Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro

Those who are considered great writers don’t usually dedicate part of their efforts to science fiction. This genre has traditionally been considered second-rate, despite the fact that some prestigious authors have occasionally engaged on it. In this context, the most cited work is Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (1932), a book I have talked about in previous posts in this blog.

But there has been a recent foray into this genre, by no less than a Nobel Prize winner for Literature. Kazuo Ishiguro, who writes in English and received the award in 2017, is well known for works such as The Remains of the Day, or An Artist of the Floating World, plus his science-fiction novel, Never Let Me Go, a dystopia along the same lines as Corinna Turner's I am Margaret, which I mentioned in my post on dystopias in this blog. Now, in 2021, he has published a science fiction novel that touches on the theme of strong artificial intelligence.

Literature and Science: Huxley and Heisenberg

Aldous Huxley

In 1963, the year of his death, Aldous Huxley published an essay titled Literature and Science. In it, he raises the existence of two different specialized languages, literary and scientific, different from the vulgar language, each of which is directed towards a specific objective:

• The purpose of literature is to describe, in the best possible way, man's most private experiences, especially those that deal with our feelings. To do this, it creates a specific language, where the ambiguity of words is the fundamental element giving strength. For Huxley, the term literature can be applied to all possible forms of the art of writing: poetry, drama, novel and essay, whose relationship with science he analyzes successively.
• Science, on the contrary, seeks to univocally describe the public (or less private) experiences of man, those that have to do with objective reality. To do this, the scientific language must be as far as possible free of ambiguity. Each term must have a univocal and unambiguous meaning. In the best case (as in physics) scientific language can be reduced to mathematical formulas.

Toward Brave New World

Cover of Brave New World's 1st edition

Just as a utopia is a literary work that describes a perfect society, from the point of view of its author, a dystopia is the description of a society where certain characteristics of the world in which the author lives, which he considers unacceptable, are exaggerated and carried to the extreme, with a satirical or denouncing intent.

The two world wars caused a feeling of disillusionment in the West that gave rise to the two most famous dystopias of recent history: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (written in 1931, published in 1932) and Nineteen-Eighty-Four by George Orwell (written in 1948, published in 1949). These two works are original in another sense: while other earlier dystopias (such as Samuel Butler's Erewhon, 1872) were located in remote places, such as the Antipodes, the two modern dystopias take place in the future.

The feeling of oppression that seizes the reader of these two novels is almost unbearable. In both cases, the very few nonconformists in society are excluded: in the first, they are banished to an island; in the second, the exclusion is only temporary: the rebel is submitted to brainwashing so as to destroy his spirit and turn him into a mental waste, raw material on which the social planner can act, remodel and educate until he is recovered and adapted to society. The two dystopias are horrible, but they have a very great power of conviction and verisimilitude.