Kazuo Ishiguro Uses Artificial Intelligence to Reveal the Limits of Our Own

In the early nineteen-eighties, when Kazuo Ishiguro was starting out as a novelist, a brief craze called Martian poetry hit our literary planet. It was launched by Craig Raine's poem "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" (1979). The poem systematically deploys the technique of estrangement or defamiliarization--what the Russian formalist critics called ostranenie--as our bemused Martian wrestles into his comprehension a series of puzzling human habits and gadgets: "Model T is a room with the lock inside-- / a key is turned to free the world / for movement." Or, later in the poem: "In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, / that snores when you pick it up." For a few years, alongside the usual helpings of Hughes, Heaney, and Larkin, British schoolchildren learned to launder these witty counterfeits: "Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings / And some are treasured for their markings-- / they cause the eyes to melt / or the body to shriek without pain. Teachers liked Raine's poem, and ...