Pun Salad

I got this from the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library because Reason editor Katherine Mangu-Ward kept recommending it, most recently in the magazine's AI issue.

I haven't had the greatest luck with Reason writers' recommendations of SF novels in the past, but this one worked out. The author, Kazuo Ishiguro, is a well-respected author of "serious" fiction, and this wound up being a best-seller, and garnered heaps of critical praise. (Oddly, it doesn't seem to have been nominated for the Hugo or Nebula best novel awards.)

It's narrated by Klara, an "Artificial Friend" (AF). As the story opens, Klara is on display in the AF store, awaiting possible purchase. It's apparent from the start that Klara views the world around her in a distinctly different way. She's solar-powered, so her attitude toward the Sun is that of a loving disciple to a benevolent god. She studies the patterns sunlight and shadow make on objects, looking for portents. She notices details humans would find trivial; important-to-us stuff seems to be beyond her ken. Her perceptions of her surroundings are decidedly non-human, and strange to the human reader. (That would be me.) And she gets some wacky ideas in her CPU over the course of the book.

Also: it appears Klara's model line is being superseded by the "B3" AF units that have just appeared on the market.

But Klara gets lucky when young Josie and her mom appear in the store. Mom is looking for an AF for Josie. (It turns out Mom has hidden motives for that, which only become known later.) Josie takes Klara home, and they become close. But all is not well, because Josie is sickly. She has a rocky relationship with neighbor Rick, a boy with unrecognized promise. Eventually, other family members show up, present and past acquaintances appear on the scene, and dysfunctions are slowly revealed.

Speaking of dys-: most reviewers peg this as a "dystopian" novel. But since Klara is narrating, and she only has dim perceptions of anything outside her relationships with Josie and the Sun, you really have to pick up some subtle clue-dropping about the surrounding society. Some kids, it turns out, are "lifted", some are not. What's up with that? If you're not a careful reader, and I'm not as careful as I should be, you'll miss some important detail.

But the overall lesson seems to be a grim one at best: the impermanence of human relationships. Kara has no heart to break, but we readers do. Be warned.