A Future Worthy of Her Spirit

Klara and the Sun (2021), Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel after winning the Nobel Prize in 2017, takes the form of the classical dystopia, the privileged "socio-political subgenre" of contemporary science fiction. Ishiguro's novel is set in a near-future United States where humanoid artificial intelligences have taken up a prominent place in an advanced neoliberal economy. Like the clone children in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005), these AIs serve as allegorical figures of disposable affective labor in a service economy. Klara and the Sun also explores the undermining of the bonds across generations produced by desperate efforts to reproduce an upper-middle-class status quo within what William Davies terms "punitive neoliberalism." This is figured in the novel by way of the changes that have occurred over the last four decades in the modern university. And yet for all the novel's grimness, Ishiguro ends on a note of hope.

Dystopia · intergenerational bonds · Kazuo Ishiguro · Klara and the Sun · neoliberal university · Never Let Me Go · reproductive futurism · Science fiction · Service economy · William Davies · Artificial Intelligence · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Literary and Philosophical Studies · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction