The Crossed Keys Chronicle

Klara and the Sun

Cover

I was recently going through the list of Booker Prize nominated works from recent years past and I noticed one book that I had seen come up on lists before but never really looked into what it was about. That book was Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro and after taking a look at the synopsis I realized that not only did it sound interesting, but it was more topical than ever.

In this book we follow the story of Klara, who is an AF, or Artificial Friend, a solar-powered robot whose main goal is to provide friendship and companionship to children. Through bits and pieces in the book we can infer that the story is taking place in a near-future dystopia where children are especially isolated and in general do all their learning remotely, only occasionally getting together in essentially play groups.

When we first meet Klara, she is learning about the world by watching the cityscape outside the large window of the AF storefront. From there she sees a number of things that her robotic brain interprets in ways that are interesting, and later important to the story, including a piece of construction equipment called a Cootings Machine and Beggar Man and his dog, who she believes are resurrected by the power of the Sun. It's also where she comes into contact with Josie, the 14-year-old main human protagonist. They have an interaction through the window one day, and eventually a few weeks later, Josie does make her promised return to the store, and after some convincing of Mother, they purchase Klara and bring her home.

Once home, we learn a little more background about the world we're in. There is some sort of elective procedure, genetic editing it sounds like, that parents can have done on their kids, which ultimately makes them much smarter and more capable than normal kids, leading them to be called "lifted". It does seem like it's not without its risks, though: Josie's sister Sal didn't survive the procedure, and Josie herself is often very weak and ill.

The rest of the story is Klara navigating her new life as Josie's AF and the family dynamic of Mother and Josie's neighbor Rick, who is "unlifted," which will leave him at a huge disadvantage in life despite his obvious aptitude at making and flying drones. As they try and navigate Josie's continual health issues, Klara puts her faith in the Sun to come up with a solution to the family's issues.

I really enjoyed this novel and it's fascinating to read a story of what we'd now call AI, but written in a time before LLMs were introduced to the world. Klara is portrayed as caring and compassionate, but often her understanding of the world about simple factual things like the Cootings construction machine is completely of her own design. It is, though, a little ironic that devotion to the Sun and her pact-making with it could actually be interpreted a little like how modern LLMs have their hallucinations. She saw the Beggar Man brought back to life in her way of understanding, and combining that with the fact her body is solar-powered, she confidently created a mechanism that she believed was real. And given the fact she never fully explained what she thought was happening to any human, she was never gently redirected to update her worldview. Which to be fair can be said of many humans these days as well.

Klara and the Sun didn't even make the shortlist of the Booker Prize the year it was nominated, but Ishiguro himself is a Nobel laureate in Literature, so I suppose there is no accounting for taste. I think it would have been a well-deserved winner though, and I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a more compassionate version of AI in their life.

This review contains affiliate links. If you buy through one I earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you.