- [Kazuo] Hi, this is Kazuo Ishiguro and this is my new novel Klara and the Sun.

Klara is a little robot, AI girl created to prevent teenagers from becoming lonely.

And this is a story of how she tries to save the family of humans she lives with from heartbreak and how she tries to enlist the help of the sun up in the sky to do this.

- The unfolding of the story from Klara's perspective felt a little bit like seeing the world through the eyes of a child.

Would you tell us a little bit about Klara's understanding of the sun and how she thinks it works?

- She has very little in terms of memory or history and- but she's learning very, very fast.

So there's something very childlike about her.

But she's so solar powered, right?

So although she has very few other prejudices or knowledge, the fact that she's solar powered has this big influence on her, she thinks everything good comes from the sun.

That's where she gets her nourishment.

And when she looks out of the window, she assumes that all the human beings she can see out in the street are in the same position.

So it's a kind of a religious thing, but I wanted to write about that instinct without any of the, kind of, the baggage of organized religion, without power, politics, and tribalism, and wars that have occurred around organized religion.

Is she allowed to hold onto that faith?

Or would I shatter it for her?

That was one of the big questions for me from the beginning.

- [Mary] Is technology something that you fear or celebrate or both?

- Yeah, both.

I wanted to show a society that could go either way as a society.

You know, we have to actually reorganize ourselves so that we can benefit from these things and not have these things destroy our civilization.

But Klara herself, I want, I didn't want her to be like an anti-AI figure at all, you know?

She's not menacing.

I wanted her to reflect something very pure and generous about human beings.

- Thanks for watching A Word on Words.

I'm Mary Laura Philpott.

For more of my conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro, visit awordonwords.org and keep reading.

- [Kazuo] This is what interests me about human beings.

We're not content just to feed ourselves and reproduce and then die.

We've got to keep asking ourselves have I made a contribution?