Klara and The Sun/Pack Up The Moon

 Klara and The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Within the first few pages you get a sense of something being not quite right. Through a comment here and a description there, a picture starts to form of what is going on behind the scenes, and though you may want to laugh it off as just fiction, something in you knows we're not that far away from becoming the society the book portrays.

Klara is an AF, an Artificial Friend, a companion parents buy for their teenage children. Klara's teenager is Josie, whose mother is still working in spite of most jobs being done now by AI, and whose father lives in a community of those who have already been replaced. Klara's purpose is to be as much help to Josie as she can, at the same time obeying the instructions of Josie's mother. Josie is unwell and Klara wants nothing more than to see her get better and is convinced The Sun can heal her with its "special nourishment."

In this near-future society parents must choose by a certain age whether or not to have their children genetically enhanced to give them an advantage in education and in life, even though some of the "uplifted" children suffer weakened health as a result. Klara's sister died after enhancement so choosing that path for Josie was risky, but her parents didn't want to deny her the chance at a better future. They also couldn't face the loss of another child, but perhaps a way could be found to  keep Josie with them even if she did succumb to the illness. Cue eerie music here. 

Next door to Josie live Rick and his mother. Rick is not one of the lifted but he's smart and talented enough for his mother to try to get him into a school that usually will take only enhanced students. Rick and Josie are best friends with a long term plan for their lives together and one of Klara's responsibilities is to act as chaperone so the adults have that one thing less to worry about. 

I enjoy Kishiguro's writing, the spare, straightforward language and the uneasy tone he creates. The characters live the lives they must while the reader grows quietly horrified and yet can't look away; it's all too probable.  

This book and another of Ishiguro's, Never Let Me Go, have never let me go. Both left me wondering if it really must come to this, and isn't there something we should do to make sure it doesn't, while knowing that it's probably too late to stop the AI avalanche that's already gathering speed and power as it thunders towards us. It's the matter-of-fact acceptance of it all in the novels and in our real world that make these scenarios so chilling, yet both books are terrific and I wouldn't want to not have read them. In fact, I will probably read them again.  

Klara and The Sun is a book you can't put down, an unsettling story about what it means to be human and how far we could/should go in our quest to make machines human, too.   

Pack Up the Moon by Kristin Higgins

A young husband, Josh, struggles with grief after losing his wife to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. A few weeks after the funeral he receives the first of her letters - there'll be one for each month of his first year without her - assigning him tasks she hopes will help him get out and start living again. It's a terribly sad love story that will probably leave you in tears, but I didn't find it offered much beyond an opportunity to cry. If that's what you need - and who doesn't sometimes - you might love it.