Keeping humanity at the center of our orbit

by Heather Shayne Blakeslee

EXCERPT //

Two books by British author Kazuo Ishiguro have been circling one another in my thoughts the last few months—his elegiac The Remains of the Day, set in Postwar Britain, and his most recent novel, Klara and the Sun, set in a non-specific modern American city that some argue is Pittsburgh, though the decade is mysterious; like an episode of the futuristic show Black Mirror, the natural hues of the countryside are intact, and the cities look like modern cities, but our technology, and how it affects us, has blanketed us in darkness.

In an interview with the Pittsburgh City Paper, Ishiguro told interviewer Rege Behe, “I was trying to show a society in flux. [We see] all these huge new changes, breakthroughs in science and technology that have happened, that I believe are actually happening now. I thought America was a more suitable place because many of these innovations are coming from America, but also because it’s a country that’s always trying to reorganize itself. It is a country that’s asking questions about how [we] organize our society, and it’s often changing. I thought it was a more apt place to set a story with a backdrop that could turn dystopian, or it could be okay.”

Both novels are set within a small group of people, and each of them digs into timeless themes of social class, what constitutes meaningful work and purpose, what kind of society we want to live in, and, ultimately, what it means to be human and to have lived a good life. …

A compendium of modern fears and woes can be drawn out of the ruminations of these novels: What rules are we playing by? Who made them? Who made us? Are we in a simulation? A parallel universe? Is it just physics and the music of the spheres that we hear as the voice of God? Are we human? What is it to be human?

Ishiguro asks us to think hard about what that means, and whether what makes us human can ever really be understood with the limited capacity that we humans have. //

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OPENING SALVO // You Are The Sun