She’s the product that roboticists in a field called affective computing (also known as artificial emotional intelligence) have spent the past two decades trying to invent. This debate has picked up speed as the artificially intelligent agents built by actual engineers close in on the ones made up by writers and TV, film, and theater directors, the latest round in the game of tag between science and science fiction that has been going on at least since Frankenstein. It certainly makes a contribution to the centuries-old disputation over whether machines have the potential to feel. I guess you could call this novel science fiction. Ishiguro is known for skipping from one genre to the next, although he subordinates whatever genre he chooses to his own concerns and gives his narrators character-appropriate versions of his singular, lightly formal diction. Klara is the narrator and hero of Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s eighth novel. “I felt sadness then,” she says, “despite it being a good thing that they’d died together, holding each other and trying to help one another.” A passing Boy AF lags a few steps behind his child, and his weary gait makes her wonder what it would be like “to know that your child didn’t want you.” She keeps watch over a beggar and his dog, who lie so still in a doorway that they look like garbage bags. Klara registers details that most people miss and interprets them with an accuracy astonishing for an android out of the box. She tracks his passage along the floorboards and the buildings across the street and drinks in the scenes he illuminates. Not needing human food, Klara hungers and thirsts for the Sun (she capitalizes it) and what he (she also personifies it) allows her to see. On lucky days, Klara gets to spend time in the store window, where she can see and be seen and soak up the solar energy on which she runs. G irl AF Klara, an Artificial Friend sold as a children’s companion, lives in a store.
This article was published online on March 2, 2021.
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