Klara and the Sun: A Novel

"I can’t be too specific about their opinions, but we spent a long time arguing over its inclusion— Never Let Me Go was shortlisted a few years ago and The Buried Giant was submitted, but that probably too fantasy . Some of the judges had very emotional reactions to the novel, especially about the central narrating character, Klara, who is an ‘Artificial Friend’ and somewhat… pliant. But in fact, most of the female characters in the novel are passive or altruistic, accepting of their fate. The novel was on the Booker long-list, and he’s won a Nobel Prize —pretty rare for scifi writers—but that won’t necessarily count in his favour or indeed against him. I don’t see why not—arguably it’s a traditional science fiction novel, told from a first-person point of view. Ishiguro was on the original Gran ta list of the best young British novelists back in 1983, with Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Clarke-winner Christopher Priest. Several of them have written science fiction or something close to it. Ishiguro’s literary trick is that the world Klara knows is limited by what she can see or what she is told about. As readers, we might have a better idea of some of the things she doesn’t realise—what she has got herself into, say—but the narrative might not go where we expect or perhaps hope. We’re assembling Klara’s world alongside Ishiguro. And the idea of the Sun as potentially a God is fascinating; in science fiction it could, of course, be a superior being."

"I am a huge fan of Kazuo Ishiguro. I loved his Never Let Me Go , which I thought was beautifully delicate and raw and powerful. Ishiguro is one of these novelists who is writing science fiction, but it’s not science fiction as we normally encounter it. It’s not the invention of a completely different world. Instead he takes one or maybe two conceits, and then explores their consequences in a setting that is relevant and immediately relatable to normal life. His writing is always so clear, spare, and vivid—and Klara and the Sun is no exception. The basic premise of the book—I promise I won’t spoil it—is the idea of an ‘artificial friend’. This takes off from ideas emerging in AI that there will come a point soon when we can build robots or artificial virtual systems that seem to be conscious, and that may in fact be conscious. This is an old idea, of course, that’s been explored in many previous books and films. Ex Machina by Alex Garland , for example, is one of the best. There’s also Blade Runner . You can go back in history to wherever you want to go, really. There is Rossum’s Universal Robots by Karel Čapek , in which the term ‘robot’ was coined. Then back to Jacques de Vaucanson and his automata in the 18th century, these lifelike systems… Absolutely, though I was thinking of the myth of the golem . In any case , Klara and the Sun takes us straight to some coexisting reality, or maybe slightly near future, in which there are systems you can buy in shops that serve as artificial friends for children. What’s beautiful about this book is we see the world primarily from the perspective of the artificial friend herself. We also get acquainted with other perspectives, but the central character is the AF, Klara. Ishiguru succeeds triumphantly in conveying how such a system might come to terms with its world in ways that are sometimes very surprising, very emotionally affecting, and which have the worthwhile effect of prompting all sorts of thoughts about the consequences of developing these kinds of technologies. As the story unfolds, the emotional heft of Klara’s role within the family that eventually bring her into service becomes deeper and deeper. We become confronted with issues about how we treat others different from ourselves, AF or not, the assumptions we make, whether they’re justified, and what it does to our minds when we interact with systems whose moral, ethical, and conscious status is somehow ambiguous. The film and TV series Westworld does this too, in a more dramatic way, by concocting scenarios in which people are encouraged to express devastatingly horrible instincts of murder and rape and so on without consequence, which of course screws them up badly. Klara and the Sun is, characteristically of Ishiguro, a much more restrained, delicate, but ultimately, I think, for that reason, much more profound exploration of some of these issues. I wanted to include a novel in my five books because we talked about a number of different disciplines for understanding consciousness, focusing mainly on philosophy and the sciences. But literature is hugely important too, because literature has always been about understanding what it’s like to be a person, what it’s like to have a stream of thought, to be a human, to be an individual, or to be another individual. And that’s a key part of the story. Klara and the Sun is an absolutely remarkable example of how to develop this understanding. In ways I don’t yet know, it will no doubt make me think about my own work differently."

"Kazuo Ishiguro will be publishing his first new novel since winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2017. Klara and the Sun (2 March) is told through the eyes of a slightly out-of-date android (“Artificial Friend”) as she secures her first owner. It’s a slim book, with big ambitions – asking questions about the ethics of artificial intelligence – reminiscent of Never Let Me Go . Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I’ll also be looking out for Mary H. K. Choi’s latest YA novel Yolk , about two estranged sisters facing serious illness, Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom – finally out in the UK on 4 March, after receiving rave reviews in the US in September – and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed , a sequel to his bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning debut The Sympathiser . Science fiction fans will also be pleased to hear that Arkady Martine will release A Desolation Called Peace , a follow-up to A Memory Called Empire, recommended on this site when it was shortlisted for the 2020 Arthur C Clarke Award ,"

"Sure. This came out last year. It’s fun to have a really recent choice. I love this book. This is told from the point of view of an ‘artificial friend.’ Klara is a robot who’s conscious, sentient—a person—who is designed to be a companion to a wealthy disabled girl. Her whole purpose is to be as good a companion as possible to this girl, Josie. Ishiguro is brilliant in giving you the world through the eyes of Klara. You kind of assume it because it’s told from the first person perspective. Klara’s talking about what she’s thinking all the time. It’s a very meditative, reflective book. So it’s hard to conceptualize that as a reader without regarding Klara as a conscious being. He has another interesting science fiction book, Never Let Me Go , but he doesn’t primarily do science fiction. Interestingly Klara and the Sun has some similarities with Ishiguro’s earlier book The Remains of the Day in that it’s told from the point of view of someone whose life is given over to service. And it raises some of the same issues, but maybe in an even starker way than The Remains of the Day does, because Klara doesn’t have many independent desires or values other than to be a servant. So everything she does is for the sake of that. I don’t think I’ll give anything important away by describing the last scene. She’s at the end of her life, in a junkyard. She’s completely happy. One of the amazing things about this book is that Klara is so delighted and unbored with what you think would be abject servitude. In the junkyard at the end, she’s just completely content. All she’s doing is reflecting on her earlier excellence as a servant to Josie and treasuring her memories and being grateful for her existence. So it leaves you with this question of the authenticity of her desires. It’s told so completely and so perfectly from Klara’s point of view that she never even raises the question of whether these are authentic desires, whether she should have some desires for her own flourishing, or for her own sake. But as a thoughtful reader you want to shout at her, ‘You matter as much as Josie! You shouldn’t always just sacrifice everything for her!’ But Klara doesn’t ever think of doing other than the very best for Josie, at whatever cost. It doesn’t even occur to her. But at the same time she experiences her existence as completely fulfilling. Yes, that’s true. Klara and the Sun raises those issues in a fascinating way through this brilliantly told perspective. Also fascinating is Klara’s wonderfully naive religious worship of the sun. She’s a solar-powered robot. She sees a man that she thinks is dead on the sidewalk, and then the sun shines on him and he gets up. She thinks that the Sun performed a miracle cure, and she wants a miracle cure for Josie. She makes sacrifices to the sun in this completely charmingly naive way. Yes. And then from a philosophy of religion standpoint, it’s fascinating to think about Klara’s religiosity and what’s good about it or not so good about it. But to really get into that, I have to give some spoilers. Yes, it’s a wonderful read. Ishiguro is a superb prose stylist. His sentences are so spare and simple, which fits well with the innocent voice of Klara."