![]() ![]() Josie and her mom are shopping for an AF. The time, concerningly, is a future that may not be that far off.Īt first, we are downtown, in a city where taxis dominate the traffic. ![]() ![]() Time and place are not specified, but it’s not impossible to recognise this world as somewhere in America – mum is mom, the sky is gray (not grey) and later on there are references to a couple of States. ![]() Josie is ‘pale and thin’, anxious and unwell - as is Cassie, her mum. That’s Klara’s estimate, anyway: a party-trick of hers. Josie is 14 and a half years old at the start of the book. The full designation Artificial Friend (rather than AF) is, carefully, only given once, indicative of Ishiguro’s style, which is more or less jargon-free science fiction. Fundamentally it’s a story about what it means to be loved. The book is about her two key relationships: with Josie, her client and raison d’être, and with ‘the Sun’, her essential energy source and object of worship. She is bought, as one might a domestic appliance, as a companion for Josie, to prevent the teenager from becoming lonely. Klara is the narrator, and she is an AF, an Artificial Friend. He touches on AI towards the end of his Nobel Lecture and evidently was already ‘very deep’ into writing the novel. Klara and the Sun is Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel is as much about what it is to be human as it is about artificial intelligence. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |