Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun returns to the dystopian science fiction mode of Never Let Me Go and indeed can be read as a sort of companion to that earlier novel, though it now looks to the trendy topic of artificial intelligence (rather than cloning) as its central science fiction conceit. Still, both Klara and the Sun and Never Let Me Go are clear examples of what is often called “posthuman” science fiction, about a future in which the human race has either been replaced or greatly modified as the ruling species on planet earth. In Klara, rather than clones that are created to serve as organ donors for the wealthy, we have “Artificial Friends,” or “AFs,” that are created to serve as companions to wealthy children and teenagers in an attempt to help them overcome the increasing loneliness and alienation that mark life in this future world. Ishiguro also creates a larger dystopian world, but we only get a vague idea of what this world is like because everything we learn about this world is filtered through the consciousness of Klara, the AF of the title. However, much in the way that Kathy H, the narrator of Never Let Me Go, has only very limited knowledge of the world in which she lives, Klara seems to have surprisingly little understanding of her world outside of her own domestic function. But Klara is significantly more alien to us as readers than was Kathy H, so that readers of Klara and the Sun experience a sort of double cognitive estrangement as we attempt to negotiate a future world that is very different from our own, even as we attempt to understand the nature of Klara herself. In addition, Klara and the Sun is not just an interesting work of science fiction, but a major work of literature that raises a number of important questions about literature itself and about what literature tells us about ourselves as human beings. As reviewer Alex Preston put it, in this novel, “Ishiguro has written another masterpiece, a work that makes us feel afresh the beauty and fragility of our humanity.”
Klara and the Sun addresses a number of issues, both in terms of sociopolitical reality and in terms of fictional literature. Clare Connors, for example, argues that it fundamentally explores the ways in which works of literature hold their interest of their readers. Klara, after all, is an unusual narrator that raises basic questions about the rhetoric of narration in general. For one thing, she narrates the novel in a rather bland style that is in keeping with her programmed mentality. And she herself never challenges or exceeds her programming, remaining a rather bland and unchanging character whose limited perspective nevertheless creates a certain freshness in point of view. She is, meanwhile, a very sympathetic character, partly because there is a certain pathos associated with her inability to transcend her programming. Meanwhile, the intellectual depth and complexity of the issues addressed within the novel generates interest in its own right.
AI Narratives and the Robot Companion
As Klara and the Sun begins, we are immediately immersed in the consciousness of Klara as she sits in a store in a city, hoping to be purchased as a companion for some young girl (though it takes a while before this desire becomes clear). This setting immediately alerts us to Klara’s status as a commodity. Meanwhile, the immersion in her perspective also places us in a very unfamiliar situation. As reviewer Edmund Gordon puts it, “Ishiguro has made a striking effort to inhabit a non-human consciousness, and the way Klara perceives the world is in various respects entirely alien.” Thus, without preparation, we have to begin to understand this world through the perceptions and descriptions of it by this very unusual narrator. Eventually, after an extended sequence in the store, Klara, a model B2 AF, is chosen by a young girl named Josie to be her companion, though first Josie has to convince her mother to make the purchase, which she is reluctant to do, partly because more advanced B3 models have recently been put on the market. Klara then goes home with Josie and her mother, whom Klara generally refers to simply as “The Mother,” though we will eventually learn that her name is “Chrissie Arthur.” Klara, Josie, and the Mother live together in a remote mansion, with one servant, “Melania Housekeeper,” who is apparently a human, though she remains rather mysterious to Klara, who is unable to understand why the Housekeeper seems so hostile to her.
Klara and the Sun thus participates in an extensive family of AI narratives dating all the way back to Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R., which introduced the word “robot” to the language of science fiction. Čapek’s robots were actually biological, but the word “robot” has since come to signify primarily electromechanical devices (often humanoid and typically endowed with artificial intelligence) that can perform a variety of functions, partly through programming and partly through their own ability to learn and act autonomously. Robots quickly became one of the iconic staples of science fiction in the early days of the genre, with Isaac Asimov’s stories of intelligent humanoid robots in the 1940s—culminating in the 1950 compilation I, Robot—providing the most important early highlight. Asimov also extended his groundbreaking series of robot stories with the novels The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957), which mix in important elements of the detective story.
The Czech word “robota” (meaning “serf labor”) is the source of the word robot in Čapek, and the use of robots to perform various kinds of labor has been key to their appearances throughout science fiction, though rebellions in which robots seize control of their own fates (and perhaps begin to rule over humans) are also common. In Asimov’s I, Robot, for example, robots are programmed to act for the good of humans, a programming that ultimate forces them to seize control in order to prevent humans from harming themselves (though they do so in a way that causes humans to be unaware that the real decisions are now being made by robots). Klara and the Sun particularly participates in a recent group of narratives that have envisioned artificial humans (whether biological or electromechanical) as either domestic servants or as companions to humans.
These narratives have probably been more prominent in film and television than in literature, partly because of the popularity of robot characters in children’s films from WALL-E (2008) to The Wild Robot (2024). But robots or artificial humans of various sorts have also featured in many more mainstream films of the twenty-first century, beginning with Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001), which features a humanoid robot designed to replace a human child, making it a direct forerunner of Klara and the Sun. Other films featuring robots as domestic companions or servants date back at least to the robotic wives of The Stepford Wives (1975), which has exercised considerable influence on robot companion narratives. It has, for example, influenced a number of other recent “sexbot” narratives in which robots (usually female) that are designed as sexual companions tend to become deadly, as in Ex Machina (2014) or Subservience (2024). Many such narratives tilt particularly strongly into horror, rather than science fiction, as in the recent Companion (2025), which is a particularly good illustration of the tendency of many such sexbot-gone-wrong narratives to sympathize with the robots. The very popular British series Humans (2015–2018) fits in this category, as well, featuring a group of special robots who must protect themselves from extermination by humans who find them a threat. Other recent robot-gone-wrong narratives have also tilted toward horror in their focus on the threat to humans posed by robot companions, as in the case of M3gan (2023), which features a robotic doll that is designed to be a child’s companion but that turns murderous. M3gan, of course, follows in the tradition of the Child’s Play slasher films, one of which (the 2019 reboot) even features a Chucky that is an artificially intelligent robot, rather than a haunted doll.
Recent works of literature about robot companions have tended to focus less on horror than have films, and it is certainly the case that Klara never turns deadly (or rebels in any way). In 2019, just two years before Klara and the Sun, two novels by important writers with lofty literary reputations jointed this group. Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me deals with a robot designed to be a domestic companion, in the process examining ethical questions about the relationships between humans and technology (as well as between humans and other humans). Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (whose title indicates its use of the Frankenstein narrative) deals with both sexbots and the possibility of uploading human minds into computers. Meanwhile, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model (2024) features a robot valet who becomes murderous, but the reasons for this turn are actually quite complex, leading to a compelling meditation on the future of humanity.
What We Know About Klara
Klara and the Sun functions, among other things, as a sort of Bildungsroman, or novel of development, in which we follow Klara as she learns about the world. Klara, though, is a quite unusual Bildungsroman protagonist because she does not grow and mature in the same way as a human protagonist. She, in fact, remains essentially the same, even as she gains knowledge and understanding of the world. She is, in fact, an unusual literary character in a number of ways. In general, for example, first-person narrators are the characters within novels with whom readers establish the most intimate connection, both because we have access to their inner thoughts and feelings and because everything that occurs in the narrative is presented to us from their perspective. In Klara’s case, though, this perspective is complicated by the fact that she simply does not perceive things in the same way as biological human beings—both in the literal, physical sense and in the cognitive sense. She has no sense of smell at all, for example, which removes one dimension from her perception altogether (and one that has sometimes played a particularly crucial role in literature, as in the case of Marcel Proust’s classic multi-volume modernist À la recherche du temps perdu). Indeed, while Klara does seem to process sounds in a way similar to humans as far as we can tell, her physical perception of the world seems to be primarily visual. We know for a fact, though, that her vision operates very differently from that of humans. She essentially scans the world in a very mechanical fashion, gathering inputs that come to her in a very fragmented (one might say “pixillated”) form (as boxes and squares or other geometric shapes) and then using her substantial processing power to make sense of that input. Occasionally, though, she experiences glitches that interrupt this process, and sometimes she clearly misperceives what she is seeing.
One might say, of course, that human beings do very much the same thing, and it is certainly the case that the way things “look” to us involves a great deal of interpretation beyond the simply receipt of signals. The difference, though, is that our brains process visual signals in a way that is entirely unconscious to us, creating the illusion that we are seeing the world directly, without processing. The fact is, though, that the signals perceived by all of our senses require a great deal of processing; we know, for example, that different species of animals process the same signals in very different ways, so that reality is perceived very differently, say, by a spider, or a frog, or a squirrel. Ed Yong’s best-selling 2022 book An Immense World provides a fascinating exploration of the way different animals process different sensual stimuli, making this point very clearly. In Klara’s case, though, this perception is foregrounded and is quite conscious, and she often describes in her narration the process by which she makes sense of visual stimuli, putting together a world that comes to her in bits and pieces in order to construct a coherent whole.
One of the interesting aspects of Klara and the Sun is that we, as readers, must continually perform a similar function of trying to piece together incomplete bits of information in order to attempt to make a coherent sense of things. Reviewer Alex Preston thus notes that, “as with Never Let Me Go, one of the enormous pleasures of Klara and the Sun is the way Ishiguro only drip-feeds to the reader hints and suggestions about the shape of this futuristic world, the reasons for its strangeness. We are left to do much of the imagining ourselves, and this makes the novel a satisfyingly collaborative read.”
Still, Klara’s method of processing visual inputs is one of the clearest reminders that she is not human, or even biological. While we get very little information about her actual construction, it is clear from the narrative that she is a humanoid electro-mechanical robot—as opposed to the genetically engineered biological artificial humans that have featured in science fiction narratives such as the film Blade Runner (1982). We don’t know, though, exactly how she operates or, in particular, how her computer brain has been able to achieve artificial intelligence. In fact, it becomes clear quite late in the novel that even the scientists and engineers who originally designed the AFs don’t actually know how they work (which is, incidentally, consistent with what many scientists expect to be the case if genuine artificial intelligence is ever achieved). Thus, the scientist Henry Capaldi comes to Klara late in the novel with a proposition. There is growing distrust of artificial intelligences among the human population, he tells her, largely because they are “black boxes,” whose inner workings are entirely mysterious. He thus asks Klara to volunteer to be taken apart and studied, in the hope of gaining a better understanding of how her brain works (390–91). Josie’s mother Chrissie intercedes, however, and refuses to allow Klara even to respond to this proposal, arguing that Klara “deserves better.” In particular, she argues that Klara deserves her “slow fade,” which is the first we have heard that AFs, having completed their work as a companion to a child who has now grown up, are apparently designed slowly to fade out of consciousness over time (391).
In this sense, the AFs would seem to be an interesting case of the “planned obsolescence” that is designed into so many consumer products. On the other hand, the novel also implies that Klara need not fade away. In fact, in a major plot twist late in the novel, we learn that Klara is being prepared to replace and “continue” Josie in the event that the seriously ill girl dies, though the actual process of this continuation is not entirely clear. From the information we are given, however, we can deduce that Capaldi has been carefully scanning and studying Josie’s body for some time, presumably so that he can design and build a special robot body that is an exact duplicate of hers. Klara’s robot brain would then apparently be transplanted into this new body, with instructions to act as much as possible like Josie would have. As evidence for this planned transplantation, we learn that Klara is highly concerned about what would happen to her original body in this event. Chrissie, though, simply dismisses this concern, clearly showing the extent to which Klara’s physical body is regarded as a mere thing: “What does it matter?” she asks. “That’s just fabric” (282).
In keeping with the “black box” analogy, we know very little about how Klara’s artificially intelligent mind works—or even about how intelligent she is. In many ways, she seems rather simple-minded, almost childlike. For example, perhaps not surprisingly for a solar-powered entity, Klara seems to think of the sun as a sort of benevolent god—and she even ultimately believes that the sun cures Josie of her ailment thanks to Klara’s own imprecations. In a special sort of dramatic irony, we as readers know that this explanation doesn’t make sense, which contributes to the characterization of Klara as naïve and innocent. Accordingly, the human characters often treat her in a very condescending manner. However, in still another sort of irony, the humans seem to accept that her intelligence is superior to their own. The text gives no real reasons for this assumption, but we can surmise that some AIs in this world might be smarter and/or more knowledgeable than is Klara, though it is also the case that the humans might simply be revealing their own suspicions (and fears) that AIs are smarter than they are.
Klara and the Sun as Philosophical Novel: Defining the “Human”
Science fiction narratives are centrally concerned with the question of the “Other” and of how we, as humans, relate to Otherness. Science fiction about intelligent robots and androids has often been described as exploring the question of what it means to be human and where we draw the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. At the same time, much science fiction deals with intelligent entities that clearly are not human in any literal sense, as in the case of most aliens from outer space. The clones of Never Let Me Go should surely be considered human in almost every conceivable way, yet they occupy a position of Otherness due to the specific process through which they are created and the purpose they are designed to serve. One could argue, on the other hand, that the robots of Klara and the Sun are machines, regardless of how intelligent they might be, and are therefore not literallyhuman, assuming that “human” is a biological category. But is it? Together, then, these two Ishiguro novels explore two fundamentally different questions with regard to Otherness: how do we relate to humans who are identifiably different from ourselves and how do we relate to the seemingly nonhuman?
One thing that both of these novels have in common is that their central Others do not question their own Otherness. As far as we can tell, especially through the attitudes expressed by Kathy H as the narrator, the clones of Never Let Me Go accept without question that they are genuinely different from other humans and that it is therefore legitimate to treat them differently. Similarly, as far as we can tell, especially through the attitudes expressed by Klara, the robots of Klara and the Sun also acknowledge their difference and seem to accept that their appropriate role is to serve humans. These novels thus raise legitimate questions about the treatment of clones and intelligent robots, questions that are likely to become relevant in a future in which both of these types of Others are likely to become a part of our daily lives. At the same time, both of these novels can also be read allegorically, so that the robots and clones can stand in for more general categories of Otherness, such as racial or class differences among humans
Some of the implications of such allegorical readings are largely political, as will be discussed in the next section of this discussion. Some of the implications, however, are more fundamental, raising basic philosophical questions about what it means to be human. This very rich novel addresses a number of different issues in this way, but in such an oblique manner that different readers have identified very different issues as crucial to the novel. Preston, for example, sees the novel as centrally exploring the ways humans feel love: “The narrative of Klara and the Sun is energised by the friction between two different types of love: one that is selfish, overprotective and anxious, and one that is generous, open and benevolent. It feels like a message for all of us as we go about our drearily circumscribed days.”
I described in the previous section exactly what it is that we know (or don’t know) about Klara from the contents of Klara and the Sun; by extension, we can assume that many of these same characteristics would apply to other AFs and to other robots in this world in general. At the same time, one of the intriguing characteristics of the robots is their potential individualism. They seem to be manufactured to serve specific purposes and to fill specific jobs; moreover, within a specific job category (such as the AFs), there are specific models of robots (such as B2s or B3s). To this extent, they can be categorized very much like any machines.At the same time, the level of intelligence associated with at least some of the robots gives them capabilities that go beyond those of ordinary machines and, in fact, endow them with a certain mysterious quality. Among other things, this mysterious quality seems to give the robots the ability to develop in individualized (and largely unpredictable) directions. Klara is the only robot we actually get to know, and the humans in the novel (especially the Manager of her original store, who presumably has considerable experience with AFs) continually emphasize that Klara is “special” and seems to have unusual abilities, such as being especially observant and especially good at learning from her observations.
This special, mysterious “black box” quality might be what makes the robots seem most human, but that is precisely what makes them seem most threatening to humans because it challenges the notion that humans are somehow unique, standing apart from the rest of nature or even reality as a whole. This topic is addressed directly in the segment of the novel in which we learn that Klara is being groomed to “continue” Josie. After all, to the extent that such a continuation might be effective, the whole concept suggests that humans might not be so special, after all.
Klara’s father clearly understands the implication of this continuation, a possibility to which he has agreed, even though he has serious doubts about its possible effectiveness. Indeed, he questions Klara directly about her ability to continue Josie effectively and to replicate even the mysterious inner core that makes Josie who she is:
“Do you believe in the human heart? I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual? And if we just suppose that there is. Then don’t you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you’d have to learn not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her? Wouldn’t you have to learn her heart?” (288).
For her part, Klara grants that this process might be difficult, but nevertheless believes that it can be done. Capaldi, meanwhile, responds that his years of research have shown that there is, in fact, no mysterious inner essence that makes human individuals who they are, so that it should be entirely possible to replicate individuals with appropriately programmed machines.
Klara, of course, seems to have been programmed to be optimistic, which is part of her childlike charm. Reviewer Anne Enright thus notes that “we, the readers, love Klara the way we love what is good. We love her the way we loved our childhood teddy bear, perhaps, or even in the way we love a fictional character. Because even the most rounded fictional character is also a kind of animated doll; a code made out of language and the readers’ goodwill, which makes us smile or cry because we believe in it. The credulity of the reader is a hopeful and sometimes beautiful thing. Klara and the Sun captures this poignancy exactly – not because of the way people believe in Klara, but because of the way she starts to believe in the sun.”
Of course, Enright’s positive view of Klara’s innocence ignores the fact that this innocence has apparently been programmed. Within the novel, she has been designed by her manufacturers to be childlike and thus to be a perfect companion for a child—as well as to seem non-threatening to humans. And, in the larger sense, she has been designed by Ishiguro to be likeable and non-threatening to readers so that they can establish the kind of connection with her that is necessary to make any first-person narrative function properly. After all, she potentially threatens our sense that we human beings are special and unique creation, and Ishiguro has to overcome any uneasiness this might create in readers.
As Banerjee notes, Ishiguro raises precisely that very fundamental question. In his book Our Posthuman Future (2002), Francis Fukuyama has argued that the existence of a “Factor X,” or an irreducible individual essence that makes each individual human special, is the thing that new posthuman creatures created by advancing biotechnologies would find it most difficult to replicate. For Fukuyama “when we strip all of a person’s contingency and accidental characteristics away, there remains some essential human quality underneath … call it Factor X.” Further, he concludes, this characteristic is the key to human ethics and justice: “We are required to respect people equally on the basis of their possession of Factor X” (Fukuyama 2002, 149-50). Citing Fukuyama, though, Banerjee argues that it is precisely this Factor X that has often been a source of injustice, noting that “throughout history, large communities of people—people of color, especially—were exploited on their perceived lack or insufficiency of this ‘Factor X’” (13). And Klara and the Sun, meanwhile, calls into question the very existence of such a “Factor X.”
Klara and the Sun as Political Novel: The Dystopian Mode
The political commentary in Klara and the Sun is complicated by the fact that Klara does not have a sophisticated understanding of social or political issues, leaving it to the reader to piece together a vision of the society of the novel that goes beyond her limited understanding. For example, the narrative functions as climate fiction to the extent that Klara is vaguely aware that human-produced pollutants have seriously degraded the environment of her world. Indeed, the deal she makes with the sun to save Josie involve her promise to destroy a piece of smoke-belching construction equipment, which she seems naïvely to believe to be the source of all the pollution in her world. But we know very little about the actual status of climate change and environmental damage in this future world.
At the same time, the very limitations in Klara’s point of view can also be read allegorically. In a deft bit of cognitive estrangement, she is able to understand the world only in certain ways because she has been programmed to do so, which seems very foreign to us—unless we stop to ask whether the same thing might be true of all of us. There is, for example, a rich tradition of theorists who have argued that individuals are able to understand the world only within the limits that have been imposed on us by the ideological climate in which we live. For example, in the process he labels “interpellation,” the French theorist Louis Althusser has argued that individual subjects are not just influenced, but are literally created by the ideologies to which they have been exposed, which means that it is very difficult for individuals to think beyond that ideology.
Klara also seems to sense that her society is stratified according to class, thus her continual tendency to “rank” individuals, as when anyone who seems affluent or important is described by her as “high-ranking.” Indeed, the society of this novel does seem highly stratified, as can perhaps be most clearly seen in the process of “lifting” that features prominently in the plot, even though Ishiguro never clearly explains just what this procedure entails (partly because Klara, who provides us with most of our information, might not understand it herself). What we do know is that this procedure seems to be quite expensive and quite dangerous, but that many parents in this world nevertheless chose to have their children undergo this process, which we can imagine to be some sort of genetic enhancement that is designed to boost cognitive functions, possibly in an attempt to allow humans better to compete with AIs (though that is never specified in the text).
One key element of Klara and the Sun is that Josie’s somewhat less economically privileged friend Rick has not been lifted, though she has. Rick is extremely bright and talented and apparently is able eventually to pursue a career designing surveillance drones (a suggestion with its own ominous resonances), despite his supposed intellectual limitations. As children, Josie and Rick make plans to marry someday and have a life together, though this eventuality never develops, presumably because she is successfully lifted, opening worlds to her that are not open to him. Meanwhile, the majority of the plot of the novel is driven by Josie’s difficulty with the lifting process. Her older sister has already died as a result of the lifting treatment, but Chrissie decides to proceed with Josie’s treatment nevertheless, a decision that causes Josie to become seriously ill and nearly to die.
That Josie’s mother is willing to risk this dangerous treatment even after the death of her first daughter suggests just how important she believes lifting to be. Whether or not this belief derives from a desire to compete with the AIs, it is clear that she and the other humans of the novel regard AIs as cognitively superior to humans. Thus, Chrissie at one point suggests that Klara might serve as a tutor to Rick if he goes to college, thus allowing him better to function in an environment in which most students will be lifted. The respect that everyone seems to have for Klara’s intellect seems ironic, though, given the limited and very simplistic understanding she seems to have of reality. Indeed, one question that is never answered in the novel is why Klara’s knowledge base seems so limited. High school students in this world seem to do most of their learning remotely at home, presumably through connection to something like the internet. Klara, however, does not seem to be on-line at all but is limited to the knowledge that she was either initially programmed with or gains through her own direct experience.
The class-based stratification of the society of Klara and the Sun can also be seen via the role played by Melania the Housekeeper, who plays a rather minor, background role in the novel, though that is largely the point. As a household servant, she might have important responsibilities, but she occupies a social status similar to that of the AFs and is clearly regarded as a sort of second-class member of the Arthur household. She also appears to speak with an accent and so might be an immigrant of some sort. Her presence in the novel thus serves to provide a link between the novel’s robots and human “Others,” such as servants or immigrants. She therefore also reinforces the allegorical reading of the robots as stand-ins for servants or immigrants, so that attitudes toward the robots in the novel can be taken as a commentary on the treatment of immigrants and servants (or other workers). Of course, the very fact that Melania occupies a position somewhat similar to that of Klara means that she is particularly in danger of being “substituted” by a robot similar to Klara that might be able to take on her duties. This possibility might explain the housekeeper’s initial hostility to Klara, though she does seem to gain more sympathy with Klara as the novel continues, partly because she feels that she and Klara are on the “same side” in terms of wanting to promote Josie’s welfare.
In this sense, it is important that the novel’s humans, so many of whom (including Josie’s father) have already lost their jobs due to being “substituted” by robots, are so clearly anxious about the possibility that humans might be replaced by robots altogether. This fear of being made obsolete by automation is an old one, of course, though an allegorical reading would suggest that this anxiety in our contemporary environment might be a version of the “Replacement Theory” that is a classic case of the fear of the Other that has often featured in science fiction narratives. This theory expresses the fear of certain right-wing elements in America (especially white Christian nationalist extremists) that the United States (which they view as an inherently white Christian nation) is in danger of being overrun by dangerous hordes of nonwhite and nonChristian newcomers who immigrate to the United States in alarming numbers and then multiply at spectacular rates once they arrive here, thus threatening to “replace” white Christians as the dominant demographic group in America.
Klara’s potential “continuation” of Josie is a special case of Replacement, of course, though Josie’s eventual recovery means that this continuation is not necessary. By this time, though, Josie herself has concluded that she might, in fact, have trouble continuing Josie, though not because of some special and inimitable property of Josie herself: “There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn’t have succeeded” (402).
The concern with the “substitution” of human workers is a key element of the dystopian texture of Klara and the Sun, both in terms of the threat it poses to humans and in terms of the possibly right-wing, or even fascist responses that this threat might trigger in humans. At one point, Helen, the mother of Rick, arranges a meeting with a former boyfriend of hers who is now an influential figure with substantial influence on the admission policies of one of the few universities that might admit a student who has not been “lifted.” As they await the man’s arrival, she tells Paul, “I think you’ll find you have certain things in common. For instance, he too has fascistic leanings. He always has done though I always tried not to notice” (305). When Paul then objects to her characterization of his leanings as “fascist,” she explains that it is only because of his rhetoric about the sense of community where he lives, in which he had described himself and his friends as an all-white group of formerly elite professionals who feel themselves threatened by other “types.” Paul responds, somewhat defensively, “What I was saying earlier has nothing to do with fascism. We have no aggressive agenda beyond defending ourselves should the need arise. Where you live, Helen, maybe you don’t have to worry yet, and I sincerely hope it’ll be that way for a long time. Where I am, it’s different” (305).
We don’t really get details that would allow us to determine whether Helen’s characterization of Paul’s group as “fascist” is accurate, though it is clear that Paul feels threatened and embattled by the social conditions that prevail in this future world. In fact, he and his neighbors appear to live in something of a fortified enclave, arming themselves for potential violence, though it is not clear whether they are primarily opposed to other groups of humans or to AIs. In fact, Paul seems oddly complacent about the loss of his formerly respected professional position due to the AIs, claiming to be quite happy in his new community: “I like it there,” he says. “I’m sharing my life with some very fine people, and most of them came down the same road I did. It’s become clear to all of us now, there are many different ways to lead a decent and full life” (305–6). He claims that he views his new life not in terms of loss but simply in terms of change.
Finally, one key issue in Klara and the Sun is the exploitation of the AFs and other AIs, though this exploitation is never actually openly discussed, largely because it never seems to occur to Klara herself to complain about her own exploitation. Yet, as a sapient entity that is nevertheless literally considered to be a piece of property, Klara and her kind clearly function very much as slaves—a connection that is made more openly in other narratives about artificial workers, such as Blade Runner. But the replicants of Blade Runner are conscious of their exploitation and rebel against it. The AIs of Klara and Sun, like the clones of Never Let Me Go, seem passively to accept their lot and never suggest that they see anything wrong with it. As Banerjee notes, then, they epitomize the stereotype of the “happy slave,” which some have used as a specious justification for slavery. For Banerjee, in fact, “Klara, as a manufacturable, replaceable, and recyclable commodity, is the ultimate capitalist fantasy of the perfect slave: tireless, selfless, meek, and all too eager to serve” (5).
Of course, read allegorically, Klara and the other AIs can also stand in for the position occupied by workers in general in a capitalist society. However much they might seem to threaten to “take over,” it is clear in the novel that the AIs are commodities, manufactured and marketed (for profit) like any other commodities. They are, of course, particularly high-tech commodities, so that their depiction in the text can serve, among other things, as a commentary on the way in which high-tech commodities seem continually to transform our lives, often in ways to which we do not necessarily adjust well. Mejia and Nikolaidis thus observe that Klara and the Sun “makes vivid the way in which emerging technologies developed by profit-seeking corporations are reshaping our private lives” (303).
Then again, the AIs of Klara and the Sun are a special form of commodity in that many of them can perform the function of producing other commodities—which is exactly how human workers function under capitalism. Thus, as Benia and Dagamseh note that “these AIs serve as tools for economic forces seeking human perfectibility and progress within neoliberal capitalist societies, thus, further commodifying human relationships and emotions” (124). The fact that AIs can be employed as long as they are useful, then cast aside when they are not clearly has implications for the way human workers have long been treated under capitalism, as well.
Klara and the Sun and History
In addition to presenting us with an entire future world (however vaguely described) Ishiguro also presents us in Klara and the Sun with an implied vision of future history—well beyond the obvious fact that the book’s future world differs so substantially from our own present. As with most aspects of the novel, we are given few actual details about this history, though one thing most of the characters seem to accept without question is that the changing world they inhabit will continue to change, perhaps even more rapidly than before. Thus, Helen (who is from England) nostalgically thinks back on the country of her birth, thinking especially of the hedges that have been used as boundary markers in rural areas for centuries, as opposed to the less permanent fencing used in this country (which can probably be taken as a future version of the United States, though that is never actually stated in the novel):
‘You can tear down a fence in a moment,’ she said. ‘Then put up another somewhere else. Change the entire configuration of the land in a day or two. A land of fences is so temporary. You can change things as easily as a stage set. … Fences, what are they? Stage design. That’s the nice thing about England. Hedges give a sense of history properly set down in the land. (200–1)
Whether hedges are really all that permanent is another matter, of course, but nostalgia is seldom concerned with actual reality. This sense of being overwhelmed by constant, rapid change is a key part of the postmodern condition, of course, and Klara and the Sun is built on the perception that unchecked change, especially in technological innovation, might eventually lead, not just to changing humans themselves, but to replacing them altogether. This sense, though, is as old as capitalism itself. As long ago as 1848, Marx and Engels were discussing the impermanence of everything, including social relations, under the pressure of capitalist innovation. In one of their more famous passages, they note that
constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudice and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solidmelts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, in his relations with his kind. (6)
Marx and Engels were certainly correct that capitalism was driven by innovation as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, though it is also clear that the pace of innovation has picked up in the recent years of the electronic information age—and that artificial intelligence might be the most dramatic innovation of all. Robert Crary convincingly argues that human identities have come, in the twenty-first century, to be defined more and more in relation to our consumption of specific technological objects and devices that themselves are continually replaced by newer models and thus rendered obsolete. This rapid pace of innovation means that our identities must themselves be revised and updated at a faster and faster pace, while those identities are rendered more tenuous in the first place by the knowledge that the devices we so cherish are temporary and provisional:
Now the brevity of the interlude before a high-tech product literally becomes garbage requires two contradictory attitudes to coexist: on the one hand, the initial need and/or desire for the product, but, on the other, an affirmative identification with the process of inexorable cancellation and replacement. (45)
In short, eventually, the consumerist desire that drives subjects under late capitalism becomes a desire not for the commodity itself but for the newness of the commodity and for the sense of being up-to-date on all the innovations being produced by the consumerist system.
This frantic pace of change and this obsession with innovation itself both contribute to the loss of historical sense that Fredric Jameson has so influentially associated with life during the postmodernist era of late capitalism. And, while Klara and the Sun is not a quintessential example of postmodern fiction, it is certainly the case that it shows a concern with a possible loss of historical sense. In fact, one might argue that this same concern can be found in much of Ishiguro’s fiction. Thus, Radhika Jones, reviewing Klara and the Sun, has noted that “for four decades now, Ishiguro has written eloquently about the balancing act of remembering without succumbing irrevocably to the past.” Further, Jones argues that, in this novel, Ishiguro “has mastered the adjacent theme of obsolescence. What is it like to inhabit a world whose mores and ideas have passed you by? What happens to the people who must be cast aside in order for others to move forward?”
In short, the planned obsolescence of technological devices like Klara is reflective of an emphasis on changes that also applies to human beings, and characters such as Helen have a very strong sense of having been rendered obsolete. Indeed, all of the adult human characters seem to share this sense, and the very fact that so many of them support and accept the notion of “lifting” the younger generation shows their acknowledgement of their own obsolescence. This process can apparently be applied only to the young, so that creating a younger “lifted” generation renders their elders obsolete and unable to compete in the new lifted world.
To an extent, this aspect of Klara and the Sun is again merely an extension of phenomena that have long been underway in late capitalism. Writing in the 1960s, at a time when late capitalism was still in its infancy (or at least early childhood), the eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead already marveled not only at the increasing rate of change in the modern world. For her, modern culture changes so rapidly that only the very young are living in their own culture; by the time they reach adulthood, they will already be living in a culture that is foreign to the one they grew up in:
Today, everyone born and bred before World War II is an immigrant in time—as his colonizing forebears were in space—struggling to grapple with the unfamiliar conditions of life in a new era. Like all immigrants and pioneers, these immigrants in time are the bearers of older cultures. The difference today is that they are represented in all the cultures of the world. (70–71)
It should be noted, though, that Klara and the Sun addresses a major breakpoint in history—the transition from the era of human domination of the earth (often called the “anthropocene”) to a posthuman era dominated by artificial intelligences—that is not just more of the same. Jones addresses this fact, as well, comparing Ishiguro to Thomas Hardy as a writer who also wrote about the passing of a way of life, in his case the passing from a traditional, agrarian England to a modern, industrial England. Of course, by the time Hardy was writing his novels in the late nineteenth century, the transition to a modern, industrial world had already occurred, while the posthuman transition of which Ishiguro writes is still a speculation about the future: Hardy was essentially writing historical novels, while Ishiguro is writing science fiction.
In this sense, Klara and the Sun itself marks an important historical change in literature that has been noted by Jameson. Noting that the historical novel “corresponded” to the emergence of a sense of history in its modern sense, Jameson argues that
science fiction equally corresponds to the waning or the blockage of that historicity, and, particularly in our own time (in the postmodern era), to its crisis and paralysis, its enfeeblement and repression. Only by means of a violent formal and narrative dislocation could a narrative apparatus come into being capable of restoring life and feeling to this only intermittently functioning organ that is our capacity to organize and live time historically. Nor should it be thought overhastily that the two forms are symmetrical on the grounds that the historical novel stages the past and science fiction the future. (284).
At first glance, Klara and the Sun would seem to contradict Jameson’s argument that the emergence of science fiction marks a loss of genuine historical sense, given the extent to which the novel acknowledges the process of historical change. And this change would seem to be a dramatic one, potentially leading to a radically different historical future. Yet one could also argue that the humans in the book operate mostly in a state of denial in terms of what this change will really mean. Their principal response to the rise of AIs is either to retreat into armed enclaves informed by an old-fashioned sense of community or to attempt to compete with the AIs by “lifting” their children. The novels humans, meanwhile, don’t really seem to have come to grips with the fact that they are in the midst of such a fundamental historical shift, remaining optimistic that it will all somehow be okay.
Most initial reviewers saw the ongoing hope displayed by the novel’s characters as positive. Gordon thus argues,
Although the characters’ plans often fail to work out, the novel doesn’t end on their disappointments. Instead, we see them pick themselves up and start afresh, and the cumulative effect is strangely uplifting. Hope, in this novel, isn’t the opposite of acceptance but of despair; it isn’t a mechanism for denying reality so much as a purposeful way of experiencing it. And some of the time, it might even be the most reliable way there is” (Gordon).
Similarly, Enright notes that, in the novel, “the promise is held out that those who wait will be rewarded, and sometimes they are. Other times, the reality is disappointing or even brutal, but win or lose, hope is such a sustaining thing that it becomes a value in itself. Hope, in the face of sickness and possible death, is what Klara does best.” I would argue, though, that the attitudes of the novel’s human characters might, in fact, be seen as a way of denying reality. In fact, the fact that their hopefulness tends to mirror Klara’s own (as in her faith that the sun can cure Josie) is not necessarily a good thing, given that Klara’s attitudes often arise from (presumably programmed) ignorance.
In short, in what might be interpreted as a massive failure of imagination, these characters continue to think in the terms of the past, rather than coming to grips with the possibility of a genuinely different future. Characters who respond to the AI crisis tend to do so either by retreating into the past (like Paul and his community) or by pretending that somehow they can continue to live as they always have, with adjustments (as with “lifting”). To this extent, Klara and the Sun (as is typical of the dystopian genre) serves as a cautionary tale that warns humans that the terms of the past might not be sufficient and that we need to think beyond them in order to succeed in what promises to be a very different future.
Klara and the Sun is the work of a major literary artist, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. As such, it not surprisingly addresses a number of fundamental philosophical issues, including basic questions about what it means to be a human being and about the ways human beings should relate to one another. But Klara and the Sun is an important novel in multiple ways. As a work of science fiction, it addresses prominent contemporary anxieties and concerns about technological change. As a highly self-conscious work of literary art, it addresses historical changes in literature itself. It also serves as a superb demonstration of the by-now-undeniable fact that science fiction can also be high literary art, showing the ability of science fiction to point toward completely new ways of thinking that might be necessitated by technological and other historical changes.
Works Cited
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Benia, Amel, and Abdullah M. Dagamseh. “Capitalist Dreams, Posthuman Nightmares: AI and the Neoliberal Reordering of Humanity in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 121–37.
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