oranges are not the only fruit by jeanette winterson

While she no longer rides her own motorbike (on the insistence of her wife, the writer and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach), she still travels across town by limo-bike. Winterson fizzes with her own Frankensteinian energy, her hair an electric halo from her constantly raking her hands through it.

“But it’s not going to be, because we are human so we will fuck it up! A super intelligence – why would something smarter than us keep anything as vain, ugly, reckless, self-destructive and stupid as we are?” “The brain has to be fully functioning at clinical death,” is the reply.) This robotic future, “could be lovely”, she says, with characteristic mischievousness. (“Is Donald Trump getting his brain frozen?” one of the characters in Frankissstein asks. As she points out, “we are further down the line than a lot of people realise”: success stories of pigs’ brains being “revived” after death were in the news the day we met. But while McEwan chose alternative history, launching his prototype robot Adam into the 1980s, Winterson wanted to show “what is going on now and where that might lead”. Here, that something else is the non-biological lifeforms of the future, coincidentally also the subject of Ian McEwan’s new novel Machines Like Me, published just last month. “Because everything is relational, everything is about our interaction with something else.”Ĭharlotte Coleman (left) and Geraldine McEwan in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1990). She is a romantic, with capitals and without: “Love comes in and out of fashion and I’m sticking to it,” she says. Declaring its literary genesis in neon pink on the cover, Frankissstein is subtitled “a love story”, because all Winterson’s novels are love stories. The novel looks back 200 years to Mary Shelley and the industrial revolution and takes us into the present day revolution of artificial intelligence, sexbots and cryogenics. “But of course what they haven’t got, and never will have, is a clitoris. A mother and daughter are celebrating a birthday with afternoon tea at the next table. They’ve got huge tits and small waists and long legs”. Female sex dolls start at “around $2,000 for a really crap one”, she says, and it was no surprise to learn that they are “entirely fantasy. Watching guys have sex with bots,” she announces cheerfully, attacking dessert in a smart London restaurant.

R esearching Frankissstein, her 11th novel, led Jeanette Winterson down some unlikely digital paths.

Oranges are not the only fruit by jeanette winterson