§ Review ·

Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun is a ‘quiet dystopian’ novel incorporating aspects of memory, AI, and other topics. The novel is told entirely from the perspective of Klara, an Artificial Friend (a solar-powered robot companion designed to keep children company). Klara observes the world in the most literal way, seeing as how she is a robot. “She” develops an almost religious devotion to the Sun, and eventually gets discarded when her owner no longer needs her.

A machine’s eye view

After being discarded, Klara finds a new owner in Josie, who suffers an ailment and now relies on Klara to take care of her. Klara is reliable in what she sees but delusional in how she interprets it. For instance, Klara believes that the Sun and its solar power will heal Josie because the sun charges her with power You’d think that an advanced AI with access to data should know the Sun is just a power source, not a deity. Ishiguro uses Klara’s “faith” to show how consciousness (real or simulated) creates meaning even when it’s irrational. We’re reading a machine’s thoughts translated into something we can understand, and we keep projecting humanity onto what’s probably just algorithmic behavior. The spare, precise prose matches this perspective.

Throughout the novel, you can pick up casual details about how some children are “lifted” (genetically enhanced) to gain advantages, but this operation comes with a health risk. Josie was lifted, but her luck causes her to get an ailment. The procedure is accepted and even favored by society since it gives children an edge.

The book’s quiet discourse on gene editing runs parallel with the concepts around artificial friends in the form of robots such as Klara. Ishiguro doesn’t explicitly mention these societal dilemmas, much like Never Let Me Go and how the students are clones waiting for their organs to be harvested and society is debating whether the clones can be considered human. The ethics sit in the background for us to ponder.

There is even a subplot where an ‘artist’ is commissioned to paint Josie’s portrait. Except it isn’t a portrait as we know it, rather its preparing Klara to become Josie in the event Josie passes away.

The asymmetry of attachment

Klara’s entire existence revolves around Josie, but Josie has a full life beyond Klara: her neighbor Rick, her parents, her future. The relationship is one-sided because Klara is just sophisticated programming, an AI prediction engine optimizing toward her goal based on learned patterns and accumulated data. What looks like devotion is probably us anthropomorphizing algorithmic behavior. Her memories work like weighted data points.

After Josie recovers and moves on, Klara has no purpose left, just memories tied to her primary objective. New experiences barely register because they’re not relevant to her optimization function. She’s a trained model that’s no longer being updated, replaying its highest-weighted memories on loop.

The end of usefulness

Josie grows up, goes to college, moves on. Klara is sent to a yard where obsolete AFs slowly deteriorate, as technology gets replaced when we don’t need it anymore or when newer models come out.

What’s strange is that Klara fades instead of just being turned off. Maybe Ishiguro is suggesting something more than programming, or maybe we’ve just built these companions to mirror human aging because it makes us feel better about getting attached before we discard them. For Josie, Klara was useful during a difficult period, but maturity brings the realization that a machine is a machine, programmed for a specific goal. The attachment ends when the goal is fulfilled.

Tying it back to today’s reality

A lot of the concepts in Klara and the Sun aren’t far out there. AI companions are already here, and gene editing is possible and practiced to a small degree. Ishiguro raises hypotheticals related to technology and medicine that quickly approaching reality and broader acceptance, but trusting us to think through the implications. As these advancements catch up to what science fiction projects, what will we do?

There’s no easy answer, and that is what makes this book so compelling. Worth reading if you’re interested in gene editing, AI ethics or Ishiguro’s other work.