.He has a poem titled “The Secret of the Machines” where machines speak in a choric voice, telling us how they work and what all they can do. Pointedly, in giving them a voice, Kipling gives them agency; although the poem is all about how machines make the best slaves: “Some water, coal, and oil is all we ask,/ And a thousandth of an inch to give us play:/ And now, if you will set us to our task,/ We will serve you four and twenty hours a day!”Published in 1911, the poem is apparently an ode to technology and a celebration of machines’ contribution to the great task of nation building. But some of the lines are ambiguous; reading them, you cannot be sure whether Kipling is praising the might of the machines or sounding a warning against the destruction they can wreak. Especially these lines, where the machines are boasting of the seemingly impossible tasks they can perform for the benefit of man.Do you wish to make the mountains bare their headAnd lay their new-cut forests at your feet?Do you want to turn a river in its bed,Or plant a barren wilderness with wheat?Reading the lines now—when we know only too well what happens when mountains are laid bare, cleared of forests, and rivers are dammed to channel their flows—we hear an ominous ring. The “secret” of the machines, as Kipling sees it, is also chilling.But remember, please, the Law by which we live,We are not built to comprehend a lie,We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.So, in the end, it is the inability to comprehend a lie rather than superhuman strength that differentiates machines from humans. This tells us something about ourselves, about our ability, even need, to concoct lies and to remain in lies, in the grey zone of morality. Unlike any other species, we need illusions in order to survive.Machines like Me (2019), the 15th novel by British author Ian McEwan, turns on this premise. There, in an alternative version of Britain in the 1980s, where the computer scientist Alan Turing is still alive and the Internet and social media are already flourishing, Charlie Friend buys a humanoid robot called Adam. Charlie is courting his upstairs neighbour, Miranda Blacke. Soon, the three are caught in a love triangle. Miranda has a secret involving a lie—a lie she has floated against a man to avenge her friend’s death by suicide. Adam cannot understand this ambiguity—in his scheme of things, words are either true or false. He records her confession and sends it to the police, resulting in Miranda getting a jail term for her false accusation. The novel cleverly recreates the complicated web of truths, half-truths, and lies that we weave around ourselves in our daily lives and relationships, and contrasts this with the morally uncomplicated brain of Adam who, like Kipling’s machines, cannot comprehend a lie. Machines like Me uses sci-fi tropes to plumb the depths of the human mind. It makes us face the possibility that we, in our humanness, might be morally inferior to the machines we create.McEwan’s recent novel, What We Can Know, is also speculative fiction that goes deeper than the expectations created by that label. If Machines Like Me took us to an alternative past, What We Can Know transports us to a post-apocalyptic future. The common factor in both timelines are muddle-headed humans and their imperfect devices. Bhavya Dore writes an enthusiastic review, saying, “Through sly humour and fine-grained detail, McEwan pithily conveys the larger tragedy that could befall us [in the future]. Still, not everything is bleak—if Shakespeare and Austen are being read and taught, does that not count for something?” Read the review here.Personally, I am no fan of McEwan. I find most of his fiction too preachy, and in that, he has similarities with Kipling. Yet, Kipling is closer to my heart, not just because of an unshakeable childhood devotion to The Jungle Book, but also because there are spots of darkness in his writings that speak to me. I suppose it is conflicted emotions like these—fondness despite reservations, admiration despite anger—that machines cannot comprehend.See you soon with more. And thank you for the thoughtful mails on your favourite rivers sent in response to my last newsletter.Yours,Anusua MukherjeeDeputy Editor, FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS