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Bernard Cohen

Klara and the Sunby Kazuo IshiguroKnopf
Philip K. Dick titled his famous 1968 sci-fi work on the status of artificial humans – later made into the film Blade Runner – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 
Should we worry about robots becoming too human? Should we forgive them?
Klara and the Sun is a cleverly meshed, tightly structured and fast-reading novel, sitting at the philosophical end of sci-fi, far removed from detailed accounts of the technical aspects of robotics and artificial intelligence.

If its title were a question, it might be, “Do Androids’ Prayers Come True?”
We first meet Klara – the cheerful android narrator of the latest novel by 2017 Nobel Literature Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro – in the back of a store. She is hoping to be positioned in the sunny and customer-attracting window at the front. 
Klara is an AF (artificial friend) and we discover immediately that she has an unusually acute capacity to notice and retain details, even though she is one model behind the times and nowhere near as supple as the newer B3s. (We’ll use “she/her” for Klara because that’s how characters address this sexless robot, even when the nonconformist Miss Helen wonders, “Do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?”)
Klara is purchased by young Jodie and her mother, Chrissie (whom Klara calls “the Mother”), after the latter tests Klara’s observational skills by disturbingly having her imitate Jodie’s limp.
Klara narrates this kind of creepy human behaviour without emotion – she mentions only in passing the horrifying morality of Jodie’s world, where privileged children are “lifted” by an unspecified and high-risk cognitive genetic enhancement. It is left to the reader to piece together how the world operates. We don’t know the steps and missteps that led civilisation here, except that large polluting machines are still in use.
Kazuo Ishiguro wins 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature
Klara is more human – certainly more humane – than many of the humans in the novel, and she is unceasing in her care and concern for Jodie.
The child has not responded well to her genetic treatment and seems to be in a slow and terminal spiral. The intermittent intensity of Jodie’s exhausting illness provides the novel’s central storyline and motivates Klara’s efforts: both Klara’s narration and her actions are driven by a sense of duty and her somewhat gappy, often dreamlike android logic, which from early in the novel is shown in her prayer-bargaining with the Sun.
Ishiguro leads us along a taut, finely balanced narrative path, both hyper-reliable and conventionally unreliable (in the sense that we have to learn to read through Klara’s android perceptivity and blind spots). Klara’s deficiencies in interpreting this world and Jodie’s experience of it are those of cross-cultural tourists who assume that understandings from the country of origin (android settings) exactly apply wherever they visit (human world).
When Klara doesn’t understand the human world, she simply repeats what she hears. For example, when Jodie’s mostly absent father is accused of being a fascist living in a racially segregated enclave, Klara has nothing to say about it. 
She aims to fulfil her duty to Jodie by gathering as much information as possible from Jodie’s best friend (the non-lifted Rick) and (especially) the Mother without understanding their human motives for inclusions and omissions: Rick would never make it to university without lifting; Jodie’s elder sister, Sal, had died in the process of being lifted.

Most tellingly, Klara generalises her experience as solar-powered – sun-dependent – to humans. On this turns Klara’s biggest project.
And yet, simultaneously, she works as an ideal authorial foil who misses nothing, not even subtle relationship signs of ease and discomfort. She’s excellent at observing, but hers is very much a gridded, robotic point of view: “the room’s space had become divided into twenty-four boxes – arranged in two tiers – all the way to the rear wall. Because of this partitioning, it was hard to gain an overall view of what was before me, but I gradually made sense of things.” 
The strange robotic artificiality is reproduced in some human-to-human relationships and produces a sense of almost Pinter-esque menace. When Rick is invited to Jodie’s home to meet a group of healthy “lifted” children, they talk about Rick in the third person as though he isn’t right there – “Why doesn’t he eat his chocolate?”
Rick and his mother, Miss Helen, contrast with the hard-headedness of the Mother – Miss Helen wasn’t ready to risk Rick’s life through lifting.
And Rick is vital to Klara on each of her two quixotic journeys to a neighbouring barn in pursuit of the Sun – of which, for the avoidance of spoilers, I should say no more here.


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In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro examines what it is to be human – and humane

The android narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new sci-fi novel, Klara and the Sun, proves the most humane character in an inhumane society. Photo: Shutterstock

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Photo: Handout

Author Kazuo Ishiguro. Photo: Reuters 

In Ridley Scott’s Raised by Wolves, androids in spandex bodysuits, refugees from war on Earth, raise humans in space

Amanda Collin stars in Raised By Wolves, which premieres on HBO Max. Photo: Coco Van Oppens/TNS

Amanda Collin (left) and Winta McGrath costar in HBO Max's "Raised by Wolves," premering Sept. 3. (Coco Van Oppens/Handout/TNS)

Amanda Collin stars in "Raised by Wolves" streaming on HBO Max Sept. 3. (Coco Van Oppens/Handout/TNS)

(FILES) In this file photo English director Ridley Scott poses during a photocall for the movie out of competition "Blade Runner: The final cut" during the 64th Venice International Film Festival at Venice Lido on September 1, 2007. - When Ridley Scott, the legendary filmmaker behind "Alien," "Gladiator" and "Blade Runner," began directing his first television series in decades, he was faced with a dilemma. Sci-fi show "Raised by Wolves," premiering on HBO Max on September 3, sees a pair of advanced male and female androids land on a new planet after the destruction of Earth, charged with raising a new colony of humans. (Photo by Christophe SIMON / AFP)

Abubakar Salim (centre) and Amanda Collin (right) in a still from Raised By Wolves, directed by Ridley Scott. Photo: Coco Van Oppens/TNS

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Remember Sophia the robot that argued with Elon Musk? Version 2.0 is coming, thanks to Covid-19, and her name is Grace

Robotic heads at the press gathering for Grace, the health care robot. Photo: Dickson Lee

Robot Sophia during a press launch event unveiling the latest humanoid robot medical assistant for elderly care and biodata management at Awakening Health Lab in Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong. 28OCT20 [FEATURES] SCMP / Dickson Lee

(From left) Robotist David Hanson, Sophia and David Lane CEO of Awakening Health during a press launch event unveiling the latest humanoid robot medical assistant for elderly care and biodata management at Awakening Health Lab in Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong. 28OCT20 [FEATURES] SCMP / Dickson Lee

Robot Sophia demonstration during a press launch event unveiling the latest humanoid robot medical assistant for elderly care and biodata management at Awakening Health Lab in Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong. 28OCT20 [FEATURES] SCMP / Dickson Lee

David Hanson who created Sophia the robot, shows a poster of Grace, the upcoming health care robot, designed to care for the elderly. Photo: Siqi Ji

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The Nobel laureate’s latest sci-fi novel is cleverly meshed, tightly structured and fast-reading, sitting at the philosophical end of the genre
Its android narrator proves to be more human – certainly more humane – than many of the humans in the novel



The android narrator of the Nobel laureate’s new sci-fi novel proves the most humane character in an inhumane society, despite offering a distinctly robotic viewpoint.


Artificial intelligence

An assessment or critique of a service, product or creative endeavour.  Film reviews, restaurant reviews, reviews of art exhibitions. (Eg. Crazy Rich Asians: an important film, yes, but a good one?)


Review

Review | In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro examines what it is to be human – and humane

The Nobel laureate’s latest sci-fi novel is cleverly meshed, tightly structured and fast-reading, sitting at the philosophical end of the genre Its android narrator proves to be more human – certainly more humane – than many of the humans in the novel

The Nobel laureate’s latest sci-fi novel is cleverly meshed, tightly structured and fast-reading, sitting at the philosophical end of the genre

Its android narrator proves to be more human – certainly more humane – than many of the humans in the novel