Sarah Ditum’s article on Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (Looking to the future, Review, 20 April) covers a range of fiction that took a different approach to sci-fi, including works by Ursula K Le Guin and Margaret Atwood. Arguably the most salient treatment of emotional entanglements with non-human persons is Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass (1993), with tales of two parallel relationships, one with a golem in 16th-century Prague, the other with a robot in the 21st-century USA.
Dr Felicia Hughes-Freeland
Chichester, West Sussex
• Re odd subtitles (Letters, 1 May), I am reminded of the story of the French version of Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron. After a lengthy battle sequence with no dialogue, someone sticks their head over the parapet and sees a column of armoured vehicles. “Tanks!” he cries. The subtitles rendered this as “Merci!”
Paul Dormer
Guildford, Surrey
• My father worked in Devonport dockyard, was in the merchant navy and became a draughtsman for the MoD (navy). He and his engineer colleagues referred to engines and everything containing an engine as “she” (Letters, 2 May).
Steve Vanstone
Wolverhampton
• You do not have to travel as far as New York to see black squirrels (Arwa Mahdawi, G2, 1 May). There is a small population in Cambridge, often seen in the trees along the Backs.
John Bryant
Topsham, Exeter
• Re funeral songs (Report, 2 May), how about Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone? Actually played at the end of a funeral of an old friend.
Leon Rogers
London
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition
