Books
Review: ‘Klara and the Sun’ Is A Book With Moxie
In 2020, a company introduced Moxie, a dystopian “social support robot” designed to help kids learn human interaction. As we wrote at the time, this super creepy product resembles something out of a Black Mirror episode. In a day and age in which children are forced to wear masks when they interact with their peers, what Moxie offers is in some ways more social than what is available in actual social settings. This may be a selling point for Embodied, the company that makes Moxie, but it certainly does not inspire confidence in the direction our once great society is heading.
I have no idea if Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize-winning author who wrote Klara and the Sun knew specifically about Moxie when he was coming up with his latest book. Presumably he researched similar “advancements” in child development technology enough to know that such products are on the horizon. The result is a touching, nuanced depiction of what “life” would be like for a social support robot, and what that means for the human world that welcomes it.
The titular Klara in Klara and the Sun is the story’s protagonist, an “Artificial Friend” or “AF,” and the story is told from her first-person perspective. From the get-go Ishiguro puts the reader in her shoes, establishing a world in which few things are truly certain. The AF’s in the book are programmed with an artificial intelligence, but their core function is comforting and supporting the growth of a human child. There are certain things we take for granted that are completely unknown to Klara, and the first few chapters are critical in helping us understand the way Klara “thinks.” As soon as that perspective is fortified, Ishiguro proceeds with the main story.
After days of waiting in the store for her lucky day, Klara is purchased by the mother of a sick girl to be her artificial companion. Turns out this is a more difficult assignment than that given most AF’s, and the reader comes to question what exactly are Klara’s responsibilities—if any—as a robot to aid in her convalescence. She certainly goes above and beyond what the girl’s parents expect of her, which, as it turns out in a major twist, is actually quite a lot.
It is hard to discuss the themes of Klara and the Sun without including spoilers, since it is such a simple tale whose enjoyment comes from the gradual understanding of the world Ishiguro is painting. It is not quite the world we live in, or at least not yet, but our world is certainly recognizable in it. The adults in the novel make several decisions that would be controversial but nowhere near unthinkable if presented as options today. After reading Klara and the Sun, one can only wonder: Is this where we are heading? And if so, how do we prepare?
The most impressive thing about this short novel is that the author manages to be neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the situation detailed. When I first read the description, Luddite that I am, I was prepared to hate Klara and hope for characters to start smashing the AF’s before Skynet takes over. If you come to the book from this viewpoint, I don’t expect you to necessarily change your mind about the inherent value of Artificial Friends. But similar to watching the HBO series Westworld, you might come away with more sympathy for the robots than expected. Most importantly, you may realize that there are certain things that are obvious to a nascent species of intelligence that humankind seems to have forgotten along the way.
Klara and the Sun is certainly a book written for its time, and in future years may be viewed as downright prescient. If the implications of products like Moxie interests you, then I definitely recommend it. I have not read Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go, the Ishiguro novels that are regarded as classics, but I enjoyed this enough that I certainly will.