Klara and the Sun, The War with the Newts, Some of Your Blood
Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is written from the perspective of an artificial friend (AF), an android companion for children. We learn a lot about Klara as she waits to be chosen by a customer along with the other AFs. In particular, her devotion and adoration of the sun. Perhaps because she is solar powered, she comes to essentially worship the Sun. Klara is chosen by Josie, a sickly teen, and does her best to befriend and help Josie navigate her illness and her relationship with a neighbor boy and her future.
Klara is both perceptive and naive about different aspects of the world, which makes for an interesting read. Without cribbing from BladeRunner or the android section of Cloud Atlas, the novel certainly raises similar questions about the human experience. WIth Klara's innocent voice, the ultimate meaning or theme of the book is somewhat ambiguous, and probably I'm just projecting my own prejudices, but one truth of the novel is that we can never know what's going on in the head of someone else. Klara generally responds appropriately in human situations, but her idiosyncratic religion is literally insane. Although one might suppose this is what could distinguish androids from humans, I rather think the implication is that it's a similarity.
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The War with the Newts, by Karel Capek
Speaking of androids... the author who gave us the word 'robot' also wrote this satire in the interwar period. I recognized the title, but really knew nothing about the plot, and picked this up at the Little Free Library when I was dropping off some books. Glad I did. Some of the humor may not play as well in modern America as in 1930s Prague, but there's still some great insight into the human condition. Mankind's essential flaw in the novel is quite apparent today in climate change denial (and to some extent from COVID-19 idiocy.) So maybe this book should find itself some new currency.
I did what I could; I warned them in time ... I preached, don't [enable the Newts by doing business with them], well -- you know what happened. They all had a thousand absolutely sound economical and political reasons why it's impossible. I'm not a politician or an economist; I can't change their opinions, can I? What is one to do? The earth will probably sink and drown; but at least it will be the result of generally acknowledged political and economic ideas, at least it will be accomplished with the help of the science, industry, and public opinion, with the application of all human ingenuity! No cosmic catastrophe, nothing but the state, official, economic, and other causes. Nothing can be done to prevent it.
There are also some faint but eerie allusions to Nazism. Capek was antifa before it was cool, and he had the good fortune, probably, to die of pneumonia before the Gestapo got to him. "Several months later, just after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Nazi agents came to the Čapek family house in Prague to arrest him.[11] Upon discovering that he had already been dead for some time, they arrested and interrogated his wife Olga.[36] His brother Josef was arrested in September and eventually died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945."
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Some of Your Blood, by Ted Sturgeon
You can almost hear Sturgeon saying to himself in 1960, "That little shit Bob Bloch wrote about some psycho murderer with a sick and twisted ending and now he's in Hollywood having money fights. I'll show him a psycho murderer with a sick and twisted ending." A little hokey, a little gimmicky, but fine airplane fodder.
Klara is both perceptive and naive about different aspects of the world, which makes for an interesting read. Without cribbing from BladeRunner or the android section of Cloud Atlas, the novel certainly raises similar questions about the human experience. WIth Klara's innocent voice, the ultimate meaning or theme of the book is somewhat ambiguous, and probably I'm just projecting my own prejudices, but one truth of the novel is that we can never know what's going on in the head of someone else. Klara generally responds appropriately in human situations, but her idiosyncratic religion is literally insane. Although one might suppose this is what could distinguish androids from humans, I rather think the implication is that it's a similarity.
---
The War with the Newts, by Karel Capek
Speaking of androids... the author who gave us the word 'robot' also wrote this satire in the interwar period. I recognized the title, but really knew nothing about the plot, and picked this up at the Little Free Library when I was dropping off some books. Glad I did. Some of the humor may not play as well in modern America as in 1930s Prague, but there's still some great insight into the human condition. Mankind's essential flaw in the novel is quite apparent today in climate change denial (and to some extent from COVID-19 idiocy.) So maybe this book should find itself some new currency.
I did what I could; I warned them in time ... I preached, don't [enable the Newts by doing business with them], well -- you know what happened. They all had a thousand absolutely sound economical and political reasons why it's impossible. I'm not a politician or an economist; I can't change their opinions, can I? What is one to do? The earth will probably sink and drown; but at least it will be the result of generally acknowledged political and economic ideas, at least it will be accomplished with the help of the science, industry, and public opinion, with the application of all human ingenuity! No cosmic catastrophe, nothing but the state, official, economic, and other causes. Nothing can be done to prevent it.
There are also some faint but eerie allusions to Nazism. Capek was antifa before it was cool, and he had the good fortune, probably, to die of pneumonia before the Gestapo got to him. "Several months later, just after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Nazi agents came to the Čapek family house in Prague to arrest him.[11] Upon discovering that he had already been dead for some time, they arrested and interrogated his wife Olga.[36] His brother Josef was arrested in September and eventually died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945."
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Some of Your Blood, by Ted Sturgeon
You can almost hear Sturgeon saying to himself in 1960, "That little shit Bob Bloch wrote about some psycho murderer with a sick and twisted ending and now he's in Hollywood having money fights. I'll show him a psycho murderer with a sick and twisted ending." A little hokey, a little gimmicky, but fine airplane fodder.