Started reading (finally!) Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun a few nights ago. I was struck immediately by the simplicity and sophitication co-living in his language, yet another thing came to me after finishing Part 1 last night.
This is a writer who managed to create suspensions where there seems to be room for none.
We know that Josie would be back in the store, because that'd be how Klara learned about her name. But it didn't make the waiting and the reunion any less - we still want to know how they happened, and more than anything, how they happened through Klara's eyes, the same eyes we've been seeing this world through.
We also would have no problem reading if AF remained an acronym. We know more or less what they are by this point: they are robots powered up by sunlight (partly, at least), they are regularly updated commodities and usually owned by families with children. They have individual traits, are clearly intelligent but also utterly unexperienced compared to real human minds.
But it's a different thing seeing the word Artificial Friend on the page. Not a helper, not a companion, but a friend. A friend to a child. The possibility that friendship, at a stage mostly never formed deliberately, can be a choice. A one-way one, even.
Talk about excellent writing...
ps. 喜剧演员章晋唯新的播客单集有提到类似的概念（喜剧和日常的好笑区别在哪？）。
