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The Best Sci-Fi Novels For Smart People

Sometimes you want to treat your intellect as well as your imagination. That's where these sci fi novels come in. These are the best science fiction novels for smart people, from the darkly comical to the expansive and epic. Some great science fiction books for smart people are travel tales while other good intelligent science fiction novels are about alien life forms. Many of the best hard sci fi novels have even been adapted into award-winning films.

What books will you find on this list of the best sci fi novels for smart people? If you're a fan of the classics, you might vote  Brave New World by Aldous Huxley to the top. This timeless work appeals to intelligent readers because of its themes of class discrimination and psychological manipulation. It is largely considered one of the best science fiction works of all time. Dune by Frank Herbert is another intelligent sci fi book celebrated by readers all over the world. Other good books features on this must-read list include The Martian Chronicles , The Diamond Age , and The Man in the High Castle .

Which smart sci fi book is your favorite? Give the best novels a thumbs up and please add any intelligent science fiction works that are missing.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Rendezvous with Rama

The Martian Chronicles

Slaughterhouse-Five

Brave New World

The Martian

Neuromancer

The Left Hand of Darkness

Stranger in a Strange Land

A Canticle for Leibowitz

The Man in the High Castle

The Invention of Morel

The Dispossessed

Ender's Game

The Mote in God's Eye

The Forever War

The Demolished Man

Cat's Cradle

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Algebraist

Time Enough for Love

Mars trilogy

Lists about the best (and worst) films, TV series, novels, characters, etc. in every sci-fi genre.

The Best Sci Fi Books

Find a great science fiction book, 24 best artificial intelligence science fiction books.

Most artificial intelligence in books is very similar to human intelligence, but with perfect memory and incredibly fast speed of thought. My guess is that, in reality, true artificial intelligence will feel completely alien to us. If that happens, then the first contact with an alien intelligence will happen with an alien we’ve created.

In a narrative that spans geography and time, from the Atlantic Ocean in the seventeenth century, to a correctional institute in Texas in the near future, and told from the perspectives of five very different characters, Speak considers what it means to be human, and what it means to be less than fully alive.

A young Puritan woman travels to the New World with her unwanted new husband. Alan Turing, the renowned mathematician and code breaker, writes letters to his best friend’s mother. A Jewish refugee and professor of computer science struggles to reconnect with his increasingly detached wife. An isolated and traumatized young girl exchanges messages with an intelligent software program. A former Silicon Valley Wunderkind is imprisoned for creating illegal lifelike dolls.

Though each speaks from a distinct place and moment in time, all five characters share the need to express themselves while simultaneously wondering if they will ever be heard, or understood.

“Stunning and audacious… It’s not just one of the smartest books of the year, it’s one of the most beautiful ones, and it almost seems like an understatement to call it a masterpiece.” —NPR

Quick show of hands: how many science fiction plays have you seen? This one introduced the word “robot” to the English language and science fiction in general.

R.U.R. quickly became famous, and by 1923, it had been translated into thirty languages.

The play begins in a factory that makes artificial people, called roboti (robots), out of synthetic organic matter. They are not exactly robots by the current definition of the term; these creatures are closer to the modern idea of cyborgs, androids, or even clones, as they may be mistaken for humans and can think for themselves. They seem happy to work for humans at first, but that changes…

A unique anthology of all-new stories that challenges authors to throw down the gauntlet in an epic genre battle and demands an answer to the age-old question: Who is more awesome—robots or fairies?

Featuring an incredible line-up of authors including John Scalzi, Catherynne M. Valente, Ken Liu, Max Gladstone, Alyssa Wong, Jonathan Maberry, and many more, Robots vs. Fairies will take you on a glitter-bombed journey of a techno-fantasy mash-up.

“These lively, action-packed, and emotional tales by the best writers in sf/fantasy allow readers to root for their favorite team or discover new pleasures in an unfamiliar genre…Exceptional storytelling and well-paced writing make this volume a total delight.” —Library Journal

Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it’s a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street.

Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he’ll be switched off, and they’ll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty.

The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad—very mad.

Winner of Audible’s 2016 Best of Science Fiction.

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Series ( Wayfarers )

Lovelace was once merely a ship’s artificial intelligence. When she wakes up in a new body, following a total system shutdown and reboot, she has no memory of what came before. As Lovelace learns to negotiate the universe and discover who she is, she makes friends with Pepper, an excitable engineer, who’s determined to help her learn and grow.

Together, Pepper and Lovey will discover that no matter how vast space is, two people can fill it together.

Wayfarers series: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet A Closed and Common Orbit Record of a Spaceborn Few

Book 1 of 17(!) in the EarthCent Ambassador series

Kelly Frank is EarthCent’s top diplomat on Union Station, but her job description has always been a bit vague. The pay is horrible and she’s in hock up to her ears for her furniture, which is likely to end up in a corridor because she’s behind on rent for her room. Sometimes she has to wonder if the career she has put ahead of her personal life for fifteen years is worth it.

When Kelly receives a gift subscription to the dating service that’s rumored to be powered by the same benevolent artificial intelligence that runs the huge station, she decides to swallow her pride and give it a shot. But as her dates go from bad to worse, she can only hope that the supposedly omniscient AI is planning a happy ending.

(Do not judge this book by its cover.)

Ten thousand years in the future, Phaethon of Radamanthus House, is attending a glorious party at his family mansion to celebrate the thousand-year anniversary of the High Transcendence. There he meets first an old man who accuses him of being an impostor and then a being from Neptune claims to be an old friend. The Neptunian tells him that essential parts of his memory were removed and stored by the very government that Phaethon believes to be wholly honorable. It shakes his faith. He is an exile from himself.

And so Phaethon embarks upon a quest across the transformed solar system—Jupiter is now a second sun, Mars and Venus terraformed, humanity immortal. He is among humans, intelligent machines, and bizarre life forms that are partly both. He yearns to recover his memory, to learn what crime he planned that warranted such preemptive punishment, and, in short, regain his true identity.

“[D]azzling first novel.” —Publishers Weekly

Not far into our future, the dazzling technology that runs our world turns against us. Controlled by a childlike, yet massively powerful, artificial intelligence known as Archos, the global network of machines on which our world has grown dependent suddenly becomes an implacable, deadly foe. At Zero Hour—the moment the robots attack—the human race is almost annihilated, but as its scattered remnants regroup, humanity for the first time unites in a determined effort to fight back. This is the oral history of that conflict, told by an international cast of survivors who experienced this long and bloody confrontation with the machines.

“You’re swept away against your will. . . . A riveting page turner.” —Associated Press

In Los Angeles in 2047, advances in the science of psychology have made crime a rare occurrence. So it’s utterly shocking when eight bodies are detected in an apartment, and not long afterward the perpetrator is revealed as well: noted poet Emmanuel Goldsmith. The LAPD’s Mary Choy—who has had both her appearance and her police work enhanced by nanotechnology—is tasked with arresting the killer, while psychotherapy pioneer Martin Burke prepares to explore his mind. Meanwhile, Goldsmith’s good friend and fellow writer reels at the news—while, far from all of them, a space probe makes a startling discovery.

“[S]ucceeds on virtually every level.” —The New York Times Book Review

When the obituary of legendary computer game architect Matthew Sobol appears online, a previously dormant daemon (a computer program that runs in the background) activates, initiating a chain of events that begins to unravel our interconnected world. This daemon reads news headlines, recruits human followers, and orders assassinations. With Sobol’s secrets buried with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed, it’s up to Detective Peter Sebeck to stop a self-replicating virtual killer before it achieves its ultimate purpose—one that goes far beyond anything Sebeck could have imagined…

“A riveting debut.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The Justice of Toren was a colossal starship run by an artificial intelligence. That intelligence also linked thousands of human soldiers, each soldier’s mind completely run by the AI. These AI-run soldiers are known as ancillaries.

In an act of treachery, the Justice of Toren is destroyed, and the AI—now going by the name of Breq—is a single human body filled with unanswered questions and a burning desire for vengeance.

Ancillary Justice is the only novel ever to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards. Newspapers nationwide heaped praise on it.

And you know what? It’s a really good book. Clever, fun, inventive, occasionally shocking, and overall a great read with fascinating characters. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.

However, I was disappointed because all that praise made me think was going to be one of the most amazing science fiction books ever written, and that my life would be fundamentally different after reading it. It was good, but it wasn’t that good.

So just make sure your expectations are a little more realistic than mine were, and you’ll probably love Ancillary Justice .

Author Alastair Reynolds isn’t afraid of big, strange ideas, and he puts on a parade of them in House of Suns .

Six million years ago, a woman named Abigail Gentian fractured her consciousness into a thousand different clones, called shatterlings. Since then, the shatterlings have observed the rise and fall of many human civilizations. Nearly immortal, they meet every two hundred thousand years to share memories.

Except now, someone is wiping out all of the Gentian shatterlings. It’s up to Campion and Purslane—two shatterlings—to figure out who or what is trying to kill them.

House of Suns is imaginative, fun, and well-paced, but a little thin on character development. The book’s more about far-future coolness than fully-developed characters.

(I don’t want to give away the part about A.I., but it’s there.)

What’s the best way to create artificial intelligence? In 1950, Alan Turing wrote, ‘Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. This process could follow the normal teaching of a child. Things would be pointed out and named, etc. Again I do not know what the right answer is, but I think both approaches should be tried.’

The first approach has been tried many times in both science fiction and reality. In this new novella (at over 30,000 words, his longest work to date), Ted Chiang offers a detailed imagining of how the second approach might work within the contemporary landscape of startup companies, massively-multiplayer online gaming, and open-source software. It’s a story of two people and the artificial intelligences they helped create, following them for more than a decade as they deal with the upgrades and obsolescence that are inevitable in the world of software. At the same time, it’s an examination of the difference between processing power and intelligence, and of what it means to have a real relationship with an artificial entity.

“[A] very rare thing: a science fictional novel of ideas that delivers a real human impact.” —Publishers Weekly

Winner of the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novella

In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids.

But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied droid—a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.

But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it’s up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.

“[R]eading about this sulky, soap-opera-loving cyborg killing machine might be one of the most human experiences you can have in sci-fi right now.” ―NPR

Decades into our future, a stone’s throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neo-Victorians. He’s made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer . Commissioned by an eccentric duke for his grandchild, stolen for Hackworth’s own daughter, the Primer ’s purpose is to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. It performs its function superbly. Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled copy has fallen into the wrong hands.

Young Nell and her brother Harv are thetes—members of the poor, tribeless class. Neglected by their mother, Harv looks after Nell. When he and his gang waylay a certain neo-Victorian—John Percival Hackworth—in the seamy streets of their neighborhood, Harv brings Nell something special: the Primer .

Following the discovery of his crime, Hackworth begins an odyssey of his own. Expelled from the neo-Victorian paradise, squeezed by agents of Protocol Enforcement on one side and a Mandarin underworld crime lord on the other, he searches for an elusive figure known as the Alchemist. His quest and Nell’s will ultimately lead them to another seeker whose fate is bound up with the Primer —a woman who holds the key to a vast, subversive information network that is destined to decode and reprogram the future of humanity.

“[I]n The Diamond Age the wonders of cyberspace pale before the even more dazzling powers of nanotechnology.” —New York Times Book Review

Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards

Case was the sharpest data-thief in the matrix—until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction.

“A revolutionary novel.” —Publishers Weekly

Widely acknowledged as one of Robert A. Heinlein’s greatest works, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress rose from the golden age of science fiction to become an undisputed classic and a touchstone for the philosophy of personal responsibility and political freedom. A revolution on a lunar penal colony—aided by a self-aware supercomputer—provides the framework for a story of a diverse group of men and women grappling with the ever-changing definitions of humanity, technology, and free will: themes that resonate just as strongly today as they did when the novel was first published.

“Offers a lot of food for thought and fodder for argument…indisputably rich with ideas.” —io9

I, Robot , the first and most widely read book in Asimov’s Robot series, forever changed the world’s perception of artificial intelligence. Here are short stories of robots gone mad, of mind-reading robots, and robots with a sense of humor. Of robot politicians, and robots who secretly run the world—all told with the dramatic blend of science fact and science fiction that has become Asimov’s trademark.

The Three Laws of Robotics:

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

With these three, simple directives, Isaac Asimov formulated the laws governing robots’ behavior. In I, Robot , Asimov chronicles the development of the robot from its primitive origins in the present to its ultimate perfection in the not-so-distant future—a future in which humanity itself may be rendered obsolete.

“A must-read for science-fiction buffs and literature enjoyers alike.” —The Guardian

In a post-apocalyptic world, four men and one woman are all that remain of the human race, brought to near extinction by an artificial intelligence. Programmed to wage war on behalf of its creators, the AI became self-aware and turned against all humanity. The five survivors are prisoners, kept alive and subjected to brutal torture by the hateful and sadistic machine in an endless cycle of violence.

Pissing off science fiction writers everywhere, Ellison wrote the story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” in a single night in 1966, making virtually no changes from the first draft. He won a Hugo award for it, too. Bastard.

Excession is the fifth book in Banks’s excellent Culture series.

Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared.

Now it is back.

“Banks has created one of the most enduring and endearing visions of the future.” —The Guardian on the Culture series

After finishing most books, I’ll put them down and think something like, “That was a good book,” or “The ending was terrible,” or “I’m hungry.”

But with The Ware Tetralogy , I put the big book down and wondered what the hell just happened to me.

My horizons got expanded in weird directions and there’s a little more odd joy in my life.

The four Ware novels ( Software , Wetware , Freeware , and Realware ) explore consciousness as an information pattern in a fearlessly absurd, awesomely readable way. All together, they’re a Dadaist cyberpunk tour de force that’ll make your brain feel like it’s in a bath of seltzer water. The books all move like a bat out of hell, are packed with enough ideas for forty normal science fictions books, and you can feel beat poetry in the background as you read them.

Few science fiction books can claim to use the same structure as The Canterbury Tales and still be kick-ass sci-fi, but Hyperion pulls it off.

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.

“Dan Simmons has brilliantly conceptualized a future 700 years distant. In sheer scope and complexity it matches, and perhaps even surpasses, those of Isaac Asimov and James Blish.” —The Washington Post Book World

Accelerando made me afraid that the future’s going to tear us all a new one.

It’s dense, and author Charles Stross presents enough throwaway ideas for at least a dozen other novels.

Accelerando follows the adventures of three generations as they experience the world just before the technological singularity, during it, and just after.

(The technological singularity is the point where an artificial intelligence begins to create a runaway chain reaction of improving itself, with each iteration becoming more intelligent. Eventually, it is vastly superior to any human intelligence. Is that something to worry about? Maybe. Stephen Hawking once said, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”)

The book is deeply technical in spots, which is fun, but still has good characters you root for (or despise).

You still can’t beat HAL.

This allegory about humanity’s exploration of the universe—and the universe’s reaction to humanity—is a hallmark achievement in storytelling that follows the crew of the spacecraft Discovery as they embark on a mission to Saturn. Their vessel is controlled by HAL 9000, an artificially intelligent supercomputer capable of the highest level of cognitive functioning that rivals—and perhaps threatens—the human mind.

“Dazzling…wrenching…a mind bender.” —Time

6 thoughts on “ 24 Best Artificial Intelligence Science Fiction Books ”

Thank you! GREAT LIST! (as always :D)

May I suggest, “Sea of Rust” by C. Robert Cargill? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32617610-sea-of-rust

The story is set in future earth where humans no longer exist. The planet is now populated with a wide variety of AI constructs that are in a battle for totalitarian dominance vs individualism. The story revolves around BRITTLE, a scrappy, lone-wolf AI who is wandering the charred desert landscape doing whatever it can to survive. Though it is a hunter, it has a strong moral compass, which makes it an endearing character that one can’t help but root for. The ancillary AI characters are also well crafted and provide emotional complexity and depth.

It’s an exciting read with many high stakes, Mad-Max style battles that are well-balanced with the back story of how humans ended up extinct, which gives the reader a lot to ponder. Despite this being a solid sci-fi story, it feels like it could also exist in the western genre.

For what it’s worth, the author has two other fantasy genre books that are truly fantastic. “Dreams and Shadows,” and the second “Queen of the Dark Things” The 2nd story has a few carry-over characters, but it can read as a stand-alone.

Hello, I’d like to ask you If exists some book about AI Story ? … something like: In the future an intellectual singularity arises. Someone creates an AI capable of self-improvement, and it basically just improves itself to the point that it attains apotheosis and is no longer bound by things such as physical laws. Godlike AI starts to manipulate the timestream, and it’s revealed that this GOD-AI was actually responsible for the creation of the Universe and everything in it.

Fans of Accelerando will appreciate how such a manic tale came to be: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html

Trying to remember the title of a book in which a group of people travel in a hollowed out asteroid or comet. One of them is injured and his mind is uploaded into a computer; he then has discussion with his former lover over whether it is really ‘him’ in the computer. There are other adventures. They are contaminated with some alien fungus-like life-form, etc. I read this thirty years ago or so and thought it was good ‘hard’ science fiction, but now can’t remember the author or title.

it’s david brin’s heart of the comet

try to write my PhD thesis in English literature about artificial intelligence, it seems that it will be fun and a little bit difficult

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Savvy sci-fi futurists: 21 science fiction writers who predicted inventions way ahead of their time

Many futurists, scientists and inventors have been inspired by the imagination and anticipation of the future inherent to science fiction novels. From the Internet to iPads to smart machines, some of the world’s greatest advances in technology were once fictional speculation. As sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke wrote in Profiles of the Future (1962), “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

Sci-fi is a powerful genre because it envisages how society could function differently. “This is the first step towards progress as it allows us to imagine the future we want, and consider ways to work towards it,” writes physicist and philosopher Dr. Helen Klus . “It also makes us aware of futures we wish to avoid, and helps us prevent them.”

The 21 sci-fi futurists featured below gave some of the earliest recorded mentions of inventions that have since become a reality. Several of these authors doubted that their fictional inventions would ever come to fruition, or thought it would take much longer for their inventions to occur than it actually took. Others were remarkably spot on. Regardless of accuracy, however, what these future thinking authors all recognized was that change is an inevitable and powerful force that can blur the boundaries between fiction and possibility.

1. Rocket-powered space flight: Cyrano de Bergerac, 1657

“I ran to the Soldier that was giving Fire to it… and in great rage threw my self into my Machine, that I might undo the Fire-Works that they had stuck about it; but I came too late, for hardly were both my Feet within, than whip, away went I up in a Cloud.”

In a literary sense, this passage evokes the exhaust flames produced by rockets with internal combustion engines. The first rocket that propelled something into space—the satellite Sputnik—would be launched 300 years later, in 1957.

2. Submarines: Margaret Cavendish, 1666

Many people attribute the first mention of a submarine to Jules Verne, who described an electric submarine in his famous book 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870). However, few people know that an early form of submarine was mentioned in The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World (1666), a book about a satirical utopian kingdom, written by Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. The book is perhaps the only known work of utopian fiction by a woman in the 17th century, as well as one of the earliest examples of what we now call science fiction. Cavendish’s protagonist talks to sentient animals about various scientific theories, including atomic theory, before travelling home in a submarine when she hears that her homeland is under threat.

3. Machine-automated language: Jonathan Swift, 1726

Jonathan Swift, the well-known Irish satirist who wrote Gulliver’s Travels , critiqued the so-called scientific literature of his time, which was not always the result of rational thinking. Consequently, when Swift described an “engine” that could form sentences, he was satirizing the arbitrary methods of some of his scientific contemporaries:

“…the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study”.

What Swift may not have realized was that his ensuing description of a machine containing all the words of the language spoken in Lagado, a fictional city, is one of the earliest known references to a device broadly representing a computer. Nowadays, computers are able to generate permutations of word sets, as Swift envisaged.

4. Eugenics: Nicolas-Edme Rétif, 1781

Among the creatures Rétif’s hero encounters is an articulate half-human, half-baboon. “The book is part natural history, part imaginary evolutionary experiment, in which Rétif brings these primitive beings to life and demonstrates the genetic mixing that gradually results in both the differentiation of animal species and the emergence of humankind,” writes Amy S. Wyngaard . Rétif imagined Australasia as a sort of eugenic utopia, a century before the term “eugenics” would be coined by Charles Darwin’s half-cousin, Francis Galton .

5. Oxygen in air travel and space travel: Jane Webb Loudon, 1828

A future where women wear trousers and automatons function as surgeons and lawyers was foreseen by pioneering sci-fi writer Jane Webb Loudon . In her book The Mummy: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century , Loudon gave a very early mention of the notion that, to survive in outer space in earth’s orbit, it would be necessary to take some air with you. She wrote:

“… and the hampers are filled with elastic plugs for our ears and noses, and tubes and barrels of common air, for us to breathe when we get beyond the atmosphere of the earth.”

So, next time you are on an airplane watching a demo about oxygen masks, don’t forget to remember the contribution of Jane Webb Loudon!

6. Debit cards: Edward Bellamy, 1888

Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887 featured an American utopian society that used so-called “credit cards”. Bellamy’s concept actually relates more to debit cards and spending social security dividends than borrowing from a bank. The main character describes how people are given a stated amount of credit on their card to purchase goods from the public storehouses:

“You observe,” he pursued as I was curiously examining the piece of pasteboard he gave me, “that this card is issued for a certain number of dollars. We have kept the old word, but not the substance…The value of what I procure on this card is checked off by the clerk, who pricks out of these tiers of squares the price of what I order.”

Debit cards and credit cards would be invented more than 60 years later.

7. Electric fences: Mark Twain, 1889

“Now, then, observe the economy of it. A cavalry charge hurls itself against the fence; you are using no power, you are spending no money, for there is only one ground-connection till those horses come against the wire; the moment they touch it they form a connection with the negative brush through the ground, and drop dead.”

Electric fences were not used to control livestock in the United States until the early 1930s.

8. Videoconferencing: Jules Verne, 1889

Famous French sci-fi pioneer Jules Verne described the “phonotelephote”, a forerunner to videoconferencing, in his work In the Year 2889 . The phonotelephote allowed “the transmission of images by means of sensitive mirrors connected by wires,” Verne wrote. This was one of the earliest references to a videophone in fiction, according to Technovelgy.com , a site that traces inventions and ideas from science fiction. In the Year 2889 also predicts newscasts, recorded news, and skywriting—inventions which have all come to fruition well before 2889.

9. X-ray and CAT scan technology: John Elfreth Watkins Jr., 1900

In a visionary article for the Ladies’ Home Journal entitled “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years” , an American named John Elfreth Watkins Jr. made several remarkable predictions. One of the most striking was his prediction of X-ray and CAT scan technology:

“Physicians will be able to see and diagnose internal organs of a moving, living body by rays of invisible light.”

In the same article, Watkins also foresaw high-speed trains, satellite television, the electronic transmission of photographs, and the application of electricity in greenhouses.

10. Radar: Hugo Gernsback, 1911

“A pulsating polarized ether wave, if directed on a metal object can be reflected in the same manner as a light ray is reflected from a bright surface… By manipulating the entire apparatus like a searchlight, waves would be sent over a large area. Sooner or later these waves would strike a space flyer. A small part of these waves would strike the metal body of the flyer, and these rays would be reflected back to the sending apparatus. Here they would fall on the Actinoscope, which records only the reflected waves, not direct ones…From the intensity and elapsed time of the reflected impulses, the distance between the earth and the flyer can then be accurately estimated.”

In 1933, a working radar device that could detect remote objects by signals was created.

11. Atomic bomb: H.G. Wells, 1914

One of the most unfortunate legacies of science fiction is the genre’s inspiration for the atomic bomb. In The World Set Free , H.G. Wells predicted that a new type of bomb fuelled by nuclear reactions would be detonated in the 1956. It happened even sooner than he thought. Physicist Leó Szilárd apparently read Wells’s book and patented the idea. Szilárd was later directly involved in the Manhattan Project , which led to the tragedy of nuclear bombs being dropped on Japan in 1945. Strikingly, Wells spelled not only spelled out the idea of a sustained atomic reaction, he also predicted the moral and ethical horror that people would feel upon the use of atomic bombs, and the radioactive ruin that would last long after the bomb was dropped.

12. Cyborgs: E.V. Odle, 1923

Some readers believe that E.V. Odle was a pen name used by Virginia Woolf , who dabbled in science fiction and sought to protect her credibility as a serious writer. Most consider this an unfounded rumor, and hold that E.V. Odle was Edwin Vincent Odle, a little-known British playwright, critic, and author. Regardless of the author’s identity, Virginia Woolf’s work seems to have influenced the novel. Reviewer Annalee Newitz calls the book “an odd mashup of Virginia Woolf and H.G. Wells” .

13. In vitro fertilization: J.B.S. Haldane, 1924

J.B.S. Haldane was a British scientist who also imagined the future directions of biology in his book Daedulus; or Science and the Future . The work proclaimed how scientific revolution might alter the most private aspects of life, death, sex, and marriage. This was a bold move given the uproar that inventions like birth control were causing in contemporary media.

Haldane predicted the widespread practice of in vitro fertilization, what he called “ectogenesis”. His theory of reproductive technology and his scientific futurism influenced Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932).

Haldane also stressed that humans need to make advances in ethics to match our advances in science. Otherwise, he feared, science would bring grief, not progress, to humankind.

14. Teleoperated robot surrogates: Manly Wade Wellman, 1938

Some robot surrogates already exist. See, for example, the Inmoov Robots for Good designed for hospitalized children, the InTouch medical rounding robot for doctors, and the Geminoid human replicas .

15. Microwavable heat-n-eat food: Robert Heinlein, 1948

In Space Cadet , famous sci-fi author Robert Heinlein took the newly invented microwave one step further by predicting the rise of ready-to-eat, microwavable food:

“Theoretically every ration taken aboard a Patrol vessel is pre-cooked and ready for eating as soon as it is taken out of freeze and subjected to the number of seconds, plainly marked on the package, of high-frequency heating required.”

It took a few decades before Heinlein’s vision became an everyday reality.

16. Earphones: Ray Bradbury, 1950

In Fahrenheit 451 , Ray Bradbury described earphones that were much more convenient than the huge headphones of his day:

“And in her ears the little seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind.”

In-ear headphones were released to the mass market in 1980.

17. Machine intelligence outsmarting humans: Clifford Simak, 1951

In Time and Again (also published as First He Died ), Clifford Simak depicted a chess game between a man and a robot:

“In the screen a man was sitting before a chess table. The pieces were in mid-game. Across the board stood a beautifully machined robotic. The man reached out a hand, thoughtfully played a knight. The robotic clicked and chuckled. It moved a pawn… “Mr. Benton hasn’t won a game in the past ten years…” “… Benton must have known, when he had Oscar fabricated, that Oscar would beat him,” Sutton pointed out. “A human simply can’t beat a robotic expert.”

Simak’s early sci-fi reference of robots or computers being unbeatable at chess occurred four decades before futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted in The Age of Intelligent Machines that a computer would beat the best human chess players by 2000. In 1997, sure enough, IBM’s “Deep Blue” beat Garry Kasparov .

18. iPad: Arthur C. Clarke, 1968

“When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug in his foolscap-size newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers…Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination…”

19. Electric cars: John Brunner, 1969

Perhaps one of the most prophetic novels ever , John Brunner’s novel Stand on Zanzibar , set in 2010, creates an America under the leadership of President Obomi, plagued by school shootings and terrorist attacks. The EU is in existence, major cities like Detroit become impoverished, tobacco faces backlash but marijuana is decriminalised, and gay and bisexual lifestyles have gone mainstream. The inventions used in society include on-demand TV, laser printers, and electric cars. Brunner believed these cars would be powered by rechargeable electric fuel cells, much as they are today, and that Honda would be a leading manufacturer. Recently, Honda has affirmed that its electric vehicles are a “core technology” .

20. Real-time translation: Douglas Adams, 1979

The amusing little Babel Fish in Adams’ renowned The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy brings real-time translation to Arthur Dent and his fellow characters. Several apps now on the market for Android or iOS mimic the Babel Fish’s abilities. One of these apps is Lexifone , which translates from one language to another when someone speaks during a call. Microsoft has also been developing real-time translation for Skype .

21. The ubiquity of the World Wide Web: David Brin, 1990

The ongoing role of sci-fi

As futurist Ross Dawson has observed , “Fiction about the future whets our appetite for new technologies. It is how we discover what it is we truly want, driving new developments.”

As the pace of change continues to increase, a statement by s cientist and sci-fi author Isaac Asimov rings truer than ever: “It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.”

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable. They inspire us to turn fiction into reality, but they also remind us to reflect on the consequences of our actions and remember what is most important to humanity.

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The 15 Best Modern Sci-Fi Authors Who Are Writing Today

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Science fiction has never been an easy genre to pin down. Space opera, cyberpunk, science fantasy, and hard sci-fi all exist within one overall label. But which is which? And who writes it all?

Still, science fiction is a genre where you know it when you see it—and there are many fantastic authors working in the genre these days.

This article is about modern sci-fi writers, meaning those who are still active and releasing new works. So even though there are many other big names in science fiction, you won't see them mentioned.

Here are my picks for the best modern sci-fi authors and their various claims to fame as writers of science fiction.

15. Arkady Martine

Primary genres: Science Fiction

Debut novel: A Memory Called Empire (2019)

Notable works: Rose/House (2023)

Arkady Martine 's works range from sweeping short stories to grand sci-fi novels. For the latter, she truly proved her skill as a storyteller with the acclaimed Teixcalaan series.

Her first novel, A Memory Called Empire , introduces the character Mahit Dzmare, a mining station ambassador who's assigned to stop an evil empire from governing most of the universe.

And in her follow-up book, A Desolation Called Peace , she puts Mahit into the middle of political conflict.

Science fiction is often epic, but Arkady Martine cleverly applies her knowledge of history to craft a magnificent saga.

14. Tamsyn Muir

Primary genres: Fantasy, Horror, Science Fiction

Debut novel: Gideon the Ninth (2019)

Notable works: Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (2020)

It's possible that Tamsyn Muir 's Gideon the Ninth could be the sci-fi equivalent of grimdark fantasy, at least if it wasn't so laugh out loud funny.

That first book in the series is enough to have many fans eagerly awaiting the next title in the trilogy and calling Muir one of the writers to keep a closest eye on for the next few years.

13. Ann Leckie

Primary genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction

Debut novel: Ancillary Justice (2013)

Notable works: Provenance (2017), The Raven Tower (2019), Translation State (2023)

If you haven't already heard of Ann Leckie , you've probably at least heard of Ancillary Justice , which was published in 2013.

Why? It won the Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Arthur C. Clarke, and Locus Awards, to start. Since then she has published two direct sequels to that novel, another set in the same universe, and a fantasy novel, The Raven Tower .

12. Dennis E. Taylor

Debut novel: Outland (2015)

Notable works: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (2016), The Singularity Trap (2018), Roadkill (2022)

Best known for his Bobiverse series, Dennis E. Taylor won Audible's Best Science Fiction Book award in 2016 for the first in the series, We Are Legion (We Are Bob) .

The series is about a former tech CEO who, after several unfortunate accidents finds himself floating as a satellite drone in space, decides to start cloning himself.

11. Yoon Ha Lee

Primary genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Poetry

Debut novel: Ninefox Gambit (2016)

Notable works: Dragon Pearl (2019), Phoenix Extravagant (2020)

Military science fiction isn't nearly as big as it used to be, but Yoon Ha Lee seems set to change that.

His novel Ninefox Gambit won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2017 and began the Machineries of Empire series, which has been popular with both readers and critics.

10. Martha Wells

Debut novel: The Element of Fire (1993)

Notable works: City of Bones (1995), The Cloud Roads (2011), Razor's Edge: Star Wars Legends (2014), All Systems Red (2017)

Martha Wells kicked off The Murderbot Diaries with All Systems Red in 2017, quickly winning several awards including a Nebula and a Hugo.

Wells followed with several more in the series about a security AI that calls itself Murderbot and really just wants to be left alone to watch its shows in peace.

9. Charles Stross

Debut novel: Singularity Sky (2003)

Notable works: The Family Trade (2004), The Atrocity Archives (2004), Halting State (2007)

Charles Stross has been writing since the late 1980s, but it was only in the early 2000s that his work began to make its way to the masses.

His Laundry Files series is my personal favorite, combining James Bond-style science fiction, workplace humor that wouldn't be out of place in a (albeit very strange) sitcom, and Lovecraftian horror.

8. Cixin Liu

Debut novel: China 2185 (1989)

Notable works: Supernova Era (2003), Ball Lightning (2004), The Three-Body Problem (2007)

Cixin Liu wrote several novels before The Three-Body Problem , but it's that novel that got him recognition in the western world.

It's the rare science-fiction novel that takes place in "the real world" but still conjures ideas and concepts that are terrifying in their enormity. Read that novel, and you'll need to finish the series.

7. Cory Doctorow

Debut novel: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

Notable works: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005), Little Brother (2008), Walkaway (2017)

Some sci-fi authors—and Cory Doctorow is one of them—use their platform as a writer for personal activism. In this case, the Canadian-British writer fights for the liberalization of copyright laws and the Creative Commons organization.

His post-modern novels reflect his cause, often delving into topics like privacy, intellectual property, wealth distribution, and social disparity.

His first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom , uses a murder mystery as commentary for the wealthy class's exploitation of consent. His Little Brother novels are presented like YA stories to expose intrusions to civil liberties.

Cory Doctorow's stories are great, but when you consider the impact of his activism, his works stand even taller.

6. N. K. Jemisin

Debut novel: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010)

Notable works: The Killing Moon (2012), The Fifth Season (2015), The City We Became (2020)

Here we have a skilled writer who isn't afraid to spread her wings and try many things, given her success in both science fiction and fantasy.

N. K. Jemisin made a name for herself as the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row (2016–2018).

The awards were given for her Broken Earth series, a science-fiction-fantasy hybrid tale that explores the last remaining humans as they harness an unearthed magic in a post-apocalyptic world.

Amidst themes of social oppression and cultural disparity, her works give light to Afrofuturism and diversity. That's most apparent in The City We Became , in which the lead character is an African artist struggling to find sense in a futuristic New York.

5. Andy Weir

Debut novel: The Martian (2014)

Notable works: Artemis (2017), Project Hail Mary (2021)

Andy Weir blew up in fame for one novel in particular: The Martian . Yes, the very same book that became the source material for Ridley Scott's blockbuster adaptation where Matt Damon was trapped on Mars.

The Martian is a perfect representation of Weir's style and it placed Weir on the map as a sought-after sci-fi novelist.

His following novels— Artemis and Project Hail Mary —almost have the same structure and themes of The Martian , each one focusing on a lone astronaut fighting against catastrophic phenomena.

Repetitiveness aside, every detail is cinematic and compelling while raising the emotional stakes. The Martian is a modern classic told through log entries, while Artemis and Project Hail Mary are space exploration classics in the making.

4. James S. A. Corey

Debut novel: Leviathan Wakes (2011)

Notable works: Gods of Risk (2012), Honor Among Thieves: Star Wars Legends (2014), The Churn (2014)

James S. A. Corey doesn't really exist, but is instead a pen name for the team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.

Together they write The Expanse , a series of novels that began with Leviathan Wakes in 2011. If that name sounds familiar, it's because the books became so popular they spawned a TV series of the same name.

3. Peter F. Hamilton

Debut novel: Mindstar Rising (1993)

Notable works: Pandora's Star (2004), The Dreaming Void (2007), Salvation (2018)

Peter F. Hamilton has been writing even longer than fellow British author Alastair Reynolds, releasing Mindstar Rising , the first novel in his Greg Mandel trilogy in 1995.

It was 2004's Pandora's Star and its 2005 follow-up Judas Unchained that brought him to the attention of many and also fleshed out the Commonwealth universe initially set up by the earlier Misspent Youth .

2. Alastair Reynolds

Debut novel: Revelation Space (2000)

Notable works: Century Rain (2004), Terminal World (2010), Blue Remembered Earth (2012), Revenger (2016)

Alastair Reynolds began his science fiction career in 2000 with the hard sci-fi novel Revelation Space , which kicked off an entire universe of books.

As someone who holds a PhD in Astronomy, he seems uniquely suited to the world of science fiction, which explains why he has maintained a steady stream of output since that first novel.

1. John Scalzi

Debut novel: Old Man's War (2005)

Notable works: Redshirts (2012), The Collapsing Empire (2017), The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022)

John Scalzi first made a name for himself with Old Man's War in 2005 and hasn't stopped delivering quality sci-fi since, including the award-winning Redshirts from 2012.

While he doesn't shy away from big ideas and impactful events, an underlying humor in many of his books keeps them from ever becoming unbearably dark.

What can science fiction tell us about the future of artificial intelligence policy?

• Open access
• Published: 20 September 2021
• Volume 38 , pages 197–211, ( 2023 )

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• Andrew Dana Hudson 1 ,
• Ed Finn 1 &
• Ruth Wylie 2  

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This paper addresses the gap between familiar popular narratives describing Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as the trope of the killer robot, and the realistic near-future implications of machine intelligence and automation for technology policy and society. The authors conducted a series of interviews with technologists, science fiction writers, and other experts, as well as a workshop, to identify a set of key themes relevant to the near future of AI. In parallel, they led the analysis of almost 100 recent works of science fiction stories with AI themes to develop a preliminary taxonomy of AI in science fiction. These activities informed the commissioning of six original works of science fiction and non-fiction response essays on the themes of “intelligence” and “justice” that were published as part of the Slate Future Tense Fiction series in 2019 and 2020. Our findings indicate that artificial intelligence remains deeply ambiguous both in the policy and cultural contexts: we struggle to define the boundaries and the agency of machine intelligence, and consequently find it difficult to govern or interact with such systems. However, our findings also suggest more productive avenues of inquiry and framing that could foster both better policy and better narratives around AI.

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Artificial intelligence in fiction: between narratives and metaphors

A sociotechnical perspective for the future of ai: narratives, inequalities, and human control, echoes of myth and magic in the language of artificial intelligence.

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1 Introduction

When we think of artificial intelligence, often we think first not of a product or app we can download, but of a character in a book or film. Science fiction has been imagining our current technological moment—or one near at hand—for at least a century, when Karel Čapek coined the term “robot” from a Czech word meaning “forced labor” in the 1921 play Rossum’s Universal Robots . The foundations of this AI imaginary stretch back another century to Mary Shelley’s founding of science fiction with Frankenstein, a story about the perils of creating artificial life. As classicist Adriene Mayor argues ( 2018 ), we could even consider the Greek myths of Hephaestus’ golden servant automatons, the golems of Jewish folklore, and the automatons of Hindu mythology as proto-science fictions about technological life. Perhaps more than any other technology, artificial intelligence has been entangled with science fiction and mythologies of technology from the beginning.

Already we have mentioned many angles from which to look at this imaginary, including artificial intelligence, artificial life, technological life, robots, and automatons. We could add more, from both science and fiction: algorithms, agents, neural networks, machine learning, and Turing tests; narrow, general, and super AI; a host of technical acronyms. Which of these apply to, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator , and which apply to the Siri function on your iPhone? For AI in science fiction and the AI of our present-day technology industry, definitions prove ambiguous, both in terms of how these systems are technically bound through their design and implementation, and in terms of how everyday users interpret them and interact with them (Finn 2018 ). Because we invest these technological entities with their own agency, the boundaries of their existence inevitably reflect our own assumptions about and definitions of personhood, will, and intelligence back to us.

The stories we tell about AI have foreshadowed and heralded the emergence of these technologies by years, sometimes by decades. Alan Turing’s thought experiments of the Turing Machine and the Turing Test, the ethical robots of Isaac Asimov’s imagination, and the early robotic prototypes and rhetoric of the cybernetics movement in the 1940s and 1950s could all be framed as technically grounded, speculative stories about AI. This history, and the attendant ambiguity and entanglement about what AI actually is, puts science fiction creatives in a special relationship with AI technology policy. The stories they tell about AI exert significant influence on how AI actually develops and is understood, which in turn plays a major role in determining how AI is governed and regulated.

Despite, or perhaps because of this rich mythic history, we tend to rely on just a few pieces of narrative shorthand in popular discourse about AI. There are the killer robots, remorseless and powerful machines like those in the Terminator stories. Equally destructive but far more deceptive, there are the mimic machines that “pass” as human, like the seductive androids of Battlestar Galactica , Ex Machina , and Westworld . There are childlike, Pinocchio-esque characters trying to learn how to develop an inner humanity, as in Wall-E , Chappie , or Short Circuit. And there are the inscrutable, oracular god-computers, like Deep Thought from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ( 1979 ), charged with finding the answer to life, the universe, and everything. When we turn to these stories to understand what AI means, we gaze at distant horizons and ignore all of the humble and mundane ways in which machine intelligence is already transforming our lives, our economies, and our brains, from aircraft autopilot systems and credit scores to social media filter algorithms.

This state of affairs spurred us to launch AI Policy Futures, a research and public engagement project addressing the challenge of how storytelling can enhance policy deliberations and public dialog about how we define, regulate, and assess artificial intelligence technologies. Working in collaboration between the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University and the Open Technology Institute at New America, we spent 18 months studying the intersection of science fiction and AI policy through a combination of quantitative, qualitative, and creative methods. Footnote 1 Our research goal was to explore the full spectrum of AI narratives in science fiction, to identify ideas that might have been overlooked or underestimated with respect to the near-future emergence of AI technologies, and to create a taxonomy of different configurations of possible AI futures. These themes and the taxonomy served as a guide for commissioning new works of science fiction and fostering a grounded dialog between the technology policy and science fiction communities, using compelling stories of the near future as a form of speculative anticipatory governance (Guston 2013 ).

We were not the first researchers to consider these questions. On the Sci-fi Interfaces blog, Chris Noessel, a member of our project’s advisory board, pursued a similar line of inquiry in his “Untold AI” project, which focused on AI as depicted on screens ( 2019a ). Noessel analyzed the messages and moral frames that dozens of television series and movies implied about AI. He compared these findings with guidelines drawn from a variety of white papers and manifestos about AI promulgated by technology-industry advocacy groups and think tanks. He found that on-screen science fiction and policy recommendations from tech share many ideas about AI. In other words, the science fiction that Noessel looked at was somewhat aligned with the concerns of nonfictional AI’s various stakeholders. However, Noessel also found stories being told about AI in sci-fi that had no parallel in the messages coming from tech. These he labeled “pure fantasy”—ideas that made for good stories, but did not seem useful in analyzing the real-world present and future of AI. This left a final group: imperatives and messages from the tech industry’s manifestos that science fiction was not engaging with. Noessel called these “untold AI” stories, and he recommended that science fiction creatives could help us better understand real-world artificial intelligence by telling stories about these particular ideas.

The sci-fi AI imaginary has also been elucidated by research at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. In a paper published by Nature Machine Intelligence , Kanta Dihal (another member of our advisory board) and her colleagues laid out four pairs of linked hopes and fears for the future of AI (Cave and Dihal 2019 ). The four dichotomies were: immortality and inhumanity, ease and obsolescence, gratification and alienation, dominance and uprising. The Leverhulme Centre has also been advancing a set of Global AI initiatives, identifying a multitude of cultural frames through which different populations interpret and govern AI.

Both of these projects identified the challenges of mapping the AI imaginary and provided valuable framing for our own taxonomical approach. This prior work also highlighted our collective tendency to focus on the long-term destiny of the technological project of machine intelligence, and thereby lose track of the social, economic, and political impacts of AI as it exists already. Our own effort attempted to focus squarely on this near-term future. We engaged technologists, policy experts, science fiction writers, and researchers in an effort to see and think critically about the AI imaginary.

2 Methodology

We used a mixed-methods approach to address our research goals of exploring the full spectrum of AI narratives in science fiction, to identify ideas that might have been overlooked or underestimated with respect to the near-future emergence of AI technologies, and to create a taxonomy of different configurations of possible AI futures. We began with a series of interviews with experts (technologists, policy thinkers, science fiction writers, and researchers), followed by a workshop with further experts and a public gathering in May 2019. For the purposes of this paper, we use the data collected via the semi-structured interviews ( n  = 13) conducted between November 2018 and March 2019. Interviews averaged 60 min (SD = 20 min) and were conducted in-person or via video conference or phone call. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. Semi-structured interviews allow researchers to ask predetermined questions around a topic while also allowing for follow-up questions and prompts that may vary between participants, to more fully explore a topic (Leech 2002 ). For our work, we asked all participants the same high-level questions about AI and pursued individual themes and observations in a free-flowing way.

Following the convening, a team of three researchers coded 96 science fiction short stories to better understand the spectrum of ways in which AI is depicted in science fiction. Details regarding our iterative process are described below (See “ Developing the taxonomies ”). These conversations and structured readings of science fiction helped to inform a set of themes that are under-explored in both science fiction and technology policy and are likely to become pressing in the near future of actual technology implementation, which we discuss in the closing section of this paper.

3 Defining AI

Many of our experts agreed that the protean nature of artificial intelligence is a barrier to effective policy conversations and broader cultural understanding of how to anticipate the potential impacts of these technologies. “Defining AI is a moving target,” argues Damien Williams, an AI ethics scholar at Virginia Tech. There has never been a consensus definition of what qualifies and what doesn’t, and the goalposts have moved in one direction or another with a constant push and pull. Suren Jayasuriya, an AI researcher at Arizona State University, argues that this is a sign of a healthy diversity in the field. “It’s good that we can’t come up with one definition of AI,” Jayasuriya told us. “You don’t want a policy that applies uniformly over a wide swath of technology.”

Others argued that definitions and sub-definitions are more about hyping up particular products in a competitive investment space. As science fiction writer and information technologist Brenda Cooper put it, “machine learning is just really good computation.” Where and how computation becomes artificial intelligence remains a blurry rhetorical line. The impulse that drives countless startups to gravitate towards the term AI as a descriptor for their work, whether or not any form of machine learning or intelligence is involved, has its inverse in academia, where careers are built on drawing distinctions and rejecting prior nomenclature. “People keep renaming things to get grant money,” said cyberpunk guru Bruce Sterling. “But this interferes with their ability to do actual research.”

“Intelligence” is also definitionally slippery. Several of the thinkers we engaged—such as Cooper, science fiction writer and physicist Vandana Singh, and science fiction author, futurist, and AI Policy Futures advisory board member Madeline Ashby—pointed out that moral and political questions of AI “personhood” are complicated by the existence of nonhuman intelligences that we already share the world with: animals. Scientists studying animal behavior tell us that many species have memories, thoughts, opinions, emotions, preferences, problem-solving skills, and other cognitive capacities presumed to be unique to humans, while also sensing and engaging with the world in deeply unhuman ways (Wasserman  2006 ; Reznikova  2007 ). Other research suggests that some plants and trees also sense and behave in ways that could be called “intelligent” (Simard et al. 1997 ; Wohlleben  2017 ). But our legal systems do not accord personhood to plants or nonhuman animals. If we expect to create advanced AIs that have some human cognitive characteristics but are in fundamental ways not human, and we also expect debates about whether those AIs are legal persons, will this lead to expanded political consideration for nonhuman “natural intelligences”? When does the moral standing of computational systems bump up against the social and intellectual convention that treats other living beings as property, products, or pests? Thinking about plant and animal cognition can give us tools to better recognize and evaluate intelligence in our machines.

Another frame raised several times in our interviews was that of neurological othering. AI entities in science fiction are often othered by being depicted as incapable of understanding some aspect of the human psyche: love, for instance, or the importance of family. In Star Trek: The Next Generation , the android Data struggles to make sense of human emotions and humor. “Think of every replicant as autistic,” as interviewee Damien Williams said. Thinkers in the field of Disability Studies can help us see that such narratives of othered minds derive from experiences and perceptions of neurodivergent people, those who have suffered brain injuries, and so on. As with animal and plant cognition, expanding our definitions through disability and neurodiversity lenses allows us to question whether “general artificial intelligence” (i.e., AI that is equivalent to a human being) will ever be attainable or even conceptually useful. Instead, we should use these frames to theorize about the multiplicity and diversity of intelligence in a future filled with many varied kinds of “narrow artificial intelligence.” Perhaps they will even push us to recognize the ambiguity and arbitrary normativism we apply to cognition in society.

These questions underscore how “intelligence” is itself the wrong way to think of and imagine complicated information technology. Sterling argues in a talk at the 2014 IMPAKT Festival that cognition and computation are different, and that definitions of AI that mix the two constitute “a category error”: “It’s like thinking that birds have wings and drones have wings, and therefore one day drones will lay eggs and birds will have radar.” The Turing Test, according to Sterling, has long been used in both science fiction and the technology industry as an end-run around this ontological problem. Rather than define intelligence, Alan Turing cleverly invented an emulation test, suggesting that any computer sophisticated enough to pass as a human should be considered intelligent. This conception of intelligence as both a performance and a deception has long troubled our conceptions of AI. In both cases, the nuances of modern-day technology policy require new, more honest discussions and metaphors about what exactly technologists are creating. But of course, these conversations continue to take place in the cultural context of a mythos whose deeply entrenched notions of anthropomorphism, analogy, and familiarity shade all discourse around AI and machine learning.

Intelligence is ambiguous in large part because we connect it so often to different constructions of human identity: technical mastery of a skill or medium; interaction and empathy; anticipation and foresight; idiosyncrasy and the auto-poetic performance of the self. From this perspective, it is tempting to dismiss the “personhood” question as a philosophical fantasy that does not tell us anything useful about the actual techno-culture AI companies are creating. However, Ashby argues that all policy regimes are built on philosophical foundations and supported or maintained in part on philosophical grounds. The abolition of slavery was a personhood argument, for instance. Debates about the personhood of fetuses and zygotes are at the heart of some of the most contentious rifts in American political culture. So whether or not the sci-fi and tech industry imaginaries about AI use what Sterling would call “bad metaphors,” they are nevertheless inescapable, and we should be prepared to contend with abstract questions about artificial intelligence as a central aspect of policy discussions.

4 Developing the taxonomies

Defining AI is not just hard in the real world—it is hard in sci-fi as well. We found similar ambiguity in our attempts to categorize AI systems depicted in prominent science fiction. Our initial goal in our qualitative content analysis (Bengtsson 2016 ) was to analyze a broad swath of narratives, but we eventually decided to narrow our focus to more rigorously approach the question of just how science fiction is imagining artificial intelligence. We chose to focus on short fiction, rather than include movies, television shows, novels, video games, and other media. We had three reasons for this decision. First, we believed that the short fiction form was one with few hard rules or material production constraints (unlike film budgets or the computational limits of game engines), and thus empowers creatives to approach topics in an incredibly diverse range of ways. Second, another of the outputs of our project would be a set of original commissioned short stories to run in the Future Tense Fiction series in Slate , so we hoped a consistent focus on the short story would improve our outputs there. Third, we felt that we would not be able to rigorously examine the enormous body of work about AI that has been produced across all media, and even an attempt at random sampling would be more a demonstration of our own interests and preoccupations in genre and media terms than a dispassionate survey. Adopting this constraint increases the representative power of our sample.

We also chose to limit our analysis to short stories published in the twenty-first century. As we have discussed in this paper, artificial intelligence has been a subject of science fiction for decades, even centuries. This was again an effort to limit the amount of content we would need to examine, but also to focus on fiction produced during a time when most of the population was engaging regularly with computers and algorithms. Were our familiar ideas about killer robots, et cetera, an artifact of science fiction from the mid-twentieth century, or had they found fresh purchase in our contemporary imaginary? How did the proliferation of digital technologies shape science fiction notions and expectations about AI? We believe these questions are central to an examination of the near future of AI policy, and is best addressed by keeping our focus on contemporary, as opposed to classic, stories.

To compile our corpus, we looked at the set of short stories ( n  = 975) that had received some form of recognition in the genre, either by being nominated for one of the three major science fiction awards (the Hugos, the Nebulas, or the Locus Awards) or that had been included in the annual Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies edited by the late Gardner Dozois. After removing duplicates of stories earning more than one of these honors, we further limited our pool to stories that were freely available online. Sourcing texts in this way, rather than simply listing the AI science fiction works we had already encountered and read, allowed us to limit the degree to which our own preconceptions and interests shaped our analysis. However, it was also a significant task to pore over almost 20 years of award nominations and 19 volumes of Year’s Best collections to determine which stories actually include and discuss AI. The presence of robots or talking computers is only occasionally mentioned in a short story’s title, and so we had to look deeper. Some stories we could include based on a keyword search or quick scan of the first few pages. Others required detailed scans or even full, close reading to determine whether the story featured AI. To complete this step, one researcher reviewed all of the stories and identified ones that featured AI to be included in the next stage of coding. This resulted in a corpus of 96 stories.

We found ambiguity within this first step of the process. We quickly realized we had a natural bias toward recognizing AI in characters but not in systems . If a story features a robot or talking computer, especially one with a name or a prominent emotional role in the story, it was easy to include it in our corpus. If a story instead features computational systems that make complex decisions but do not talk, it was harder to decide whether or not that story should be included. The same was true with stories that imply technology running in the background that we think of as AI products in our contemporary reality (facial recognition, autonomous vehicles, etc.). Indeed, when such stories made it into our corpus, in step 2, our research assistants would sometimes flag them as being erroneously included, or ask if we had reason to think particular characters in the story are secretly robots. What those of us compiling the corpus interpreted as AI, those of us reading and categorizing the stories did not always see. In part, this is the nature of short stories, which have less room for extended explanations and detailed descriptions of technological minutiae (and narrative in general–technical explanations can interrupt and distract readers following a plot). In part, however, we believe this is due to the ambiguous AI imaginary.

Rather than adopting a purely emergent coding strategy, we first identified a number of themes based on advice from our advisory board and experts we interviewed, extended discussion among our project team, and trial and error. These themes reflect our hypotheses and analysis goals. For example, we hoped to categorize stories based on the sophistication and purpose of the AIs they depict; their engagement with policy questions; the positive, negative, or ambiguous tone of the AI imaginaries they propose; and other questions (see final codebook in Appendix 2 ). An early debate on the project team was around whether we should attempt to categorize AI in stories as protagonists or antagonists. While this might help determine just how prevalent movie-based tropes are, we ultimately decided that this framework was too reductive and would mean losing a great deal of literary nuance in many stories. We also discussed trying to categorize AI around embodiment—whether they walk in an android body, are projected as a hologram, speak as a disembodied voice on a computer, control swarms of nanobots, and so on. The range of possibilities here, many of which overlap, and the disconnect between these portrayals and the current policy issues we were interested in, led us to omit this question from the final analysis as well (cf. Noessel 2019b ). Similarly, we ultimately eliminated questions about who or what creates and controls the AI, which proved difficult to determine in many of the short-form narratives we were analyzing.

Once we developed a first codebook, we went through several more iterations by having four readers (including members of the project team) test the frameworks on small batches of 5–10 stories. Afterwards we would debrief with our coders to determine where questions made sense, where discussion was needed to establish shared definitions, and where the framework failed to make sense or produced contradictory interpretations. We eliminated some questions that did not seem clear or useful, and adjusted the wording. In one case, we split a question that seemed to be asking too much into two separate parts. After these initial trials, we also instituted a confidence metric, which we asked coders to include in their explanation boxes for each question. With each rating, our coders would mark whether they felt “highly confident,” “moderately confident,” or “not confident” in their rating, as well as indicate a second-choice answer. We also had coders briefly explain their answer to each question.

After finalizing a coding structure and set of questions, each story in our corpus was read and analyzed by two coders who had not been involved in developing the previous iterations of the codebook. Where there was disagreement about a rating, a third researcher would read the story and break the tie. We found a great deal of disagreement in these ratings by all three coders. We were applying difficult questions to literary works that are deliberately nuanced, even ambiguous, in their themes, their descriptions, and their imagined futures. These disagreements would be problematic if our goal was to create a generalized taxonomy using a small set of sample data; in this case, however, we were attempting to understand the characteristics of a data set (contemporary, widely read, short-form science fiction) using an extensive sample of that data. As we discuss below, the ambiguity was an important feature of the data set, revealed through our efforts at taxonomizing it. This highlighted how challenging it is to meaningfully discuss AI in a nontechnical way, both because the definitions are slippery, as discussed above, and because AI encompasses so many different kinds of technologies, both in science fiction and in the real world. Despite these challenges, we believe that our analysis offers useful insights into the current state of the policy/sci-fi intersection that suggest a path forward for the AI imaginary.

5 Results and implications for technology policy

Throughout the project, our most significant finding has been the slipperiness of AI as a concept itself, both in fiction and policy. Because we struggle to articulate what AI is , in terms of its functional boundaries, its status as a person or entity, and its position of agency and responsibility within broader social systems, it is difficult to determine what AI should or should not do.

The study resulted in three main findings. First, that narrow AI will have a greater social impact in the near term, but sci-fi short stories mostly concern general AI. Second, most stories do concern themselves with policy, governance, or constraints, but mostly bias. Third, most of the stories depict problematic AI rather than AI that works well. The paper discusses each of these in more detail below.

Of the stories we analyzed, a majority (52%) feature AI that we categorized as having “general” (human-equivalent) intelligence. Examples include “Articles of Faith” by Mike Resnick, in which a church’s robot janitor decides to embrace religion, and “Fandom for Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, about a museum-dwelling AI obsessed with an anime cartoon show. Another significant portion of stories—such as “Computer Virus” by Nancy Kress ( 2001 )—describe “super” intelligences with cognitive capacities vastly greater than human beings, sometimes likened to gods. Few stories feature the “narrow” artificial intelligences that are extremely good at some tasks (such as identifying skin cancer from photos) but unable to reason through any other kind of problem—in other words, the kind of AI that many of the experts we talked to predicted will dominate the field for a long time. Examples of those that do depict narrow AI include “Elephant on Table” by Bruce Sterling ( 2017 ), featuring complex but inhuman surveillance algorithms, and “Henry James, This One’s For You” by Jack McDevitt ( 2005 ), about a computer program that can generate the great American novel.

As most of the science fiction that we encountered focused on AI that were of human or beyond-human intelligence, most of the AI in those stories are imagined as beings with personalities, motives, and agency—or, at least two out of those three. In other words, these are AI characters with technological origins, not technologies featuring AI systems. The sci-fi AI imaginary is still preoccupied with the basic conundrums raised by Shelley in Frankenstein : the possibilities, responsibilities, and hazards of creating a fully formed being. As science fiction author Lee Konstantinaou put it during a panel at our May 2019 convening, “most SF about AI isn’t about AI at all, not in a forecasting way—it’s about us, our needs and insecurities.”

The vast majority (89%) of stories we looked at discuss AI policy, governance, or constraints—a gratifying finding, given the framing of our project. In “Mika Model” by Paolo Bacigalupi ( 2016 ), for instance, ambiguity around governance of AI is the fulcrum on which the plot turns: is a sex robot that kills its abusive owner a murderer or a malfunctioning consumer product? Several stories, such as “I, Row-Boat” by Cory Doctorow ( 2006 ) and “Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer ( 2015 ), make reference to Asimov’s Three Laws—the classic example of AI governance. Others, such as Hannu Rajaniemi’s “His Master’s Voice” ( 2008 ), imagine governance as mainly concerned with controlling the ability of AIs to copy and reproduce themselves. Yet others, such as Charles Stross’s “Lobsters” ( 2001 ), discuss the question of AI citizenship and rights. However, we quickly found that, just as defining AI had proved tricky, so too did our raters struggle to apply a clear and rigorous definition of policy . The concept easily sprawled. In AI, it is difficult to distinguish between questions of governance and questions of technology design, and in the constrained creative space of a short story, that ambiguity is magnified by the narrative lens of the author’s interests and intentions.

For instance, we might speak of governing AI technologies with government institutions that set and enforce laws, such as standards for how autonomous vehicles should be programmed or bans on facial recognition technology, as some activists are now calling for. Perhaps governance might even be represented in science fiction via the Turing Police in William Gibson’s Neuromancer ( 1984 ) or the Krishna Cops from Ian McDonald’s River of Gods ( 2004 )—agents that actively hunt down wayward AIs. On the other hand, we might think of governance as taking place primarily in the code of AI products. This might be explicit, such as the “Three Laws” that govern Asimov’s robots. It might also be more subtle: an AI character that speaks of how it thinks or processes information, the kinds of problems it can solve and those it cannot. Is governance in the code of the algorithms that Facebook uses to feed users content, or in the act of Congress calling Mark Zuckerberg to testify about his company’s effects on American democracy? What portion of that spectrum should be thought of as “policy”? This question complicated our ability to identify policy insights in science fiction stories.

We also found that 72% of the stories we examined depict AI technology either as hazardous or as having unintended consequences. This may stem from stories’ need for drama and conflict; stories where everything works perfectly are less likely to capture our interest, get published, or win awards. But partly this is the nature of the technology itself, whose power magnifies flaws in data and human institutions. As Williams pointed out in an interview, wish-granting djinn are good analogies for AI in many stories: we frame our requests poorly and algorithms give us too literally what we wish for. “It’s not the genie’s fault you didn’t understand the nature of your desire,” Williams said.

However, our interviews and discussions with both science fiction thinkers and AI policy experts revealed a wide range of vital policy concerns sometimes overlooked in the more fantastical imaginary of robot uprisings.

Perhaps the most commonly discussed policy challenge posed by AI technology is bias. AI systems, such as facial recognition or predictive policing, are often built on datasets developed through already-biased practices. If racist policing practices lead to more arrests in low-income and non-white neighborhoods, an algorithm predicting crime or criminality in that neighborhood will make that racial bias a part of how it sees the world. Similar, less egregious examples proliferate throughout the AI tech space, from algorithms used for hiring and processing insurance claims to biased language used in natural language processing (NLP) algorithms. Aylin Caliskan, Joanna Bryson, and Arvind Narayanan conducted a study that found that NLP systems were likely to assume that a “doctor” was male and a “nurse” was female. Systems connected masculine names to concepts like “career,” “professional,” and “salary,” and feminine names to words like “wedding” and “parents” ( 2017 ). These are sexist human assumptions that have crept into our machines, and preventing or eliminating such bias is a tricky and time-intensive task. Williams, along with many other experts, argues that a key way to address these problems is to promote greater diversity at technology companies and on teams that develop AI systems.

Complicated systems entrench and amplify existing biases, make them harder to address, and fuel the tendency for using AI to avoid human responsibility and culpability. As Ashby argued, the transfer of decision-making from humans to machines absolves governments and corporations of liability and accountability for mistakes, injustices, and even war crimes. They make it easier for institutions to say, “Sorry you got hit by a self-driving vehicle, but there’s no driver to charge with reckless endangerment.” “Sorry, we can’t approve your insurance claim. The algo makes those decisions.” “Sorry the automated predator drone blew up your village. It was a glitch that no human will be held accountable for.” From redlining to policing to war, AI systems, even ones that only nominally make decisions, make it harder for humans to get justice against institutions and the individuals that run them. As these examples suggest, the problems are not technical but rather sociotechnical—the intersection of technologies, policies, and people.

AI systems also pose difficult policy questions around transparency and consent. Do convincingly human automated systems—for instance, a voice agent that might call the salon for you to book a haircut—need to make humans aware that they are interacting with a machine? Do we need to establish consent before our AI systems reach into people’s lives? In an interview, ASU theatre scholar Michael Rohd articulated a rubric for thinking about how we interact with AI either knowingly or unknowingly, and willingly or unwillingly. An AI therapy app we deliberately download would be an example of a system we interact with both knowingly and willingly. A streaming service that non-transparently feeds us algorithmically generated content might be considered AI we interact with unknowingly but willingly. An AI prison warden would interact with prisoners knowingly but unwillingly. And a top-secret AI system used for government surveillance would interact with citizens unknowingly and unwillingly. Because we struggle to define what AI “is”—the capabilities and boundaries of a particular system in sociotechnical space—it is difficult to provide full and knowledgeable consent in every case.

The final area of policy concern that emerged in our discussions is the question of assessment. As ACLU technology policy director Kade Crockford explained to us, AI (and digital technologies in general) are often rolled out to the public or into institutions without a full assessment of their social impacts. Once they are in use, these genies are hard to get back into the bottle. Police procedures get tied into databases, employees get trained on new systems, human workers are laid off and replaced by automated tools. Particularly in the criminal justice system, invasive technologies can be in use for years before a case makes it to the Supreme Court for final judgment as to whether they violate Constitutional rights. Crockford argues that we should have discussions about whether AI systems are ethical and socially beneficial before they are developed and brought to market or put in use. The protean nature and fluidity of these systems only exacerbate the ambiguity and assessment problems: even experts who believe that they understand the risks and capabilities of a problematic system like Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition technology might discover that the tools, and their use cases in implementation, have changed overnight.

As pressing as these areas of concern are, they are often too mundane to be grist for popular science fiction stories. These policy questions were largely nonexistent in the dozens of stories we analyzed—with the caveat that unintended consequences, broadly conceived, are a regular theme of many stories about AI.

6 Commissioning original fiction

Our findings suggest that there is a disconnect between the problems of imaginary AI as envisioned by science fiction and the policy problems posed by AI technology products. Much pop science fiction about AI features killer robots, robot uprisings, and computational creatures rebelling against their creators. Interestingly, our own study of AI in short fiction found few stories that use these tropes (though a few did, such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s story “Mika Model”). Only a few stories we read feature AI in violent or military roles, or AI designed to provide humans with companionship. Most of these fictional AIs manage complex systems, like cities, corporations, or starships—or pursue their own ends. This may be the difference between AI on the screen and AI on the page; a chrome robot that blows things up à la The Terminator or a sexy robot that seduces à la Ex Machina are more visually interesting than a disembodied AI making stock trades.

Yet those pop narratives have shaped public and industry discourse around AI. Prominent commentators on the future, such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, have warned of an AI takeover as a consequence of tech advancement. Such narratives come with a sense of inevitability that does not leave room for public choices about technology. An imaginary built around time-traveling killer robots occludes the messier quandaries of real machine intelligence as it is being implemented today, such as privacy, consent, and bias. Our collective fixation on the anthropomorphic destiny of AI also makes it hard for the public to recognize the real promise of AI technologies to do good. We need a more nuanced conversation that explores a broader range of possible AI morphologies and cultural roles, and how such systems might positively impact society.

Our project sought to address this challenge by commissioning original fiction to fill in some of the gaps in our cultural representations of AI. Between the lines of inquiry pursued by our advisory board members and our discussions with experts at our May 2019 convening, we developed a sense of what kinds of stories about AI would be most useful for better engaging the public with contemporary tech policy questions. This informed our approach to commissioning original short stories that were published as part of Slate ’s Future Tense Fiction series. First, we asked that stories be grounded in an understanding of AI as a technology product likely created within a capitalist economic framework. We were less interested in AIs that spontaneously dragged themselves out of the primordial ooze of the Internet or that found consciousness through some accident or twist of fate. We did not want killer robots, all-powerful Skynet analogs, or AI girlfriends. We did want stories that extrapolate from already-contentious policy debates and explore the nuance and ambiguity of intelligent machines as they are now, or might soon become.

The first three stories published in Slate offer compelling examples of this way forward for the AI imaginary. In “Affordances” ( 2019 ), bestselling science fiction author, activist and AI Policy Futures advisory board member Cory Doctorow wrote about how predictive policing can reinforce and be used to justify already existing societal biases, and also depicted the massive amounts of hidden human labor required to make technologies like facial recognition function seamlessly. In “A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Robot Walk Into a Bar” ( 2019 ), speculative fiction writer and AI Policy Futures graduate researcher Andrew Dana Hudson explored a future tech industry building advanced AI voice agents that can navigate diverse cultural and religious sensibilities, and imagined how AI might be used by faith groups to advance their evangelical agendas. Finally, advisory board member and Hugo Award finalist Malka Older offered “Actually, Naneen” ( 2019 ), a story about robots used for childcare work and the complications that come with treating an integral part of the family like a product with planned obsolescence.

In these glimpses of AI policy futures, AI is sometimes not a thing that thinks, but a thing that sees . Sterling has made the point that the most popular uses of AI are photo and video editing effects, such as giving yourself cat ears in Snapchat or TikTok. We see this lens in Doctorow’s story, in which a popular facial recognition service is used to let people into their locked homes—and sometimes witnesses doorstep crimes. The computational labor involved is sourced in part from climate refugees, who work to categorize images the facial recognition algorithm does not understand. We see in this detail another way forward for the AI imaginary: acknowledgement that AI systems require a vast amount of human labor to function. Another example is Hudson’s story about the debates that might take place in the tech company offices where the sentences spoken by future-Siris are written, curated, edited, and approved.

And this imaginary sees AI policy questions replicating, amplifying, and reigniting values disputes across almost every sector. Hudson’s story imagines the cultural work of AI as reaffirming our beliefs and mores as well as answering our questions, and in affirming those beliefs, contributing to the imagined communities from which they spring. This also includes understanding that AI will play a role in areas of life that may seem, at first glance, less technological—such as childcare and childhood, as Older explores and Hudson and Doctorow touch on. Taken together, the stories describe not just how AIs might “see” cultural phenomena, from childrearing to politeness, but also how they are seen, as servants, family members, or agents of oppression.

Our second trio of AI stories expanded on this notion, focusing on the question of justice. Holli Mintzer’s story “Legal Salvage” ( 2020 ) addresses the question of legal personhood for AIs as an intersection of law, ethics, and aesthetics, with a sentient robot that asserts its personhood in part by demonstrating taste and curatorial competence. Tochi Onyebuchi’s story “How to Pay Reparations: a Documentary” ( 2020 ) takes on a different dimension of justice, asking if algorithms could be employed to counteract systemic racism and right historical wrongs through economic interventions. In “The State Machine” by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne ( 2020 ), machines have taken surveillance and personalization to their logical extreme: an autonomous AI governance system that continually updates the constitution and legal framework, while also micromanaging the lives of its citizens.

All three of these justice stories address the challenge of instrumentalizing moral and ethical rules in code. As we invest computational intelligence with real political, legal, and economic power, we effectively endorse structures of value and ethical practice embedded in those systems. Sometimes the machines are a convenient moral dumping ground for the difficult decisions that humans no longer wish to be blamed for. Sometimes the emergence of AI forces us to reconsider broader questions of personhood and justice. But each of the stories asserts a bedrock faith that justice itself cannot be automated, and that individual actions and moral positions matter. Mintzer’s story of an AI who achieves legal personhood dwells on the central importance of individual actions and identity, as well as the deep relationship between aesthetic and moral value. The central role of political economy in each of these three stories invites possible readings of AI and moral value, in particular the question of how work, identity, and civic participation intertwine. These authors’ sketches of AI and personhood echo Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and the concept of society as a construct built on responsibility and care towards strangers.

One of the stories from our coding exercise that we found most representative of the broader AI imaginary implied by both the corpus we analyzed and the broader pop culture narratives about AI is “Zima Blue” by Alastair Reynolds ( 2005 ), which was adapted into an animated short for the Netflix show Love, Death & Robots . The story centers on Zima, a futuristic artist working on planet-sized canvases who is obsessed with a particular shade of blue. The story describes his process of artistic transcendence, growing beyond the limitations of his body to commune with the cosmos in extreme environments. In the end, Zima is revealed to be an AI, an android who evolved to his present form upgrade-by-upgrade from a simple, Roomba-like robot that tirelessly scrubbed the blue tile of a swimming pool.

“Zima Blue” elegantly articulates perhaps the most mesmerizing aspect of today’s AI imaginary: that our still-primitive machines might one day evolve into galaxy brains that make us look primitive in turn. Our analysis found that most stories take place in the far future and focus on general and super-intelligent AIs. There is a great interest in science fiction around the eventual destiny of technology, and such grand visions certainly make for fascinating stories, because they redirect our thoughts to the eternal questions of human experience and the purpose of existence. But sometimes this focus can amount to missing the trees for the forest.

It is time for science fiction to leave behind the tropes of both the killer robot and the computer god. These concepts stretched our brains to vast possibilities throughout the twentieth century, but now in the twenty-first they confuse our attempts to grapple with the real technological sea change already underway around us. Focusing on the far-off destiny of AI distracts us from the political and policy issues posed by these new technologies today. It is time to grow past the fixation on artificial people , and think more deeply about what it means to make systems more intelligent.

The project has provided promising initial findings to validate our approach: our taxonomy revealed that the imaginary of AI in science fiction is more complex and nuanced than the stories that tend to be most widely disseminated through major films and bestsellers. Our conversations with experts demonstrated that there is a pressing need for new conversations and narratives about AI that focus on the near term and on the complex, amorphous sociotechnical dynamics of machine learning and artificial intelligence as it is already being deployed. Finally, the fiction and response essays we commissioned have been well received, demonstrating that it is both feasible and worthwhile to treat this imaginary as a design space, or better yet an ongoing dialog, where policy experts, scholars, writers, and others can grapple with the stakes of technical and ethical possibilities. The impact of this fiction is difficult to measure in meaningful quantitative terms, but it is real: within weeks of publication, these stories have led to speaking invitations, new assignments in academic reading groups and syllabi, and new conversations about technology policy. Based on these reactions, we speculate that there is both an opportunity and a need for what we might term “policy fiction” that responds to Sheila Jasanoff’s call for works that “situate technologies within the integrated material, moral, and social landscapes that science fiction offers up in such abundance” ( 2015 ).

There have long been bridges between the imaginaries of science fiction and technology policy, but deliberately combining perspectives and methods from both of these worlds could lead to richer and more nuanced policy deliberations that are also more accessible and engaging to the public. Looking forward, we hope both to advance this work in the field of AI and to continue developing the methodologies piloted here to span science fiction and technology policy in other arenas. Other rapidly evolving fields like synthetic biology are haunted by their own short lists of ghost stories and nightmare scenarios, and would benefit from grounded explorations of the near future.

Such extensions would also allow us to better understand what is unique about the protean nature of AI in human culture, and what is true of any potentially transformative technology. Humanity’s relationship with AI is usually a variation of the Mechanical Turk: a black box that seems to function as an independent, thinking machine, but which in fact obscures the labor and agency of many human beings. The ambiguity of AI as a bundle of technologies, cultural roles, and accumulated mythological baggage underlines the fact that we will not be disentangling the humans from the machines anytime soon. But this presents us with a paradox of form: code and policy are both relatively rigid systems for expressing human intentions. They are arduous and slow to create, difficult to maintain, and often fail to keep up with reality. One approach to this problem is to see code and policy as structures of knowledge that are then exposed to shifting cultures of interpretation. Code and law are like boats we launch into the river of culture: the water continues to shift and flow, reconfiguring these objects and changing their functions as the waterways evolve. Some of these tools survive almost unchanged over long periods, like the doctrine of habeas corpus or elements of the UNIX operating system. Others remain functional but accrue new interfaces and analogies like so many barnacles, such as MOCAS, the COBOL-based contract management system the Pentagon has been running since 1958. Still other policy and code structures collapse in time, of course, disappearing with nary a bubble after a few short years—an occurrence so frequent no example is needed. In the final category are protean, ship of Theseus-style entities, still afloat but hardly resembling their original form, like the leviathan expansions of Facebook or Google since their inceptions.

In every case, however, the cultural frame in which these systems operate is fluid. Employees might peer “at” the Pentagon’s MOCAS now through sleek HTML interfaces instead of chunky lines of cathode-illuminated text. The cultural frame of what military contracting means has shifted significantly since 1958. But the code is still there, meaning different things to us today even as it completes the same operations it always has. This fluidity of cultural perception offers an important insight for how we manage the policy and technical development of AI. Like the Mechanical Turk, all intelligent systems perform their intelligence and their agency, whether they are not really intelligent at all, like Microsoft’s Clippy assistant, or if they represent the current state of the art. We are still developing interpretive frameworks to competently manage, collaborate with, and integrate intelligent machines within broader sociotechnical systems.

We launched this project in part as a response to the poverty of imagination reflected in dominant AI narratives: the killer robot, the omniscient oracle, the android who becomes human. The mythological and intellectual taproots of AI, from Pygmalion and Frankenstein to the Turing Test, all imagine AI as another self, an anthropomorphic Pinocchio figure we can use as a way to reflect on ourselves. We keep looking for the humanity in our machines, but the results of our work here suggest that this may be blinding us to many different kinds of agency. Because of this anthropocentric bias, we also risk miscategorizing or underestimating the power and agency of the intelligent systems that already influence us, from autopilots and algorithmic news filters to financial systems sifting resumes and loan applications.

There are other interpretive frames we can use for nonhuman intelligence and agency, as several of our experts pointed out. Animal and biological metaphors can be particularly useful in modeling the intention and purpose of intelligent machines without presupposing their humanity. Perhaps one day we will understand autonomous vehicles to be less like KITT from Knight Rider and more like horses: creatures that have their own needs and desires but limited cognitive capacity for higher-level thought or emotion. “The Voluntary State,” by Christopher Rowe ( 2004 ), features just this sort of future car. One might object that this kind of analogy may lead back to the “birds as drones” category error Sterling articulates about intelligence, but in this case biological metaphors can provide a richer contextual frame. Understanding some computational systems as agents or entities with particular capacities and goals is more culturally tractable when we draw on our long cognitive relationships with other species to frame those capacities and goals.

This represents an inversion of the history of computational research, which maintains our ancient fascination with remaking the natural through human artifice. From Vaucanson’s duck and Norbert Weiner’s cybernetic moth to the McCullogh-Pitts neuron and the brain metaphors prevalent in machine learning today, computer science borrows from nature to make creatures of silicon that generally seek to impersonate the organic, the human. Reversing the flow of those analogies, we might create new cultural roles and grammars of action for AI systems that perform their work as familiar but nonhuman agents.

In other instances, our best analogy to a complex intelligent system might be ecological rather than biological. Indigenous peoples around the world maintain knowledge and observational systems based on humanity’s long history of working in awareness of and in concert with local ecologies. While we have grown used to interacting with a computational avatar, voice, or personal interface, those surface appearances are usually deceptive, obscuring systems that are as extensive, intricate, and nonhuman as a forest or a river delta. Analogizing the behaviors of complex, interdependent algorithmic systems to a waterfall or a flock of birds might give us new ways to visualize the agency of these systems and mentally model our interactions with them.

Adopting better metaphors for AI might ultimately shape not just cultural interpretations but also the creation of new systems. AI researchers have in recent years begun confronting the “hard problems” of social and cultural data, which are deeply steeped in the messiness, contradictions, and ambiguities of humans. If we move away from designing AI to model or impersonate human intelligence or agency, we might be able to create meaningful new constructs. Several of our Future Tense Fiction stories explore the ways in which AI systems can embody or animate ideas. Tochi Onyebuchi’s story imagines an algorithm to enact reparations. Malka Older’s robo-nannies perform not just the service labor but the affect and love inherent in childcare. In another recent Future Tense story on the theme of AI (not commissioned for this project), author Karl Schroeder ( 2020 ) imagines AIs that literally assume the roles of biological and ecological entities, like rivers and protected territories. Today we often build AIs to imitate us in particular tasks or roles. But we can go beyond AIs that do human work, or even AIs that do the work of pretending to be human. There is an opportunity to build AIs that enact our most humane ideas, speaking for the voiceless, the forgotten, and the oppressed, inverting the power structure of futures like Doctorow’s “Affordances.” Hudson’s story “A Rabbi, a Priest and a Robot Walk into a Bar” runs with the fact that AIs embed cultural and religious values, not as tacit by-products of their development but as core features. While Hudson’s narrative imagines a future where AI becomes another battleground in culture wars, we could also design systems to remind us of those people and values we are quick to ignore. Every AI system already embeds philosophies, models of action, or structures of belief, but if we intentionally designed them to embody and speak those truths, they could occupy different cultural roles.

These observations are contingent on the preliminary nature of our work. The cultural space of AI is vast and rapidly increasing, as we embed AI technologies into more objects, structures, and organizations. The imagination space of AI in science fiction is also large, and our taxonomy barely scratches the surface of contemporary AI narratives in English across genres from film to video games, much less those in other languages and time periods. Nevertheless, the challenges confronting policy-makers, technologists, and indeed everyone who interacts with intelligent machines are all live issues right now. The next few years will be critical to the regulatory and cultural codes and laws we adopt for AI. While there are many open questions here ripe for continued research, it is clear that there is still room for better stories about what AI is, and what it should become.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Code availability

Not applicable.

In 2019, roughly a year into the project timeline, project co-leader Kevin Bankston left his position at the Open Technology Institute for a new role at Facebook. He continues to be involved in this project and as a fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination, but has not contributed directly to the research since this transition, though he provided some editorial input on this publication.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank our many collaborators on this project at ASU, Slate Magazine, and New America. We are particularly grateful for the hard work of our readers, Adam Clark and Samantha Geiser, and our undergraduate researchers, Sakshi Hedge and Michelle Emmanuelli, as well as our colleagues Joey Eschrich, Kevin Bankston, Torie Bosch, Anthony Nguyen, Andrés Martinez, the New America events and communications teams, and the Slate editorial team. We are indebted to the excellent feedback and suggestions of our advisory board and the participants in our lively discussions at the Future Tense workshop and public event in May 2019. This research was made possible thanks to funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Google.

This work was supported by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Google as part of the AI Policy Futures project.

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Appendix 1: Questions used in expert interviews

What science fiction works would you consider the most important for understanding sci-fi narratives about AI? What’s the canon and why? Any that are less well known?

How should we define AI? What’s the operating definition we should use in the next 10–20 years in the context of tech policy and social change?

What do you see as the most realistic or important short to mid-term social impact of AI?

What are the most important things policymakers need to understand about AI? What questions should they be asking about AI?

We are crafting a taxonomy of depictions of AI in science fiction. What categories or questions do you think are the most useful lenses for examining AI in this fictional context?

AI narratives often engage with metaphysical questions about the nature of consciousness, the definition of intelligence, the consequences of immortality, etc. How important are these questions to consider when thinking about real-world technology policy on AI?

What are we missing here? What questions about AI do you think have yet to be explored, by sci-fi or other research? What potential narratives would you like to see?

Who else should we talk to about this?

Appendix 2: Questions used to code short fiction works

Title of the work

Link/Collection Title

Short Description of the AI System or Ecosystem (including specific name if applicable)

WHEN in the future does the story take place? (select one)

Now or the Near Future (a world recognizably similar to ours with a few changes, e.g., Ex Machina)

The Distant Future (a world where many things have changed e.g., Star Trek)

The Past/an Alternate Timeline

Unknown/Indeterminable

Explanation

Who made the AI? (select one)

Machines/AIs

Self-realizing/emergence OR accidental awakening (of something built by humans)

Unknown/Ambiguous

What does the AI do in the world? What is its work or primary function? (select one)

Military/warfighting

Specialized physical workforce function (e.g., janitor, nanny)

Love, companionship, friendship (e.g., robot girlfriend, Stepford wives)

Logistics or information management (e.g., managing a city, analyzing a surveillance system, driving a car, piloting a spaceship)

Solving an intellectual problem (e.g., writing a novel, curing a disease, calculating the fate of the universe, picking the president, pondering the meaning of life)

Unknown/Pursues its own goals

What kind of intelligence does the AI have? (select one)

Narrow. It might be very good at solving a particular kind of problem, but can’t think through novel types of problem and doesn’t have broad consciousness like a human.

General. Equivalent roughly to a human. It can reason through many different kinds of problems.

Super. Much more intelligent than a human on reasoning through most problems.

Other. Hard to categorize, perhaps displaying very alien ways of thinking.

Does the story discuss AI policies, governance structures, constraints, or other ways society manages (or fails to manage) the AI? (select one)

Does this story depict AI as hazardous or AI policies having unintended consequences? (select one)

Does the story show AI having widespread social or economic impacts? (select one)

Yes, major impacts

Yes, minor effects

Overall does the story portray the impact of the AI as… (select one)

Quote (optional)

How long did it take you to read/code this story?

Do you have any other comments you want to share? (i.e., if this story should be excluded from the study)

Coder’s name

Appendix 3: List of works analyzed

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Hudson, A.D., Finn, E. & Wylie, R. What can science fiction tell us about the future of artificial intelligence policy?. AI & Soc 38 , 197–211 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01273-2

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Published : 20 September 2021

Issue Date : February 2023

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Best sci-fi books: modern masterpieces & all-time classics

Here’s a scintillating selection of the best sci-fi books, with modern hits and sci-fi classics for you to enjoy.

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Explore the unknown from the comfort of your home, with the best sci-fi books of all time.

As we drift ever further into a fresh new year, it’s only natural for curious minds to hunger for something far-out and exotic and science fiction literature is the answer. It’s the perfect accompaniment to the occasion, whether it’s finding the perfect transportive book or discovering a rare gem to cozy up with during these cold, dark days.

Sci-fi comes in a wealth of varieties and flavors, and that’s what makes the genre so enticing for readers of all persuasions, from gung-ho military sci-fi, dire dystopian sagas, and revealing concept art editions, to old-fashioned space operas and terrifying extraterrestrial encounters.

If you're interested in checking out more of the science that inspires some of these amazing sci-fi tales, then check out our best space and astronomy books guide.

To cover more ground, we've split our guide into three categories: newly released sci-fi books (within the last year), modern sci-fi books, and classic sci-fi books. Now, sit back and enjoy our collection of the best sci-fi books out there.

Best new sci-fi books

1. the simulated multiverse.

Why you can trust Space.com Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test and review products.

• Author: Rizwan Virk
• Publisher: Bayview Books (2021)

MIT computer scientist, Silicon Valley video game guru, and bestselling author Rizwan Virk (“The Simulation Hypothesis”) explores the wild notion of a complex multiverse that has generated legions of believers over the past decade. 

Here Virk offers up mind-scrambling dissections of provocative topics like parallel universes, infinite timelines, quantum computing, alternate simulated realities, contorted definitions of space and time, and the Mandela Effect (a phenomenon in which the minority of the population recalls memories of past events different from the consensus). Think “The Man in the High Castle” high on both the blue and red pill from “ The Matrix .” It’s a fascinating explanation of our world that might shake the foundations of your digital reality, but does so in a totally digestible style.

2. The Art of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge

• Author: Amy Ratcliffe
• Publisher: Abrams (2021)

This isn’t nearly as exciting as an actual trip to Disneyland Resort or Walt Disney World, but it costs far less and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the theme parks’ newest Star Wars lands. Written by pop culture expert and theme park aficionado, Amy Ratcliffe, this deluxe 256-page coffee table book displays the incredible portfolio of pre-visualization art that inspired the creation of the fictional world of Galaxy’s Edge and its bustling Black Spire Outpost on the Outer Rim planet of Batuu. 

“We looked back on work that happened over five years ago in some cases, but everyone recalled their thought processes and their excitement about working in the Star Wars galaxy,” Ratcliffe told Space.com. “I think readers will not only get an idea of the immense amount of work that went into developing such an ambitious land, but they’ll also see how much care and thoughtfulness went into it.” 

Walt Disney Imagineering’s trademark creative method comes alive using a constellation of vivid concept artworks, sketches, attraction blueprints, photos, and exclusive interviews with the talented team of Imagineers who helped construct the illusion of a life-size Star Wars trading destination.

• Buy “The Art of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge” now on Amazon

3. Providence

• Author: Max Berry
• Publisher: G. P. Putnam’s Sons (2020)

Quietly released during the height of the global pandemic panic, Max Barry’s (“Lexicon”) novel deserves a spot on our list as it’s one of the best sci-fi novels of the decade. It spins a compelling yarn about a weird race of hive-like, amorphous aliens that spit miniature black holes as defensive weapons and the AI-driven battleship called the Providence Five and its small four-person crew sent to deep space to annihilate them. 

Seven years after a tragic first contact event that left several astronauts dead, this hyper-aware spaceship gradually travels inside enemy territory where it becomes paranoid ala HAL-9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” resulting in some frightening encounters transmitted back to Earth to a captivated global audience. Fans of The Expanse will devour this book before another plasma round explodes!

• Buy “Providence” now on Amazon

4. Leviathan Falls

• Author:  James S. A. Corey
• Publisher: Orbit (2021)

As wise minds once said, all good things must end, and so it is with the best-selling series of military sci-fi novels “The Expanse”. On Nov. 30, the ninth and final book of Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham’s (writing as James S. A. Corey) immensely popular saga landed on Earth. The book dropped just before the sixth and last season of Amazon Prime’s “The Expanse” TV series began airing in December (psst... if you like this TV show, you might like some other of the best sci-fi TV shows based on books ). Following 2019’s “Tiamat’s Wrath,” this climactic volume picks up after the Laconian Empire falls and 1,300 systems are free of the tyrannical rule of Winston Duarte.

In this intense grand finale, Elvi Okoye commands a last-ditch quest to the Adro system to learn more about the enigmatic alien presence known as the gate builders and what long-lost nemesis ended their cosmic construction projects. Back aboard the Rocinante, Captain James Holden and his intrepid colleagues attempt to peaceably reunite Mankind out of the innumerable calamities that have come before.

“We’re going to pay off the promises we’ve been making in the first eight books and complete the story,” Abraham told Space.com. “That’s all we can really promise. And it is the last one. We’re not leaving it open for sequels and prequels and side stories. We wanted to tell one complete story and have a satisfying finish and hopefully that’s what we’re delivering.”

• Buy “Leviathan Falls” now on Amazon

5. Shards of Earth

• Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky 

Adrian Tchaikovsky is the Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author of “Children of Time” and if you’ve never read his tight, rhythmic prose, you’re in for a real treat.

The storyline is set in the aftermath of an 80-year war against angry aliens called the Architects. Idris Telemmier is a genetically-modified soldier once used as a telepathic weapon in the decades-long battle. With the inability to grow older or sleep since the conflict ceased, Idris now exists aboard a salvage spaceship named Vulture God. Humans created these intimidating soldiers who could connect mentally with the enemy when the Earth died.

A half-century later, Idris and his team have happened upon some discarded object that’s clearly of the Architects’ design. Does this signal the aggressive race’s resurgence in this part of the galaxy? Chased by criminals, fanatics, and politicians while custodians of a rare alien item, Idris zooms through the heavens trying to evade his pursuers while seeking the ultimate truth.

• Buy “Shards of Earth” now on Amazon

6. At the Mountains of Madness: Volumes 1 and 2

• Author: H. P. Lovecraft
• Illustrator: François Baranger
• Publisher: Design Studio Press (2020/21)

Fans of H. P. Lovecraft’s unforgettable sci-fi horror novella will savor this impressive oversized hardback adaptation showcasing the absorbing art of French illustrator François Baranger. The recounting of a doomed Miskatonic University expedition to sub-zero Antarctica where specimens of an ancient alien species are discovered in a crumbling stone city is now accompanied by frozen landscapes of otherworldly dread.

Baranger is well known for his work as an internationally-recognized concept designer for popular movies and video games, and here he’s achieved the difficult task of reimagining one of Lovecraft’s most terrifying tales into pure nightmare material. Volume 2 was just released on December 22 to complete the set!

• Buy “At the Mountains of Madness: Volume 1” now on Amazon
• Buy “At the Mountains of Madness: Volume 2” now on Amazon

7. Frank Herbert’s Dune: The Graphic Novel, Book 1

• Author: Frank Herbert
• Adapted by: Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
• Illustrators: Bill Sienkiewicz (cover), Raúl Allén, and Patricia Martín
• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams (2020)

With the success of director Denis Villeneuve’s epic rendition of the seminal 1965 sci-fi novel last year, you might want to check out this stunning graphic novel rendition adapted by Herbert’s son, Brian Herbert, and collaborator Kevin J. Anderson. This pair of writers has vastly expanded the scale and scope of the original “Dune” with over a dozen prequel and sequel novels over the last 22 years. This is the first time the masterwork has been offered in a premium illustrated format (the debut release of a trilogy), now richly adorned with artwork by artists Raúl Allén and Patricia Martín, and an epic cover by Eisner Award-winning illustrator Bill Sienkiewicz. 

“His vast library did not include very many comics or graphic novels, but in his newspaper career he was not only a feature writer but also a professional photographer,” Herbert told Space.com , speaking about his father’s cinematic eye. “He used to tell me that he wrote scenes in his novels – and especially in “Dune” – with a camera in mind, as if he were looking at each scene through the lens of a camera.”

• Buy “Frank Herbert’s Dune: The Graphic Novel, Book 1” now on Amazon

8. The Empire Strikes Back: From a Certain Point of View

• Authors and artists: Tom Angleberger, Sarwat Chadda, S. A. Chakraborty, Mike Chen, Adam Christopher, Katie Cook, Zoraida Córdova, Delilah S. Dawson, Tracy Deonn, Seth Dickinson, Alexander Freed, Jason Fry, Hank Green, Christie Golden, Rob Hart, Lydia Kang, Michael Kogge, R. F. Kuang, C. B. Lee, Mackenzi Lee, John Jackson Miller, Michael Moreci, Daniel José Older, Mark Oshiro, Amy Ratcliffe, Beth Revis, Lilliam Rivera, Cavan Scott, Emily Skrutskie, Karen Strong, Anne Toole, Catherynne M. Valente, Austin Walker, Martha Wells, Django Wexler, Kiersten White, Gary Whitta, Brittany N. Williams, Charles Yu, and Jim Zub
• Publisher: Del Rey (2020)

To help celebrate the 40th anniversary of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Del Rey released a stout, 576-page hardcover stuffed with 40 short stories featuring unsung supporting Star Wars heroes, villains, droids, and aliens from the 1980 film. Ever wondered what it’s like caring for tauntauns on the icy world of Hoth? Or about the goings on in the dark depths of Cloud City? Well, now you can find out!

This entertaining anthology showcases contributions by bestselling authors and well-known artists like Austin Walker, Hank Green, Tracy Deonn, Delilah Dawson, Alexander Freed, John Jackson Miller, Anne Toole, and many more. Participating writers generously donated compensations for their tales and proceeds will be given to First Book, a nonprofit providing learning materials to educators and organizations serving kids in need.

• Buy “The Empire Strikes Back: From a Certain Point of View” now on Amazon

9. Star Trek: The Artistry of Dan Curry

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• Publisher: Titan Books (2020)

For Star Trek junkies and tech-heads wanting to delve deep into the sensational special effects and worldbuilding of the Star Trek franchise, there’s no bolder release than this lavish volume written by seven-time Emmy Award-winning visual effects supervisor and director, Dan Curry. For three decades, Curry has contributed concept art, title sequences, matte paintings, spaceship design, and practical weapons to numerous series and spin offs including The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. Written by Curry and Ben Robinson, this is a 204-page treasure packed with rare sketches, concept art, behind-the-scenes stills, and never-seen storyboards celebrating the accomplishments of one of Star Trek’s most acclaimed artisans.

“The illusions that created the universe of Star Trek were the result of many gifted and dedicated artists,” Curry told Space.com. “There was no single hero of its visual effects. I was very fortunate to design and create a lot of things that became part of the Star Trek franchise. I feel it was a decent legacy to leave behind when I ultimately move into the non-biological phase of existence.”

• Buy “Star Trek: The Artistry of Dan Curry” now on Amazon

10. The Last Watch

• Authors: J. S. Dewes
• Publisher: Tor Books (2021)

Here’s a rousing space adventure by author J. S. Dewes that chronicles the vigilant crew of the Argus as they perform guard duty against an extraterrestrial threat at the far limits of the universe. This impressive series debut is part of a two-book project called “The Divide” and boasts a motley collection of soldiers led by commander Adequin Rake, who endeavors to protect her crew and humanity from a collapsing cosmic anomaly.

It’s basically “The Expanse” meets “The Dirty Dozen” where a rag-tag group of Sentinels must pull together to save themselves and ensure a viable future. An excellent example of military sci-fi pumped up with pathos, memorable characters, and a relentless juggernaut of a plot. Its sequel, “The Exiled Fleet,” arrived this past August so you won’t have to wait for the follow up!

• Buy “The Last Watch” (The Divide Series, 1) now on Amazon
• Buy “The Exiled Fleet” (The Divide Series, 2) now on Amazon

Best modern sci-fi books

• Authors: Daniel Suarez
• Publisher: Dutton (2019)

In "Delta-v," an unpredictable billionaire recruits an adventurous cave diver to join the first-ever effort to mine an asteroid. The crew's target is asteroid Ryugu, which in real life Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft has been exploring since June 2018. 

From the use of actual trajectories in space and scientific accuracy, to the title itself, Delta-v — the engineering term for exactly how much energy is expended performing a maneuver or reaching a target — Suarez pulls true-to-life details into describing the exciting and perilous mission. The reward for successful asteroid mining is incredible, but the cost could be devastating.

2. The Lady Astronaut series - The Calculating Stars/The Fated Sky/The Relentless Moon 

• Author: Mary Robinette Kowal
• Publisher: Tor Books (2018-2020)

What if space exploration wasn't a choice but a necessity, driven by the knowledge that Earth would soon become uninhabitable and powered by international coalitions built after a catastrophic meteorite impact? That's the alternative history novelist Mary Robinette Kowal explores in her Lady Astronaut series. 

The books follow mathematician and World War II pilot Elma York, who dreams of becoming an astronaut herself. Kowal intricately melds real history with her fictional plot to create a series that is simultaneously hopeful and pragmatic. The Lady Astronaut offers a powerful vision of how spaceflight could be a positive force in society.

3. Red Moon

• Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
• Publisher: Orbit (2018)

Red Moon, the latest novel from legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, blends realism and drama in a way that instantly transports the reader to the lunar surface. The book, which takes place 30 years into the future, opens on the journeys of Fred Fredericks, an American quantum engineer working for a Swiss company, and Ta Shu, a poet, feng shui expert and celebrity travel reporter to the moon where they are traveling to work. In the world of the book, China has become the first political and technological entity to inhabit the moon in a serious, long-term way.

At first, as a reader, you may find yourself adjusting to the character's clumsy movements in lunar gravity and anticipating what life on the moon might really be like, but the story takes a shocking turn and life on the moon turns out to be much different from what you may have expected. "Red Moon" does an incredible job immersing the reader in a captivating alien, yet still familiar, world while at the same time staying grounded in a reality that we could truly one day face.

4. Before Mars

• Author: Emma Newman
• Publisher: Ace (2018)

Emma Newman's latest book set in her "Planetfall" universe, "Before Mars," sees a geologist arriving at a small Mars base after a lengthy journey only to realize that things aren't as they seem. The base's AI is untrustworthy, the psychologist seems sinister, and the main characters finds a note to herself she has no memory of writing. In a world of perfectly immersive virtual reality, can she trust what she sees? Or did the long trip take a toll on her sanity? "Before Mars" takes place on an eerie, largely empty Mars after a giant corporation buys the rights to the planet.

It's a thrilling read but — like Newman's other "Planetfall" books — also a deep dive into the protagonist's psychology as she grapples with what she discovers on the Red Planet. "Before Mars" and the other books in the same universe (" Planetfall " and " After Atlas ") can be read in any order, but Space.com highly recommends giving them all a look.

• Author: Andy Weir
• Publisher: Crown (2017)

In " The Martian " (Crown, 2014) first-time author Andy Weir gave voice to the sardonic, resourceful botanist Mark Watney as he struggled for survival stranded on Mars. In his second novel, "Artemis," he follows Jazz Bashara, a porter (and smuggler) on the moon who's drawn into a crime caper. 

Weir brings a similar meticulous detail to his descriptions of the moon as the ultimate tourist destination as he did to Watney's misadventures on Mars, but his characterization of Jazz doesn't play to his writing strengths like Watney's log entries did. Still, "Artemis" is an entertaining romp through a really intriguing future moon base, with plenty of one-sixth-gravity action and memorable twists. It's well worth the read. Plus, there's an audiobook version  read by Rosario Dawson .

6. Provenance

• Author: Ann Leckie
• Publisher: Orbit (2017)

A young woman plots to find stolen artifacts in "Provenance," which takes place in the same universe as author Ann Leckie's award-winning  "Ancillary" trilogy  of books — but introduces readers to a new selection of future human cultures with a more straightforward and less high-concept adventure story. 

Don't let that fool you, though: The book's exploration of multiculture, multispecies conflict (with aliens called the Geck) works just as much intriguing worldbuilding into the mix as her previous books. Plus, there are mind-controlled robots, stolen alien ships and a society with three genders.

7. Leviathan Wakes - The Expanse series

• Author: James S.A. Corey
• Publisher: Orbit (2011)

200 years in the future, humanity has colonized the solar system and is split among three factions on the brink of conflict: Earth, Mars and the Asteroid Belt, which includes the spinning Ceres asteroid colony. As multiple viewpoint characters are ensnared in a system-wide mystery, the story's scope slowly broadens to reveal the full complexity of the novels' science fiction world. The books, co-written by Dan Abraham and Ty Franck, originally stemmed from a  tabletop roleplaying game idea , and it shows through the detailed worldbuilding and exploration of a solar system remade in humanity's image. Plus, it's a fun, tightly-plotted set of spacefaring adventure stories.

The series is slated for nine books, and they've appeared steadily one per year from 2011-2015 for a total of five so far (plus some tie-in novellas). They're also the basis for Syfy's TV show "The Expanse," recently renewed for a 13-episode second season. Book six, "Babylon's Ashes," is slated for release December 2016.

See  here  and  here  for Q&As with the series' authors describing the book's inception and the TV show's development (plus, the coolest sci-fi in the series).

• Publisher: Orbit (2015)

After numerous novels and short stories probing humanity's trials in the near future, far future and distant past, science fiction master Kim Stanley Robinson offers his own highly detailed spin on the challenge of interstellar travel in his new book "Aurora" (Orbit, 2015).

Humanity's first trip to another star is incredibly ambitious, impeccably planned and executed on a grand scale in "Aurora." The novel begins near the end of a 170-year mission aboard a spaceship carrying roughly 2,000 humans to the seemingly Earth-like moon of a planet orbiting a nearby star, Tau Ceti.

Told largely from the perspective of the ship's computer, "Aurora" emphasizes the fragile unity of all the living and nonliving parts aboard the starship as it hurtles through space. As the story of the landing unfolds, the narrative doesn't shy away from the science or the incredible complexity of a 2,000-person, multigenerational ship. The spacecraft is portrayed as one organism that can have conflicting interests or fall out of balance but that ultimately has to work in concert to reach its destination intact.

Best classic sci-fi books

1. the martian chronicles.

• Author: Ray Bradbury
• Publisher: Doubleday (1951)

In case you haven't heard of him, Ray Bradbury is an  icon of science fiction writing . In "The Martian Chronicles," Bradbury explores the gradual human settlement of the Red Planet, through a series of lightly connected stories. Bradbury paints the Martian landscape and its inhabitants with master strokes, but equally strong is his portrayal of the psychological dangers that await the human settlers who arrive there. 

This, as well as the space-themed stories in Bradbury's other classic collection "The Illustrated Man," struck a chord with me when I was young and dreamed about traveling to the stars. Reading his work today, it is amazing to see that although Bradbury writes from a time when human space travel hadn't yet begun (the book was first published in 1950), the issues and questions his stories raise are still relevant as humanity takes its first steps into that great frontier.

2. Ender's Game

• Author: Orson Scott Card
• Publisher: Tor Books (1985)

This classic science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card should be ever-present on any space fan's bookshelf. Card's novel follows the life of Ender Wiggin as he learns to fight the Formics, a horrifying alien race that almost killed off all humans when they attacked years and years ago. 

Wiggin learns the art of space war aboard a military space station built to help train young people to fight the cosmic invaders. Basically, this book is a coming-of-age tale that makes you want to fly to space and also forces you to think about some serious social issues presented in its pages. (The book is the first in a quintet, and inspired a much larger body of work that takes place in the same universe.)

3. The Martian

• Publisher: Random House (2014)

"The Martian," by Andy Weir, is a truly great science fiction book that's heavy on the science. Weir tells the story of Mark Watney, a fictional NASA astronaut stranded on Mars, and his difficult mission to save himself from potential doom in the harsh Red Planet environment. Watney seems to have everything against him, yet Weir deftly explains not only what Watney's survival needs are but also how he goes about trying to make them work. "The Martian" also was made into a movie, which was released in 2015. The film stars Matt Damon as Watney and is directed by space movie veteran Ridley Scott.

• Publisher: Chilton Books (1965)

In "Dune," Frank Herbert imagines a vast, intricate future universe ruled by an emperor who sets the Atreides and Harkonnen families warring over the desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune. The arid world holds the only source of the spice mélange, necessary for space travel. Spread across star systems, "Dune" teems with wild characters: human computers (Mentats), tribal fighters (Fremen), mind-controlling "witches" (Bene Gesserit Sisterhood) and humans ranging from the corrupt Baron Harkonnen to Paul "Muad'Dib" Atreides, whose journey from a sheltered childhood anchors the story. 

Early on, the Baron says, "Observe the plans within plans within plans," summing up the adversaries' wary analyses of each faction's complex motivations. This cerebral second-guessing balances with epic action throughout the book, centering on the perhaps best-known feature of the Duniverse: the monstrous spice-producing sandworms. The best-selling novel raised science fiction literature to greater sophistication by including themes of technology, science, politics, religion and ecology, although the burgeoning Dune franchise remains less popular than Star Wars (which borrowed heavily from "Dune").

5. Hyperion - Hyperion Cantos Series

• Author: Dan Simmons
• Publisher: Doubleday (1989)

Part space epic, part "Canterbury Tales," "Hyperion" tells the story of seven pilgrims who travel across the universe to meet their fate, and the unspeakably evil Shrike, who guards the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion. 

On the way, each pilgrim tells his or her own tale, and each world is so exquisitely created that it's hard to believe it all came from the mind of one author. The tale of the scholar whose daughter ages backward after her visit to the Tombs, and his quest to save her as she returns to childhood, is my favorite — it's heartbreaking and terrifying at the same time.

• Author: Frederik Pohl
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press (1977)

"Gateway" is the first science fiction book I ever read, because my father, a longtime sci-fi junkie, had loved it. It's an intense read that explores why we make the choices we do, and how we deal with the consequences of those choices in the black vacuum of space. In "Gateway," those with the money to leave the dying Earth can hitch a ride on a starship that will either make them wealthy beyond their wildest dreams or lead them to a grim and possibly violent death. Or, like our hero, you could wind up in the grip of a massive black hole and have to make difficult decisions that lead you to the couch of an electronic shrink.

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Jeff Spry is an award-winning screenwriter and veteran freelance journalist covering TV, movies, video games, books, and comics. His work has appeared at SYFY Wire, Inverse, Collider, Bleeding Cool and elsewhere. Jeff lives in beautiful Bend, Oregon amid the ponderosa pines, classic muscle cars, a crypt of collector horror comics, and two loyal English Setters.

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Top Sci-fi Books

15 Best Sci Fi Authors

Are you looking to have serious Science Fiction book collection? If so, you're gonna need some staples from the best science fiction authors!

Every sci fi author on this list can be truly considered as one of the greats. So, in no particular order, here are our picks for the top sci fi authors to ever write in the genre.

Oh! And if you want to check out any of these titles for free, you can do so with Audible's one month free trial .

Isaac Asimov

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It’s impossible to curate a list of the best science fiction authors of all time without mentioning Isaac Asimov. His prestige and pedigree cannot be overstated. As well as being one of the most respected authors in terms of his literary contributions, he is one of the most serious scientists found here. His contributions to the sci fi genre and science as a whole are numerous. His Foundation series is one of the most classic sci fi series of all time, and his laws of robotics are an incredible scientific landmark.

Robert Heinlein

Robert Heinlein is perhaps the finest example of a classic sci fi writer who used the genre to explore wider themes. Although Heinlein’s work stands on its own as essential reading, having helped to establish some of the biggest and best subgenres within sci fi, he was also one of the first writers to explore social themes through a science fiction lens. For newcomers to Heinlein, Stranger In A Strange Land and Starship Troopers are excellent starting points.

Frank Herbert

We wanted to avoid the cliche of listing the ‘big 3’ authors in order, so allow us a brief detour in the form of Frank Herbert. Dune is perhaps the best example of an epic sci-fi story that satisfies both genre fans and wider literary admirers. Dune also is the best-selling sci fi story of all time, a true testament to its broad appeal. However, Herbert shouldn’t be thought of as a one trick pony. As well as penning classic fiction, Herbert is a trained journalist. This helps to explain the level of political and social detail he weaves into his work.

Arthur C Clarke

Arthur C Clarke is the third of the classic ‘big 3’ science fiction authors, alongside Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Clarke’s stories are well-known through their film adaptations, although sci fi purists tend to insist on the superiority of the print editions. As well as his best-known work, 2001, Clarke has produced other genuine classics such as Rendezvous with Rama. Outside of science fiction, Clarke was a true adventurer, even discovering a ruined temple as part of his scuba diving expeditions! This pioneering spirit can be found within the pages of his science fiction books.

Ursula K Le Guin

Le Guin is perhaps the most widely admired female science fiction author, and with good reason. Her stories stand up against any in the genre, and she is one of the most imaginative minds to ever put pen to paper. Guin’s special talent was mixing fantasy and science fiction into cohesive and gripping tales which also grip the reader emotionally. Although definitely appealing to sci fi fans, to say Le Guin was purely a science fiction author is a disservice to her. Her work drew critical claim from literary reviewers of almost every type, and Le Guin stated she was a novelist as opposed to a sci fi author.

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley’s influence is immense and lasts until this day. His writing was almost prophetic in predicting many of the ways in which science would change the world, and the impact that technology would have on science as a whole. Brave New World is still widely considered one of the most important novels of all time. In addition to his better known works, Huxley released many other books and essays, and is considered a philosopher and thinker outside of his work as an author.

Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams is one of the most-loved authors on this list, and with great reason. His Hitchhiker’s Guide series is one of the most enjoyable and fun science fiction works of all time, and Adams work continues to be adapted and enjoyed to this very day. Although Adams wasn’t a sci fi novelist in the conventional sense, having originally released Hitchhiker’s as a radio play, the legacy and impact of his work earns him a spot on this list.

Philip K Dick

Philip K Dick’s work is some of the most influential to ever exist. The power of his stories is evidenced by their numerous adaptations into film, and some of the ideas and tropes advanced by Dick have helped revolutionize the science fiction genre. To release a single story as immense as Do Androids Dream or The Man In The High Castle would be a landmark achievement for most authors, but for Philip K Dick, it was par for the course. A true titan whose impact continues to be felt.

Larry Niven

Larry Niven was one of the most imaginative and visionary authors to ever publish in the science fiction genre. Perhaps best known for his Ringworld series, Niven released a mixture of hard sci-fi, humorous works, and even stories with a sort of private eye feel to them. Niven is so widely regarded that there is such a thing as ‘Niven’s Laws’, a series of principles explaining the universe through Niven’s viewpoint. Larry Niven was perhaps the most readable of hard sci-fi writers, and is well worthy of his status as one of the best of all time.

William Gibson

William Gibson’s work had a major impact both within and beyond the world of science fiction. As well as coining the term cyberspace, Gibson helped to establish the conventions of the cyberpunk genre. His work is thrilling as well as intellectually stimulating. Of course, helping to establish cyberpunk wasn’t enough for Gibson, so he also founded the steampunk genre with the help of Bruce Sterling. It’s hard to think of a more influential and important modern sci-fi author.

Poul Anderson

Poul Anderson is a fine example of a sci fi author who was able to both write entertaining, fun fiction, that also packed a political punch. Some of the themes found in his stories include the importance of liberty, and the arrogance of Westerners towards other cultures. Some of his best known work includes Tau Zero and Time Patrol. Anderson’s pedigree is evidenced by the multiple awards he has won as well as his presence in the sci fi hall of fame.

Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card is well-known for his classic tale Ender’s Game, originally released as a serial story. Card’s winning of consecutive Hugo and Nebula awards is unmatched. As well as Ender’s Game and its sequel, Speaker For The Dead, Card has released award-winning works of fantasy, and even non-fiction guides to writing sci fi. A well-loved author who has produced some of the best sci fi of recent decades.

David Brin is a fine example of a sci fi author who is able to release both critically acclaimed and readable works. Brin is a master of both series, such as his Uplift novels, and standalone books, such as the critically acclaimed The Postman. Brin has more Nebula and Hugo awards than most of us have pairs of shoes! There aren’t many writers who are able to please both the literary critic and the casual reader alike, but Brin is one of them. The Postman is perhaps the best starting point for newcomers.

Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton will always be best-known as the mind behind Jurassic Park, but he in fact released a wide range of other epic novels. Crichton is able to blend serious science and gripping narrative in a way that few others are. Aside from Jurassic Park, Crichton’s best work includes Micro, a posthumous novel, and interestingly the TV series ER, testament to Crichton’s former life as a medical doctor. A truly extraordinary and talented individual.

HG Wells has an almost mythological status within the world of science fiction, and pop culture in general. Although the tale of widespread panic at The War Of The Worlds is basically an urban legend, Wells’ impact goes far further than that. In addition to War Of The Worlds, Wells wrote The Invisible Man, and is widely referred to as ‘the Father of science fiction’ due to his influence. Wells is one of the earliest voices in the genre, and all future writers are indebted to him for blazing the trail they later followed.

How Were The Best Sci Fi Authors Selected?

The ocean of science fiction awesomeness is deep and wide, so choosing 15 of the best ever was no easy task. In fact, there could probably be at least 50 writers on this list. However, we don’t want to risk information overload, so we decided to narrow it down.

There are plenty of writers who have released one or two amazing works, but failed to make this list due to how prolific certain writers, such as Isaac Asimov, were in comparison.

Given that this could never be exhaustive, what are some of the factors Top Sci Fi Books kept in mind when compiling our choice of the best fifteen science fiction authors to ever put pen to paper?

Influence. Although the list is more than just a rundown of who’s been the most influential within the sci fi genre, influence is certainly a factor that we’ve taken into account. From some of the earliest writers to adopt the sci fi style, such as HG Wells, to all-time classic authors, such as Isaac Asimov, many of the writers on this list are incredibly influential.

Importance. There are some sci fi writers who redefine what the genre looks like, or even branch out and create a subgenre of their own. William Gibson is a superb example of such an author. Without Gibson, we wouldn’t have cyberpunk as we know it, and steampunk would probably not exist either. Therefore, when compiling the list, we looked for authors who had a serious impact on the direction of the science fiction genre.

Pedigree. One of the things which separates science fiction authors from writers in other genres is there background. Many of the names found here are widely regarded within the world of science and other academic disciplines outside of fiction. Examples include Isaac Asimov, whose robotics work is definitive, and Michael Crichton, who was literally a medical doctor before writing.

Fan love. Some science fiction writers seem to have a special knack for inspiring love and devotion among their readers. Examples include Orson Scott Card, who grizzled grown men regularly fangirl over, and Douglas Adams, whose works have inspired cult like devotion to this day. Many of the writers on this list inspired extraordinary amounts of positivity among fans.

Were There Any Near Misses For The List Of Top Science Fiction Authors?

There are plenty of authors who were considered for this list but didn’t quite make it. This isn’t because they are worse than the authors on the list as such. Instead, they didn’t quite feel right, based on the criteria we were using.

Of course, any list of the best authors is going to be subjective. We could have been sterile and boring and done something like aggregate all the Amazon review scores, but who wants to do that? Although it’s science fiction, it’s very much an art!

So who are some of the authors we thought about including, but ultimately chose to go in another direction?

New genre specialists. The world of modern sci-fi is full of amazing genres. Steampunk, dieselpunk, eco-sci fi. If you can think of it, it probably exists. There are incredible and talented writers producing great work in each and every subgenre out there. However, we wanted to pick authors with the broadest appeal possible. If your tastes are a little more niche, we’ve got you covered elsewhere here on Top Sci Fi!

Broader literary figures. One could argue that Margaret Atwood or Mary Shelley should be on this list. However, we feel it’s something of a disservice to limit them to sci fi alone. If an author is more commonly thought of as a literary novelist, as opposed to a sci fi writer, they probably haven’t been included here.

Anyone too polarizing. There are some sci-fi authors who are seriously loved by some, but detested by others. Without naming names, think of some of the classic pulp authors, and some of the harder hard sci fi writers. If a writer tends to fall into the category of ‘loved and hated in equal measure’, they are not part of this list.

Ultimately, there is no way of definitively naming the best sci fi authors of all time. Every sci fi fan will have a slightly different criteria. However, we feel that this list presents a notable range of titans. There is someone for everyone, and much to discover when digging through the bibliographies of these science fiction powerhouses.

Check Out The Best Sci Fi Authors For Free!

Interested in delving deep into the works of the top science fiction writers? You can do so for free! Here are two ways to make it happen:

1.  Signup with Audible's One Month Free Trial : By signing up for Audible's free month trial you can download any two books you choose for free. If you decide you like Audible then you can pay a small monthly fee of $14.95 and get one book a month. If you decide you do not like Audible you can cancel your trial and keep your two free books.

2. If you want to try something other than Audible you could also try Playster.  Playster's One Month Free Trial   works with either ebooks or audiobooks. You can pay for a membership at $14.95 per month and receive unlimited books. However Playster does not offer as many book options. If you would like to listen to all of Playsters books you will need to use the premium which is $29.95. ]

1 thought on “15 Best Sci Fi Authors”

My husband enjoyed Science Fiction when it wasn’t ZOMBIES,FANASY, HORROR,VIOLENCE AND MAGIC . The violence and descriptions of horror is not good reading. Putting a little SCIENCE in the story would be easier to read.

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Cosmic Greatness: 21 of the Best Award-Winning Sci-Fi Books

Chris M. Arnone

The son of a librarian, Chris M. Arnone's love of books was as inevitable as gravity. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri - Kansas City. His novel, The Hermes Protocol, was published by Castle Bridge Media in 2023 and the next book in that series is due out in winter 2024. His work can also be found in Adelaide Literary Magazine and FEED Lit Mag. You can find him writing more books, poetry, and acting in Kansas City. You can also follow him on social media ( Facebook , Goodreads , Instagram , Twitter , website ).

View All posts by Chris M. Arnone

Awards season is so fun. The red carpets, the glamorous outfits, the A-list authors. Oh, did you think I meant those other awards? This is Book Riot. We know what we’re about: award-winning sci-fi books.

With science fiction, two awards always jump out as the big ones: the Hugo and Nebula. Each year, the Hugo Award is nominated and chosen by the attendees of the World Science Fiction Convention, while the Nebula Award is decided by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America members. While they’re the biggies, they aren’t the only game in town.

I’ve also included the Arthur C. Clarke and British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) awards for sci-fi novels first published in the UK. And I couldn’t forget the Philip K. Dick Award given at Norwescon each year. To really spice things up, I’ve included winners of the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for books that explore LGBT topics positively and the Otherwise Award for books that explore gender.

Needless to say, there are some big-name books on this list, but also some that you may not have heard of. But each one is one of the best award-winning sci-fi books and well worth your reading time.

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan (Philip K. Dick Award, 2003)

This book from Richard Morgan sparked a great, if short-lived, Netflix series. Takeshi Kovacs is an ex–United Nations envoy long dead. Except in this galaxy, people back up their minds, and so Takeshi wakes up in a new body, on a different planet, and given a dangerous mission from even more dangerous people.

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Ancient, Ancient: Short Fiction by Kiini Ibura Salaam (Otherwise Award, 2012)

Kiini Ibura Salaam is an essayist and writer of brilliant science fiction and fantasy short stories. This book collects several of the latter, all of which use magic and science and sexuality to challenge gender, myth, and the very nature of magic.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (BFSA Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Hugo Award, Nebula Award, 2013/2014)

Do you see that list of awards? Ann Leckie burst onto the scene with Ancillary Justice, sweeping up awards like a Dyson. Justice of Toren was once a colossal starship, now a single ancillary — an AI in a human body — is all that remains. She’s determined to find out how the rest of her was destroyed and might unravel a galactic empire in the process.

Apex by Ramez Naam (Philip K. Dick Award, 2015)

This novel concludes Naam’s explosive Nexus Arc trilogy in an award-winning fashion. After you read Nexus and Crux , dive into this post-humanist novel in which people are connected, linking up like hive minds, and the next apex species has finally arrived.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany (Nebula Award, 1967)

While Delany might be better known for his novel Dhalgren , don’t sleep on Babel-17 . Rydra is a poet with near-telepathic powers. When a new weapon based on sound enters the fray in a giant galactic war, the military calls in Rydra. She soon recognizes a language in that sound, but that’s only the beginning of what she’ll uncover.

Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones (Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2002)

This rock-and-roll-cyberpunk novel hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention. In a near-future England, a rock star befriends a guitarist and a techno-wizard against a backdrop of corruption and music festivals. But as this book and series roll along, something like a science fiction Arthurian retelling comes to life.

Cagebird by Karin Lowachee (Gaylactic Spectrum Award, 2006)

Yuri Terisov is wasting away in the brig of a pirate ship that he used to command. After aliens destroyed his home colony when he was 4, he was living in a refugee camp until a pirate came and took him away. But now he’s in the brig, at least until a military black ops agent offers him a way out. There are strings attached, of course. Dangerous strings.

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin (BSFA Award, 2020)

N.K. Jemisin is well-known for her Broken Earth trilogy, but that’s fantasy. These are the best award-winning sci-fi books. In The City We Became , New York City is a living life form with six children: the city and its five boroughs. In Brooklyn, a politician can hear the song this great city sings. In Manhattan, a student steps off a train and remembers nothing about himself, but he can feel the pulse of the city. Characters and city combine for a cool exploration.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (Hugo Award, Nebula Award, 1993)

Time travel and both of the major science fiction awards? This classic has it all. Kivrin is a 21st-century student studying a 14th-century plague. Oh, and she uses time travel to do it. But things go wrong, however, forcing Kivrin’s fellows to launch a rescue attempt. Now Kivrin’s vow to not change the past is conflicting with her ability to save it.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons (Hugo Award, 1990)

Sometimes award-winning sci-fi books can be based on classics like this. Canterbury Tales …in space. That’s the setup magnificently executed in this novel. Seven pilgrims are journeying to Hyperion on the eve of the end of everything. On Hyperion live the Shrike, creatures that are worshipped and feared. These pilgrims have their tales, their secrets, and one may change the course of human history.

Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald (Gaylactic Spectrum Award, 2016)

Living on the moon is hard. Taking over a massive company and building it into an empire on the moon? Even harder. But Adriana Corta did it. Now, as her life nears its end, her five children must fight to keep that company going. They’ll have to fight outsiders and each other. Should be fun.

The Mount by Carol Emshwiller (Philip K. Dick Award, 2002)

Looking for oppressive aliens and anti-utopian themes? Look no further. Charley wants to be the fastest runner in the world, just like his father. But Charley doesn’t run at track and field meets. He’s a mount for the Hoot, an alien invader. If he ever wants his freedom, he’ll need to find the other free humans and understand what that even means.

Network Effect by Martha Wells (Hugo Award, Nebula Award, 2021)

It’s hard to overstate just how good Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries series is. So when she released the fourth book, which also happened to be the first novel-length book in the series, of course it grabbed both of the big awards. Murderbot is a robot with an A.I. that, well, just wants to kill people. But their human associates are just always so needy, even when Murderbot just wants to sit at home and watch TV.

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2020)

Namwali Serpell took the world by storm with her debut novel. Beginning in 1904, a feud breaks out between three Zambian families, and thus begins this tale of retribution that spans generations, out of the past and all the way into the future. Romance, history, fairytale, and science fiction all blend together in this one.

Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler (Nebula Award, 2000)

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is a book I recommend often, though this sequel was the one to win a Nebula Award. Having survived the destruction of her home and founded a new religion, Lauren has established a peaceful community. But when an ultra-conservative president takes power, his followers see Lauren’s people as a target.

Ringworld by Larry Niven (Hugo Award, Nebula Award, 1971)

This highly imaginative, hard sci-fi adventure set the genre world on fire in 1971 and still holds up today. Louis Wu is given a job to visit Ringworld, an artificially constructed ring the diameter of Earth’s orbit. Along with a couple of aliens and a woman named Teela, they soon crash land on the ring and start unraveling its mysteries as they desperately try to find a way off of it.

The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson (Gaylactic Spectrum Awards, 2004)

This incredible novel blends fantasy, science fiction, and astute observations of social issues into a novel that should have won even more awards. Ezili has the powers of an Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love. Now she’s traveling time and space to inhabit other women, struggling against a man’s world and unaware of this holy presence.

Shards of the Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky (BFSA Award, 2021)

Idris was created during the war after Earth was destroyed. Strong, fast, not needing sleep, and able to communicate telepathically with each other and the enemy: the Architects. But when the Architects vanished, people like Idris became obsolete. But something strange has appeared in space, obviously made by the Architects. Now Idris and his crew will have to find answers.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (Hugo Award, 1962)

Here’s another one from the way-back machine that wasn’t just part of the pantheon of award-winning sci-fi books, but part of a sexual revolution. Valentine Michael Smith is a human raised on Mars by Martians. His homecoming is a heralded event. When he starts to display powers no other human has and espouses a radical philosophy, the world will never be the same.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Hugo Award, 2015)

This book, which begins a series, has captured sci-fi imaginations since it came out, and it’s soon coming to Netflix. In the midst of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, an experiment sends a message to space. An alien species facing their own destruction receives it and plans to invade Earth. Now, as the invaders close in, humanity is crumbling into even more factions.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2017)

It’s a rare thing for a science fiction novel to also be historical, and this novel did it with aplomb. Imagine that the Underground Railroad during the American Civil War was a LITERAL underground railroad. That’s what this novel does. The genre is speculative. The human drama and tragedy of slavery are very real.

Do you still crave more award-winning sci-fi books? We have lists of 20 of the best as well as a huge list of the most influential sci-fi books ever . Check them out!

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May 16, 2024

How New Science Fiction Could Help Us Improve AI

We need to tell a new story about AI, and fiction has that power, humanities scholars say

By Nick Hilden

Andrey Suslov/Getty Images

For the past decade, a group called the Future of Life Institute has been campaigning for human welfare in public conversations around nuclear weapons, climate change, artificial intelligence and other evolving threats. The nonprofit organization aims to steer technological development away from the dystopian visions that so frequently haunt media. But when it comes to discussions about artificial intelligence, its team has had to face one especially persistent foe: the Terminator .

“When we first started talking about AI risk, every article that came out about our work had a Terminator in it,” says Emilia Javorsky, director of the institute’s Futures program. The Terminator film franchise’s specter of a powerful and antagonistic robot that is driven only by ruthless logic is hard to dispel. Ask people to imagine a powerful artificial intelligence, and they tend to think of the fictional archetype of a machine with a “Machiavellian soul,” Javorsky adds—even though actual AI systems inherently “have no malevolence, no human intent to them whatsoever.”

Recognizing the influence that popular narratives have on our collective perceptions, a growing number of AI and computer science experts now want to harness fiction to help imagine futures in which algorithms don’t destroy the planet. The arts and humanities, they argue, must play a role to ensure AI serves human goals. To that end, Nina Beguš, an AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, advocates for a new discipline that she calls the “artificial humanities.” In her upcoming book Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI, she contends that the “responsibility of making these technologies is too big for the technologists to bear it alone.” The artificial humanities, she explains, would fuse science and the arts to leverage fiction and philosophy in the exploration of AI’s benevolent potential.

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“The humanities simply have to be part of the conversation, or this new world advances without our input,” says cultural historian Catherine Clarke of the University of London, who has studied the intersection of literature and AI.

Entertainment strongly shapes people’s perceptions of AI, as a recent public opinion study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin shows. These depictions, however, frequently ignore positive technological potential in favor of portraying our worst fears. “We need fictional works that consider machines for what they are and articulate what their intelligence and creativity could be,” Beguš says. And because fiction is “not obliged to mirror actual technological developments,” it can be a “public space for experimentation and reflection.”

Importantly, it also turns out that our entertainment-fueled negative impressions of AI can, in turn, influence how the technology performs in the real world; the stories we tell ourselves about AI prime us to use it in certain ways. Preconceptions that an AI chatbot will answer like a manipulative machine initiate a hostile feedback loop so that the bot acts as expected, according to a recent study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. A user’s internalized fears can be self-fulfilling, seasoning an algorithm with adversarial ingredients. So it may be that if fiction trains us to expect the worst from AI, that’s exactly what we’ll get.

But if we treat AI models with some finesse, they will respond in kind. Clarke, along with Murray Shanahan of Imperial College London and Google DeepMind, recently sought to determine whether a text-generating AI could be coached to deliver human-quality prose. They provided the beginning of a story to a chatbot and used prompts of varying detail and complexity to ask it to complete the narrative. As their preprint results found, stories composed by an AI that was given crude prompts fell flat, but more elegant and creatively refined prompts led to more literary prose. This suggests that what we give to a generative AI is returned to us.

“Why do we always imagine science fiction to be a dystopia? Why can’t we imagine science fiction that gives us hope?” — Pat Pataranutaporn, M.I.T. Media Lab

If these patterns hold true for more intelligent forms of AI, we need to instill them with scruples before we flip their “on” switches. The University of Oxford’s AI doomsayer Nick Bostrom has called this need “philosophy with a deadline.”

To pull more artists and thinkers into that discussion, the Future of Life Institute has sponsored multiple initiatives linking fiction writers and other creatives with technologists. “You can't mitigate risks that you can’t imagine,” Javorsky says. “You also can’t build positive futures with technology and steer toward those if you’re not imagining them.” The institute’s Worldbuilding Competition , for example, brings together multidisciplinary teams to conceptualize various friendly-AI futures. Those imagined tomorrows include a world in which a centralized AI manages the equitable distribution of goods. A second scenario suggests a system of digital nations that are free of geographic bounds. In yet another, artificial governance programs advocate for peace. In a fourth, AI helps us achieve a more inclusive society .

Merely imagining such worlds, where growth and innovation no longer depend on conventional human labor, allows fiction writers and other thinkers to ask provocative questions, Javorsky says: “What does meaning look like? What does aspiration look like? How do we rethink human purpose and agency in a world of shared abundance?”

The Future of Life Institute has also joined forces with an organization called Hollywood, Health & Society and other organizations to form the Blue Sky Scriptwriting Contest , which awards writers for creating television scripts that depict fair and equitable applications for artificial intelligence.

“We’ve all seen lots of dystopian and postapocalyptic futures in popular entertainment,” says Hollywood, Health & Society’s program director Kate Langrall Folb. There are “very few depictions of a greener, safer, more just future.” The inaugural contest was held in 2022, with prizes awarded last year. In that competition, the winning entry was set in a town where AI equally serves the needs of all residents, who are shaken when a once-in-a-generation murder complicates their potential techno-utopia. In another, AI-powered advisers equipped with Indigenous wisdom support a more sustainable society. Another tells of an Earth where AI has moved all manufacturing and heavy infrastructure off-planet, regenerating the terrestrial ecosystems below.

To further inspire these lines of thinking, the Future of Life Institute is in the process of producing a free, publicly available “Worldbuilding” course to train participants in hope rather than doom when it comes to AI. And once a person has managed to escape the doom loop, Javorsky says, it can be difficult to know where to direct efforts at developing positive AI. To address this, the institute is developing detailed scenario maps that suggest where different trajectories and decision points could lead this technology over the long run. The intention is to bring these scenarios to creative, artistic people who will then flesh out these stories, pursuing the crossover between technology and creativity—and providing AI developers with ideas about where different courses of action may take us.

This moment desperately needs “the power of storytelling and the humanities,” Javorsky says, to steer people away from the Terminator and toward a future where they’d be excited to live alongside AI—in peace and felicity.

“We need to come up with a new story,” says Pat Pataranutaporn, a researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab and a co-author of the study on AI user preconceptions. “Why do we always imagine science fiction to be a dystopia? Why can’t we imagine science fiction that gives us hope?”

• Artificial Intelligence /

AI-generated fiction is flooding literary magazines — but not fooling anyone

Prominent science fiction and fantasy magazine clarkesworld announced it would pause submissions after a flood of ai spam. it’s not the only outlet getting ai-generated stories..

By Mia Sato , platforms and communities reporter with five years of experience covering the companies that shape technology and the people who use their tools.

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A short story titled “The Last Hope” first hit Sheila Williams’ desk in early January. Williams, the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, reviewed the story and passed on it.

At first, she didn’t think much of it; she reads and responds to writers daily as part of her job, receiving anywhere from 700 to 750 stories a month. But when another story, also titled “The Last Hope,” came in a couple weeks later by a writer with a different name, Williams became suspicious. By the time yet another “The Last Hope” came a few days later, Williams knew immediately she had a problem on her hands.

“That’s like the tip of the iceberg,” Williams says.

Since that first submission, Williams has received more than 20 short stories all titled “The Last Hope,” each coming from different author names and email addresses. Williams believes they were all generated using artificial intelligence tools, along with hundreds of other similar submissions that have been overwhelming small publishers in recent months.

Asimov’s received around 900 stories for consideration in January and is on track to get 1,000 this month. Williams says nearly all of the increase can be attributed to pieces that appear to be AI-generated, and she’s read so many that she can now often tell from the first few words whether something might not be written by a human.

Sometimes they haven’t even bothered to replace “[name]” with their own

Besides repeating titles, there are certain character names that tend to appear often, Williams says. Sometimes the manuscript will contain a different title than the one indicated in the online form. Author names often appear to be amalgamations of first and last names. In optional cover letters, some authors include instructions on how to wire them money for their story that has not yet been accepted. At times, the submitter hasn’t even bothered to replace “[name]” with their own.

Using ChatGPT, The Verge was able to replicate some elements of submissions Williams has seen. A prompt to write a short science fiction story — plus copy-and-pasted information from Asimov’s submission guidelines — produced stories with dozens of similar titles in succession, like “The Last Echo,” “The Last Message,” “The Last Day of Autumn,” and “The Last Voyager.” 

Willams and her team have learned to spot AI-generated works, but the influx of submissions has been frustrating all the same. Outlets like Asimov’s are getting overwhelmed by AI chum, taking up the time of editors and readers and potentially crowding out genuine submissions from newer writers. And the problem could only get worse, as the wider availability of writing bots creates a new genre of get-rich-quick schemes, where literary magazines with open submissions have discovered themselves on the receiving end of a new surface for spammy submissions trying to game the system.

“I just basically go through them as quickly as I can,” Williams says of the pieces she suspects are AI-generated. “It takes the same amount of time to download a submission, open it, and look at it. And I’d rather be spending that time on the legitimate submissions.”

For some editors, the influx of AI-generated submissions has forced them to stop accepting new work.

Clarke believes the submissions are coming from “side hustle” influencers and websites

Last week, the popular science fiction magazine Clarkesworld announced it would temporarily close submissions due to a flood of AI-generated work. In an earlier blog post , editor Neil Clarke had noted that the magazine was forced to ban a skyrocketing number of authors because they had submitted stories that were generated using automated tools. In February alone, Clarkesworld had received 700 submissions written by humans and 500 machine-generated stories, Clarke says.

Clarke believes the spammy submissions are coming from people looking to make a quick buck and who found Clarkesworld and other publications through “side hustle” influencers and websites. One website, for example, is loaded with SEO bait articles and keywords around marketing, writing, and business and promises to help readers make money quickly. An article on the site lists nearly two dozen literary magazines and websites — including Clarkesworld and Asimov’s, as well as larger outlets like the BBC — with pay rate and submission details. The article encourages readers to use AI tools to help them and includes affiliate marketing links to Jasper, an AI writing software. 

Most of the publications pay small per-word rates, around 8 to 10 cents, while others pay flat fees of up to a few hundred dollars for accepted pieces. In his blog, Clarke wrote that a “high percentage of fraudulent submissions” were coming from some regions but declined to name them, concerned that it could paint writers from those countries as scammy. 

But the possibility of being paid is a factor: in some cases, Clarke has corresponded with people who’ve been banned for submitting AI-generated work, saying they need the money. Another editor told The Verge that even before the AI-generated stories, they’d get submissions and emails from writers in countries where the cost of living is lower and an $80 publication fee goes much farther than it does in the US.

Clarke, who built the submission system his magazine uses, described the AI story spammers’ efforts as “inelegant” — by comparing notes with other editors, Clarke was able to see that the same work was being submitted from the same IP address to multiple publications just minutes apart, often in the order that magazines appear on the lists.

“If this were people from inside the [science fiction and fantasy] community, they would know it wouldn’t work. It would be immediately obvious to them that they couldn’t do this and expect it to work,” Clarke says.

The issue extends beyond science fiction and fantasy publications. Flash Fiction Online accepts a range of genres, including horror and literary fiction. On February 14th, the outlet appended a notice to its submission form: “We are committed to publishing stories written and edited by humans. We reserve the right to reject any submission that we suspect to be primarily generated or created by language modeling software, ChatGPT, chat bots, or any other AI apps, bots, or software.”

The updated terms were added around the time that FFO received more than 30 submissions from one source within a few days, says Anna Yeatts, publisher and co-editor-in-chief. Each story hit cliches Yeatts had seen in AI-generated work, and each had a unique cover letter, structured and written unlike what the publication normally sees. But Yeatts and colleagues had had suspicions since January that some work they had been sent had been created using AI tools.

Yeatts had played around with ChatGPT beginning in December, feeding the tool prompts to produce stories of specific genres or in styles like gothic romance. The system was able to replicate the technical elements, including establishing main characters and setting and introducing conflict, but failed to produce any “deep point of view” — endings were too neat and perfect, and emotions often spilled into melodrama. Everyone has “piercing green eyes,” and stories often open with characters sitting down. Of the more than 1,000 works FFO has received this year, Yeatts estimates that around 5 percent were likely AI-generated.

“We put that scary little warning up [on the submissions page],” Yeatts says. Enforcing it, though, could prove to be challenging.

In the past, FFO has published mainstream work that has a more conventional writing style and voice that is accessible to a range of reading levels. For that, Yeatts says stories generated using AI tools could get past baseline requirements. 

“It does have all the parts of the story that you try to look for. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It has a resolution, characters. The grammar is good,” Yeatts says. The FFO team is working to train staff readers to look for certain story elements as they’re taking a first pass at submissions.

“We really don’t have good solutions.”

Yeatts is concerned that a growing wave of AI-generated work could literally shut out written work. The outlet uses Submittable, a popular submission service, and FFO ’s plan that includes a monthly cap on stories, after which the portal closes. If hundreds of people send ineligible AI-generated work, that could prevent human authors from sending in their stories.

Yeatts isn’t sure what the magazine can do to stop the stories from coming. Upgrading the Submittable plan would be costly for FFO , which runs “on a shoestring budget,” Yeatts says. 

“We’ve talked about soliciting stories from other authors, but then that also doesn’t really feel true to who we are as a publication because that’s going to deter new writers,” Yeatts says. “We really don’t have good solutions.”

Others in the community are keeping an eye on the problem that’s inundating other publishers and are thinking through ways to respond before it spreads further. Matthew Kressel, a science fiction writer and creator of Moksha, an online submission system used by dozens of publications, says he’s started hearing from clients who have received spammy submissions that appear to be written using AI tools.

Kressel says he wants to keep Moksha “agnostic” when it comes to the value of submissions generated using chatbots. Publishers have the ability to add a checkbox where writers can confirm that their work doesn’t use AI systems, Kressel says, and is considering adding an option for publications that would allow them to block or partially limit submissions using AI tools.

“Allowing authors to self-affirm if the work is AI-generated is a good first step,” Kressel told The Verge via email. “It provides more transparency to the whole thing, because right now there’s a lot of uncertainties.”

For Williams, the editor of Asimov’s, being forced to use her time to sift through the AI-generated junk pile is frustrating. But even more concerning is that legitimate new authors might see what’s happening and think editors won’t ever make it to their manuscript.

“I don’t want writers to be worried that I’m going to miss their work because I’m inundated with junk,” Williams says. The good stories are obvious very early on. “The mind that crafts the interesting story is not in any danger.”

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ARTS & CULTURE

How america’s leading science fiction authors are shaping your future.

The literary genre isn’t meant to predict the future, but implausible ideas that fire inventors’ imaginations often, amazingly, come true

Eileen Gunn

Stories set in the future are often judged, as time passes, on whether they come true or not. “Where are our flying cars?” became a plaintive cry of disappointment as the millennium arrived, reflecting the prevailing mood that science and technology had failed to live up to the most fanciful promises of early 20th-century science fiction.

But the task of science fiction is not to predict the future. Rather, it contemplates possible futures. Writers may find the future appealing precisely because it can’t be known, a black box where “anything at all can be said to happen without fear of contradiction from a native,” says the renowned novelist and poet Ursula K. Le Guin. “The future is a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas in,” she tells Smithsonian , “a means of thinking about reality, a method.”

Some authors who enter that laboratory experiment with plausible futures—envisioning where contemporary social trends and recent breakthroughs in science and technology might lead us. William Gibson (who coined the term “cyberspace” and will never be allowed to forget it) is well known for his startling and influential stories, published in the 1980s, depicting visions of a hyper-connected global society where black-hat hackers, cyberwar and violent reality shows are part of daily life. For other authors, the future serves primarily as a metaphor. Le Guin’s award-winning 1969 novel, The Left Hand of Darkness —set on a distant world populated by genetically modified hermaphrodites—is a thought experiment about how society would be different if it were genderless.

Because science fiction spans the spectrum from the plausible to the fanciful, its relationship with science has been both nurturing and contentious. For every author who meticulously examines the latest developments in physics or computing, there are other authors who invent “impossible” technology to serve as a plot device (like Le Guin’s faster-than-light communicator, the ansible) or to enable social commentary, the way H. G. Wells uses his time machine to take the reader to the far future to witness the calamitous destiny of the human race.

Sometimes it’s the seemingly weird ideas that come true—thanks, in part, to science fiction’s capacity to spark an imaginative fire in readers who have the technical knowledge to help realize its visions. Jules Verne proposed the idea of light-propelled spaceships in his 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon . Today, technologists all over the world are actively working on solar sails.

Jordin Kare, an astrophysicist at the Seattle-based tech company LaserMotive, who has done important practical and theoretical work on lasers, space elevators and light-sail propulsion, cheerfully acknowledges the effect science fiction has had on his life and career. “I went into astrophysics because I was interested in the large-scale functions of the universe,” he says, “but I went to MIT because the hero of Robert Heinlein’s novel Have Spacesuit, Will Travel went to MIT.” Kare himself is very active in science fiction fandom. “Some of the people who are doing the most exploratory thinking in science have a connection to the science-fiction world.”

Microsoft, Google, Apple and other firms have sponsored lecture series in which science fiction writers give talks to employees and then meet privately with developers and research departments. Perhaps nothing better demonstrates the close tie between science fiction and technology today than what is called “design fiction”—imaginative works commissioned by tech companies to model new ideas. Some corporations hire authors to create what-if stories about potentially marketable products.

“I really like design fiction or prototyping fiction,” says novelist Cory Doctorow, whose clients have included Disney and Tesco. “There is nothing weird about a company doing this—commissioning a story about people using a technology to decide if the technology is worth following through on. It’s like an architect creating a virtual fly-through of a building.” Doctorow, who worked in the software industry, has seen both sides of the development process. “I’ve been in engineering discussions in which the argument turned on what it would be like to use the product, and fiction can be a way of getting at that experience.”

In the early part of the 20th century, American science fiction tended to present a positive image of a future in which scientific progress had made the world a better place. By mid-century, after several horrific wars and the invention of the atomic bomb, the mood of science fiction had changed. The stories grew dark, and science was no longer necessarily the hero.

The tilt toward dystopian futures became even more pronounced in recent decades, partly because of a belief that most of society has not yet reaped the benefits of technological progress. Smithsonian spoke with the eminent critic John Clute, co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , who quotes Bertrand Russell’s prophetic words from 1924: “‘I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups, rather than to make men happy.’ The real fear today,” Clute continues, “is that the world we now live in was intended by those who profit from it.”

Kim Stanley Robinson—the best-selling author of the Mars trilogy, 2312 and Shaman —shares this fear, and sees it manifested in the popularity of Suzanne Collins’ novel The Hunger Games , in which a wealthy governing class uses ruthless gladiatorial games to sow fear and helplessness among the potentially rebellious, impoverished citizens. “Science fiction represents how people in the present feel about the future,” Robinson says. “That’s why ‘big ideas’ were prevalent in the 1930s, ’40s and partly in the ’50s. People felt the future would be better, one way or another. Now it doesn’t feel that way. Rich people take nine-tenths of everything and force the rest of us to fight over the remaining tenth, and if we object to that, we are told we are espousing class warfare and are crushed. They toy with us for their entertainment, and they live in ridiculous luxury while we starve and fight each other. This is what The Hunger Games embodies in a narrative, and so the response to it has been tremendous, as it should be.”

For his part, William Gibson believes that to divide science fiction into dystopian and utopian camps is to create a “pointless dichotomy.” Although his seminal 1984 cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer , depicts a gritty, scarcity-driven future, he does not consider his work pessimistic. “I’ve only ever wanted to be naturalistic,” he says. “I assumed I was being less than dystopian in the 1980s, because I was writing about a world that had gotten out of the cold war intact. That actually seemed unrealistic to many intelligent people at the time.”

The distinction between dystopian and utopian may often seem to hinge on whether the author personally has hope for a better future. Robinson, for instance, consistently has taken on big, serious, potentially dystopian topics, such as nuclear war, ecological disaster and climate change. He does not, however, succumb to despair, and he works out his solutions in complex, realistic, well-researched scientific detail. Of his own work, he says, “Sure, use the word utopian.”

Neal Stephenson—author of Anathem , Reamde and a dozen or so other wide-ranging novels—has had enough of dystopias. He has issued a call to action for writers to create more stories that foresee optimistic, achievable futures. Stephenson, who is also a futurist and technology consultant, wants realistic “big ideas” with the express intent of inspiring young scientists and engineers to offer tangible solutions to problems that have so far defied solutions. “People like Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg and Jim Benford and others have been carrying the torch of optimism,” says Stephenson. He agrees that the cyberpunk genre pioneered by Gibson “did a huge service for science fiction by opening up new lines of inquiry,” but, he adds, it also had unintended consequences in popular media. “When you talk to movie directors today, a lot of them seem stuck in a 30-year-old mind-set where nothing can be cooler than Blade Runner . That is the thing that we really need to get away from.”

In 2012, Stephenson partnered with the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University to create Project Hieroglyph, a web-based project that provides, in its words, “a space for writers, scientists, artists and engineers to collaborate on creative, ambitious visions of our near future.” The first fruit will be an anthology, Hieroglyph: Stories and Blueprints for a Better Future , to be published this September by HarperCollins. It will include stories by both established and newer writers who have been encouraged to “step outside their comfort zone,” as Ed Finn, the director of CSI, puts it. The same goes for readers. Finn sees the core audience for Hieroglyph as people who have never thought about the issues these authors address. “I want them to place themselves in these futures,” he says.

The stories take on big, difficult problems: Stephenson’s story envisions the construction of a 15-mile-high steel tower reaching into the stratosphere that would cut down on the fuel needed to launch space vehicles; Madeline Ashby applies the mechanics of gaming to manage U.S. immigration; and Cory Doctorow’s story suggests using 3-D printing to build structures on the moon.

An underlying challenge to this approach is that not all problems lend themselves to tangible solutions—not to mention briskly paced storytelling. “Techno-optimists have gone from thinking that cheap nuclear power would solve all our problems to thinking that unlimited computing power will solve all our problems,” says Ted Chiang, who has explored the nature of intelligence in works such as The Lifecycle of Software Objects . “But fiction about incredibly powerful computers doesn’t inspire people the same way that fiction about large-scale engineering did, because achievements in computing are both more abstract and more mundane.”

At the MIT Media Lab, instructors Sophia Brueckner and Dan Novy were surprised to discover that many incoming students had never read science fiction. “I could guess it’s because they’re top students from top schools who have been told science fiction is a form of children’s literature, or it isn’t worth their time,” Novy says. “They’ve had to compete so much to get where they are. They may simply not have had time to read, beyond required humanities assignments.”

Last fall, Brueckner and Novy taught a course, “Science Fiction to Science Fabrication,” with a syllabus packed with science fiction stories, novels, films, videos and even games. The students were charged with creating functional prototypes inspired by their reading and then considering the social context of the technologies they were devising. For a project inspired by a scene in Gibson’s Neuromancer , students built a device that uses electrodes and wireless technology to enable a user, by making a hand gesture, to stimulate the muscles in the hand of a distant second user, creating the same gesture. The young engineers suggested real-world applications for their prototype, such as physical therapists helping stroke victims to recover use of their limbs. But, Novy says, there was also deep discussion among the class about the ethical implications of their device. In Gibson’s novel, the technology is used to exploit people sexually, turning them into remote-controlled “meat puppets.”

Brueckner laments that researchers whose work deals with emerging technologies are often unfamiliar with science fiction. “With the development of new biotech and genetic engineering, you see authors like Margaret Atwood writing about dystopian worlds centered on those technologies,” she says. “Authors have explored these exact topics in incredible depth for decades, and I feel reading their writing can be just as important as reading research papers.”

Science fiction, at its best, engenders the sort of flexible thinking that not only inspires us, but compels us to consider the myriad potential consequences of our actions. Samuel R. Delany, one of the most wide-ranging and masterful writers in the field, sees it as a countermeasure to the future shock that will become more intense with the passing years. “The variety of worlds science fiction accustoms us to, through imagination, is training for thinking about the actual changes—sometimes catastrophic, often confusing—that the real world funnels at us year after year. It helps us avoid feeling quite so gob-smacked.”

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Eileen Gunn | | READ MORE

Eileen Gunn is a short-story writer and editor. Questionable Practices , her most recent collection, was published in March by Small Beer Press. Photo: Dennis Letbetter.

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Jaime Green

What Would It Take to Imagine a Truly Alien Alien?

Thomas Nagel’s essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” unfortunately does not endeavor to answer its titular question. (As a friend put it, it should actually be called “We Will Never Know What It’s Like to Be a Bat, Alas.”) But Nagel is not even interested in questions of batness. His project is to interrogate “the mind–body problem,” the struggle in philosophy or psychology to reduce the mind and consciousness to objective, physical terms. But around the edges of Nagel’s project, like tasty crumbs, we can grab at some useful ideas for imagining minds even stranger than bats: the minds of intelligent aliens. 

First, Nagel gives us a helpful entry into the question of consciousness. He writes, “The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.” Consciousness, then, is the ability to experience existence. It does not require intelligence, thought, or self-reflection, just the awareness of being. Nagel awards consciousness to far more animals than we might think of as humanlike or intelligent—not only bats but also mice, pigeons, and whales. Nagel chooses bats because, as mammals, he believes they are safely attributed consciousness; but, in an inversion of the swimmer who finds himself beheld by a familiar consciousness in a whale’s eye, Nagel writes, “even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.”

A bat’s presence is plenty alien, the frenetic flitting and chirps; what we know of their senses confirms it. “Bat sonar,” Nagel writes, “is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess” and “there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience  or imagine ” (emphasis mine). It’s not just that bats perceive the world through a different sense; we cannot assume that their experience of a sonar world can be mapped at all onto our visual world. And that’s before even getting to the ways that living by sonar rather than sight would shape a consciousness beyond simple perception.

Just as bats make their way in darkness, so too do creatures in the darkest depths of the sea. On worlds with subsurface oceans, like some of our outer-solar-system moons, the whole livable environment would be completely lightless. It’s a rich and strange ecosystem for science fiction writers to imagine us into. In James L. Cambias’  A Darkling Sea , intelligence has evolved on just such a world. Deprived of sunlight, the whole ecosystem draws energy from undersea volcanic vents, so life—and society—concentrates around these structures. And here, Cambias imagines people who look something like massive crayfish. He brings us inside their experience, a world known through a rich sonar that senses space as well as language. It changes their perceptive abilities, and their sense goes beyond the receptive—they perceive the world in vague shapes through passive sonar until they send out a click that gives clarity but also reveals their query to anyone who might be around to observe. (It is a book with lots of sneaking.) A loud noise can effectively blind them, as can too many other people talking at once.

When writer Charles Foster set out to understand a set of animals—badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift—he did so by living like them, and among them, for weeks at a time. As he writes in  Being a Beast , he finds himself tuning into his senses, like smell, in new ways, and discovers a powerful connection to his animal compatriots. But, Nagel might point out, Foster learns what it is like for a human to be like a badger; we still cannot know what it’s like for a badger to be a badger. “If I try to imagine this”—Nagel refers here to a bat being a bat, but it easily applies to badger (and alien)—“I am restricted to the resources of my own mind.” He argues that whatever we imagine is an alteration to human consciousness; it is impossible, he says, to imagine batness qua bat.

So then science fiction illustrates the challenge of imagining alienness qua alien. Even if aliens evolve intelligence as we do, even if they speak a language we can learn to understand, even if we can befriend them and love them, whether because of convergence or because everyone is smart enough to make it work (a bat can never help you learn its language)—even with all of that, the alien heart may still be unknowable.

By Kim Zetter

By Aarian Marshall

By Will Knight

By Matt Burgess

But it’s not only bats and aliens—fictional or optimistically imagined—who brandish subjective experiences we cannot understand. Nagel cites his own inability to understand “the subjective character of the experience of a person deaf and blind from birth.” Across human abilities and cultures, there are myriad ways in which our sensory capabilities and even our cultures and languages render our subjective experiences of the world incomprehensible to others of our own kind. Some languages have more words for basic colors than others—some naming only dark, white, and red, while others, like Russian, divide blue into light and dark the way English differentiates red from pink. But still, research has shown that even people without different words for, say, blue and green, can differentiate between the two. Though when we each make our way through the world, who knows what different things we see.

A relatively well-known factoid is that Homer writes of the “wine-dark sea” because the Greeks had no word for blue. He looked at the ocean and saw something different than we do. But Maria Michela Sassi, professor of ancient philosophy at the University of Pisa, gives a deeper illumination to the issue.

In her essay, “The Sea Was Never Blue,” Sassi writes that, well, first of all, Homer did have words at least for aspects of blue: “ kuaneos , to denote a dark shade of blue merging into black; and glaukos , to describe a sort of ‘blue-gray,’” as in gray-eyed Athena. But indeed, the sky was “big, starry, or of iron or bronze (because of its solid fixity),” and the sea was “whitish” and “blue-gray,” or “pansylike,” “winelike,” or “purple.” But neither sea nor sky was ever simply blue.

This didn’t apply only to our familiar blue expanses. Sassi gathers examples of Greek descriptions that would seem patently wrong to a modern reader. “The simple word xanthos covers the most various shades of yellow, from the shining blond hair of the gods, to amber, to the reddish blaze of fire. Chloros , since it’s related to chloe (grass), suggests the color green but can also itself convey a vivid yellow, like honey.”

We know grass and honey are not the same color—did the Greeks somehow not?

Human eyes haven’t changed in the past 2,500 years, though in 1858 the classicist and eventual British prime minister William Gladstone did propose that, as Sassi puts it, “the visual organ of the ancients was still in its infancy.” But while Gladstone’s conclusion was wrong, he was doing his best to explain the fact that ancient Greek writing reflects a particular sensitivity to light, not just hue.

Our contemporary understanding of color is primarily defined by hue—the position on the rainbow spectrum—with variations in lightness, or value. (Red and pink have the same hue, but pink has a lighter value.) There’s also saturation, the intensity of the color—vivid blue versus the less saturated gray-blue.

Sassi sees in Greek descriptions of color more emphasis placed on saliency, which is how much a color grabs your attention. Red is more salient than blue or green, and sure enough, Sassi finds that descriptions of green and blue in Greek are more focused on the qualities that grab your attention than on the rather unsalient hues. She writes, “In some contexts the Greek adjective chloros should be translated as ‘fresh’ instead of ‘green,’ or leukos as ‘shining’ rather than ‘white.’” It wasn’t that the Greeks couldn’t see blue, they just didn’t care about blueness as much as other qualities of what they were seeing.

And so, the sea to Homer was not primarily blue. Wine was not a shabby hue approximation, but a precise description of the sea’s other visual qualities: its movement, its sparkle, its reminiscence of “the shine of the liquid inside the cups used to drink out of at a symposium.” Homer and his contemporaries saw all the colors we see today, but they noticed different things about them.

These are relatively minor differences, yet they have left many people to believe that ancient Greeks either physiologically could not see blue or could not describe it. Is language reflective of a culture’s values and worldview, or does it limit the possibilities of experience? What is it like to walk through the world seeing light’s movement instead of its color? What is it like to be a bat? We can hardly imagine. What is it like to see the sea if you are Homer?

Some of these gaps may be only minor hurdles—you say potato, I say wine-dark sea—but others may prove to be barriers to communication. And they start to do weird things with the empathetic imagining of fiction. A truly alien alien, likely as their existence may be, is so incomprehensible that stories about them just become stories about human beings.

In Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel  Solaris , humans have discovered a planet they’ve named Solaris, where the surface is almost entirely covered by ocean, and they’ve built a small station on its shores for study. They call it an ocean, but we realize, over the course of the book, that it is an ocean only in being a vast body of liquid matter. It turns out to also be a body, a planet-spanning entity of some sort. But almost everything else about it is unknown. Is it conscious, is it intelligent, is it aware of its human visitors? Are the vast shapes it exudes from its own substance daydreams or reflexes or attempts at contact?

Lem walks us through these musings as his main character, a human psychologist named Kris Kelvin, flips through the books of the Solaris station’s library. (Ah, midcentury sci-fi, where we can imagine vast and incomprehensible alien life, but not the digitization of information. There is still, in this future, microfiche.) Lem conjures a century’s worth of scientific research and discourse, the theories and schools of thought competing for correctness within the discipline called Solaristics. But the narrative encounters—of a human facing the alien ocean—can only ever tell us about the humans.

In one scene near the end of the book, Kelvin makes his first visit to the shores of the ocean. He has what we learn is a common first encounter on Solaris. As the ocean’s waves lap the shore, Kelvin reaches out a space-suited hand. The wave, being far more than mindless matter, reaches up and envelops his hand, leaving a tiny pocket of air around it. Kelvin moves his hand; the wave follows. “A flower had grown out of the ocean, and its calyx was molded to my fingers. I stepped back. The stem trembled, stirred uncertainly and fell back into the wave, which gathered it and receded.” It is the simplest and gentlest gesture of contact, like E. T. reaching his lit finger toward Elliott’s, or the sea stretching to tousle Moana’s hair—but that lacuna of air between the human hand and the alien always remains. The metaphor is not hard to untangle. Contact, Lem proposes, is impossible.

But, perhaps because of that fact or as its cause, Solaris is not really a book about aliens, it’s a book about people, the human characters. Kelvin arrives on the station to find the mission leader dead by suicide, one scientist holed up reclusive in the laboratory, and the other seemingly on the edge of madness. The ocean, it turns out, has taken notice of humanity, following a bombardment of X-rays from the station: The humans wanted to force the alien to react, and it has. And Kelvin soon discovers how. He wakes to find with him in his bedroom his ex-wife, Rheya, who has been dead for a decade and is absolutely not on Solaris with him. The ocean is sending to the humans visitors, flesh-and-blood re-creations crafted from their memories. Rheya is 19 again, as Kelvin last knew her, and she knows only what he also knows. (Another … quirk, let’s say, of midcentury science fiction: The women here exist only as projections of men’s memories of them.) But the ghostly visitors are not just manifestations of memory, they’re Solaris’ doing. When I spoke to dolphin researcher Kelly Jaakkola, she said, “An interesting question to me is, If there was a blob on the wall, what would it need to do to get me to think that [it was intelligent]? I think one of those things would be a rational imitation … Not necessarily like a mirror, because a mirror is not intelligent, but in a more purposeful kind of way.” Replace a blob on the wall with a planet-spanning ocean body and you see where we are. Dolphins can imitate other dolphins or humans even without sight, listening and echolocating to determine the actions of the other swimmer in their pool. What senses might Solaris have? What might it mean with these mimicries?

We, and the visiting humans in Solaris, can ask these questions, but answers never come. So Kelvin’s delvings into the books of Solaristic history and theory sit amid scenes of emotional impact that take place between humans—or between humans and approximations thereof.

A truly alien alien like the ocean of Solaris can’t be a character in a story. I don’t know what Solaris’ ocean signified to Lem, or what he envisioned happening beneath its waves. Perhaps the alien ocean is merely meant to be a confounding presence, a wall the humans slam their heads against, the story contained in their bruises.

Excerpted from The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green, Copyright © 2023 by Jaime Green. Published by Hanover Square Press.

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[Interview] ‘AI is not really intelligent’: Ted Chiang on science and fiction in the LLM boom

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  Ahead of his keynote speech at the Hankyoreh Human & Digital Forum next month, the Hankyoreh arranged an interview between science fiction writer Ted Chiang and Kim Beom-jun, a Sungkyunkwan University professor of physics who will be joining Chiang for a talk at the forum.   Chiang is known as one of the era’s preeminent American science fiction writers. He has been honored multiple times by Nebula and Hugo awards, which are considered the most prestigious prizes in the sci-fi world. His novella “Story of Your Life” drew widespread attention after it was adapted into the 2016 film “Arrival” by director Denis Villeneuve.   More recently, he has attracted notice for texts sharing profound insights on artificial intelligence. A February 2023 essay in the New Yorker titled “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” was seen as elevating the level of the AI debate.   The third Hankyoreh Human and Digital Forum will take place on June 12 with a focus on the theme “The AI Desiring to Go Beyond Human: Can it Capture Even Human Values?” Kim and Chiang’s interview took place over email.   Kim Beom-jun: Could you introduce yourself to the Hankyoreh’s readers?   Ted Chiang: I’m a science fiction writer. I’ve published two collections of short stories, titled “Stories of Your Life and Others” and “Exhalation.”   Kim: You studied science and computer science in college. What is the value of studying sciences not only for science fiction writers like yourself, but for all of us?   Chiang: It’s important to know how the universe works, and that is what science teaches us. The universe often doesn’t work the way we want it to; it doesn’t accommodate our preferences. For example, in the United States, many people believe that the month you were born determines your personality; in Korea, many people believe that your blood type determines your personality. Neither of these beliefs is supported by any science whatsoever. It’s comforting to have a system of classification into which you can fit people, but that is not how the universe actually works.   Kim: Reading your work, I’ve often felt as though you were performing thought experiments with them, jumping off from “what if” questions. Can you comment on the differences between thought experiments in science and science fiction?   Chiang: Thought experiments in science fiction don’t need to be as rigorous as the ones in science. Reading fiction presumes a certain suspension of disbelief, which is entirely appropriate for fiction but not for science. Scientists are able to use thought experiments to make real scientific progress; Einstein developed his theory of relativity primarily by sitting in a room and thinking rather than looking through a telescope. Science fiction writers use thought experiments to dramatize philosophical questions like, “Is immortality still desirable if it means that having children is forbidden?”   Kim: You are now well-known as a critic of AI. How does your career as a science fiction writer relate to raising your voice on AI issues?   Chiang: It’s a little odd to be a science fiction writer telling technologists that they need to rein in their imaginations. I think it’s important to make a clear distinction between scenarios that would make for a good story and scenarios that might actually occur in the world we live in. A lot of people working in AI talk about the idea of “the singularity,” when computers become more intelligent than human beings and make themselves even smarter. This term was coined by a science fiction writer, Vernor Vinge. I think it’s a great idea for a story, and I’m happy to read novels built around the concept, but it’s not something we need to worry about in the real world.   Kim: I am very much impressed by your brilliant and catchy metaphors, like AI as a “blurry jpeg of the web” and “the new McKinsey” in your piece for the New Yorker last year. Why are such metaphors important? What is the power of metaphors?   Chiang: I think comparing AI to McKinsey is actually not that great a metaphor because too many people haven’t heard of the McKinsey consulting agency. What I more commonly say is that AI is a knife-sharpener for the blade of capitalism, which is a more understandable way of expressing the same idea. Metaphors are useful when trying to make sense of unfamiliar concepts. In English we have an expression “get a handle on something,” which means “begin to understand.” That’s a metaphor about the utility of metaphors; they provide a handle you can grasp. However, we should always remember that metaphors are not literally true; they are just a way to get started.   Kim: Recursive developments, not at an individual level but on a social level, were one of the main driving forces for our technological achievements. Can AI develop based on social learning like us? Could a society of AIs produce an AI technology better than themselves?   Chiang: The interactions between AI programs have nothing in common with the interactions between people. They are tools, and any improvements that result from using different tools in combination is purely a result of human ingenuity. One day it might be possible to build AI programs that are just like people, but what would be the point? We already have billions of people. If we want the benefits that arise from people working in collaboration, we know how to get it. The goal of developing AI should be to create tools that let us do things we can’t do on our own.   Kim: You emphasize we must tame capitalism in the coming years of the AI era. For the past 40 years, and even now, we’ve failed to do so, and are facing economic inequality. Tell us more about how AI Luddites can make capitalism less harmful and more beneficial for humanity.   Chiang: There are no easy solutions to the problem of capitalism. Stronger unions would help, and so would companies that are owned by their workers rather than by investors. Decisions should be made by people actually doing the work instead of executives who only see the company through a balance sheet. Being a Luddite does not mean being opposed to technology; it means caring more about economic justice for workers than about shareholder profit. If we have policies that favor economic justice, then technology can assist with that, but if we have policies that favor shareholder profit, then that’s what technology will promote.   Kim: Can you give us a taste of your talk at next month’s Hankyoreh Human & Digital Forum?   Chiang: I’m going to argue that AI is not really intelligent and that large-language models are not actually using language. I’m also going to argue that generative AI is not a tool to make art.   For more information on the Hankyoreh Human & Digital Forum, visit https://enhdf2024.imweb.me/    

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The Best Fantasy and Sci-Fi Books of 2024, So Far

Yearning for a new world? New stories from Heather Fawcett, Nisi Shawl, Danielle L. Jensen, Sofia Samatar, and more can get you there.

Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

The books that got me into books were fantasies. There was never a time in my life—post-infantile amnesia, I suppose—when I wasn’t reading a fantasy, being read a fantasy, or trying to write one myself. (Usually all three.) The same goes for science fiction: These were the types of stories that made reading feel limitless, thrilling, like peeking through a keyhole to a vaster (if not necessarily kinder) universe. As I’ve grown older, my reading habits have expanded, my understanding of genre widened, but well-executed fantasy and sci-fi remains my deepest source of literary joy. So it’s a pleasure to present ELLE’s picks for the best of those genres in 2024—through May, for now.

For the purposes of this list, speculative stories will be considered science fiction, while fairy tales, folktales, and mythological retellings will fall under the vast and complicated banner of “fantasy.” Romantasys will fall into this category as well. (You can find our other romance recommendations here .) There’s plenty of genre overlap ahead, but that’s the joy of these books—there’s always something (seemingly) contradictory to explore within them.

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

Within moments of cracking open the cover to Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland , I was sold. She has followed up her 2020 novel Parakeet with a landmark work of literary science-fiction, set in the crosshairs of “two celestially significant events occurring simultaneously: The departure of Voyager 1 and the arrival of Adina Giorno, early and yellowed like old newspaper,” the author writes. As the Voyager 1 space probe sets its sights on the final frontier, so does the child Adina make a home for herself on Earth. But she is, in many ways, no less foreign to the planet than Voyager 1 is to the outer galaxy: Adina discovers that she’s been sent by her extraterrestrial relatives to report back her earthly findings, all via fax machine. (“Upon encountering real problems, human beings compare their lives to riding a roller coaster, even though they invented roller coasters to be fun things to do on their days off,” Adina notes in one such missive.) This is a wonder of science fiction: as tender and intimate as it is conceptually courageous.

Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett

The eagerly awaited follow-up to Heather Fawcett’s first title in the popular Emily Wilde series, Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands is a winsome tale of fairies and academia, an ideal pick for fans of cozy fantasy. Set in 1910, the story follows the titular Emily, a faerie scholar who’s completed an encyclopedia of Fair Folk and is working next on a map of the creatures’ realms. But her relationship with the exiled faerie king Wendell Bambleby promises to complicate much more than her research, particularly as she and Bambleby hunt for the door back to his kingdom—and attempt to dodge his family’s assassination attempts. Clever, immersive, yet approachable for more casual readers, Map of the Otherlands is a genre-blending joy.

So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole

An inventive, vivid take on the Chosen One narrative, Kamilah Cole’s So Let Them Burn is the sort of young-adult fantasy novel both teenage and maturer readers will enjoy—particularly given Cole’s knack for juggling action-heavy dual perspectives. The premise involves 17-year-old Falon, whose ability to wield the power of the gods provides the strength she’ll need to liberate the island of San Irie from the colonizing forces of the Langlish. But her sister has unexpectedly bonded with a dragon from the Langley Empire, and when those dragons turn feral, the gods inform Falon she must eradicate them—and those bonded to them. Desperate to save each other, Falon and Elara flesh out this tale from alternating third-person perspectives in Cole’s exhilarating first entry in a promised series.

Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase

In Tlotlo Tsamaase’s future Botswana, consciousness can be delivered from body to body, making the life of protagonist Nelah possible. Her body used to belong to a criminal, which means the government has her microchipped: Her husband can control her, and the government can watch and assess her every move. Nelah is waiting for her child—gestating in an artificial womb—to arrive, but before that can happen, she and the man she’s in love with (a man who’s very much not her husband) commit a dangerous crime. The resulting fallout haunts Nelah (sometimes literally) in this sci-fi horror novel’s resolute skewering of misogyny.

Kinning by Nisi Shawl

The next entry in Nisi Shawl’s anti-colonial alternative history series, the second after Everfair , Kinning is a profoundly well-realized feat of world-building. Sprawling in its characters and themes, vaguely reminiscent of Game of Thrones’ political dramas, Shawl’s afrofuturist sequel explores the aftermath of Everfair’s Great War, the country having successfully pushed Europe out of the territory. Citizens plan to spread further peace via a fungus that generates empathy in those who interact with its spores, even as Everfair itself remains threatened from outside and within its borders. This is a complex, challenging story, but without question an impressive one.

Faebound by Saara El-Arifi

Faebound —with its simply stunning cover—takes place in a world where elves, humans, and fae once co-existed, but now only elves remain, and they’re eternally at war. Sisters Yeeran and Lettle soon find their lives bifurcated by the fighting: Yeeran is exiled outside the Elven Lands, and Lettle must pair up with one of Yeeran’s soldiers, Rayan, to find her lost sibling. Only then do they each discover that the fae are alive and well, and that the magic in store for them is well beyond what they’d once expected. This is a passionate and intriguing—but accessible—beginning to a planned Sapphic romantasy trilogy.

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Tainted Cup is the beginning chapter of Robert Jackson Bennett’s Shadow of the Leviathan series, and it imbues elements from myriad genres—primarily fantasy, sci-fi, and mysteries—to create a delicious detective story set in an equally unforgettable magical world. In Bennett’s Khanum, where massive leviathans threaten the world outside the empire’s walls, an imperial officer is murdered in an aristocrat’s summer home. Two detectives, Ana and Din, must tackle this mystery. Together, they make something of an odd couple: Ana’s brilliance rivals that of Sherlock Holmes himself, while Din is a magically enhanced “engraver,” one with a perfect memory. These lead protagonists’ platonic partnership, and Bennett’s remarkable imagination, make this book a strange and singular thrill.

Bride by Ali Hazelwood

There’s an intentional silliness to Ali Hazelwood’s paranormal romance Bride , in which the vampires are “Vampyres,” the werewolves are “Weres,” the protagonist is named Misery, and her marriage of convenience to a “very powerful and dangerous Were” might actually be...something more? But this on-the-nose humor, a signature in Hazelwood’s work, only serves to underscore the shameless indulgence of Misery’s story. Bride will certainly not enrapture all fantasy readers (particularly those wishing to avoid sex scenes), but for Hazelwood’s many existing fans, this surprise genre twist from the contemporary romance author has plenty of winks to impart.

Heartless Hunter by Kristen Ciccarelli

Heartless Hunter , an instant New York Times bestseller, has already amassed a sizable (and passionate) audience, but it’s certainly not too late to pick up this addictive romantasy, which tracks the love affair between a persecuted witch and a witch hunter. Protagonist Rune comes from privilege, but after a revolution seizes power from the once-ruling witches, she’s now hiding in plain sight: socialite by day, witch vigilante by night. (Alias: The Crimson Moth.) Working to protect her people from witch hunters, she decides to court one of them; he, in return, agrees to the relationship to gain intel about her operations. But just as their fake relationship blooms into something deeper, their political ties could easily break them apart. Relentlessly trope-y? Sure. But this is a satisfying binge-read nonetheless.

Sunbringer by Hannah Kaner

Hannah Kaner follows up the first book in her Fallen Gods series, Godkiller , with Sunbringer , set immediately after the events of its predecessor. Brilliant mythology-inspired world-building paves the foundation for Kaner’s fantasy adventure, but it’s the fully realized ensemble cast that, ultimately, makes the series so memorable. In Sunbringer , Kissen, Inara, Skediceth, Elogast, and King Arren trade third-person perspectives as a war between gods and humans bubbles into the foreground in Middren, seeding fertile ground for an epic showdown to come.

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

“Foxes, people say, are wicked women,” Yangsze Choo writes in her historical fantasy The Fox Wife , set in early-1900s Manchuria as the Qing dynasty wanes. Choo (author of The Ghost Bride and The Night Tiger ) introduces readers to Snow, a fox spirit who can shapeshift into a woman, and Detective Bao, who believes Snow is connected to a murder. But Snow, living as a human and working as a maidservant, has her own mission in mind: She wants revenge against the photographer who paid a hunter to murder her daughter. Folklore and mystery converge in Choo’s alluring, atmospheric tale.

A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L. Jensen

I know better than to buy a book based solely on its character art, but there’s no denying the cover of Danielle L. Jensen’s A Fate Inked In Blood (illustrated by Eleonor Piteira) merits the attention. Blessedly, the book’s inside contents are just as richly rendered. The latest story from fantasy stalwart Jensen ( The Bridge Kingdom series, The Dark Shores series), Fate centers on Freya, a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage—loveless enough that her husband betrays her, setting off a series of events that culminates in a shocking reveal: The blood of a goddess runs in Freya’s veins. That blood makes her powerful, but it also makes her a target for Skaland’s jarl, who believes his fate is tied to Freya’s. Still, it’s this jarl’s son, Bjorn, who will prove the most complicating factor in Freya’s fight for survival. This is an absorbing viking romantasy steeped in Norse mythology, and the start to a series with real momentum.

The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed

“They locked him up while his leg grew back.” So begins The Siege of Burning Grass , Premee Mohamed’s ferocious story of violence and resistance in a world of wound-healing wasps and floating cities. Protagonist Alefret is a peacemaker—or, anyway, he’s trying to be—but he’s since been targeted and imprisoned by his own government, then ordered to go undercover in the rival empire of Med’ariz. There, he’s tasked with seeding an anti-war effort amongst the people, an effort which Alefret’s government aims to capitalize on—and claim victory at last. But revolutions are costly in more ways than one, and Mohamed navigates these nuances with empathy and righteous verve.

The Prisoner’s Throne by Holly Black

As a childhood enthusiast of The Spiderwick Chronicles , I’ve loved watching Holly Black’s fantasy career evolve, and her conclusion to the Stolen Heir duology, The Prisoner’s Throne , is a treat for old fans and newcomers alike. In the fairy world of Elfhame, Black has created a entertaining tableau of political intrigue and romance—most notably between High King Cardan and High Queen Jude (iykyk). And as war beckons in The Prisoner’s Throne , the imprisoned Prince Oak finds his loyalties (and his love) stretched to the brink.

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

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What Can We Learn about Christianity and Writing from Zenna Henderson's Science Fiction Stories?

What made Zenna Henderson a trailblazing writer, and what can we learn from her stories about faith and craft?

Zenna Henderson (1917-1983) may not have the reputation of speculative fiction writers like Madeleine L’Engle , but her work was deeply important. While she may not be a “Christian writer” by some people’s standards, her work has attracted many readers who praise how she discusses faith. Sojourners  contributor Elizabeth Palmberg included her works in a list of “spiritually-inflected science fiction.” Reactor Mag  contributor Alan Brown praised how her stories were “infused with religious faith, and were often object lessons on the worst and best behaviors that faith can inspire.”

So, what can we learn from Zenna Henderson’s work?

Was Zenna Henderson a Christian Writer?

Whether Henderson was a “Christian writer” depends on her beliefs, readers’ expectations, and the publishing category she fits into.

Henderson’s beliefs place her within Judeo-Christian thought, but secondary resources often describe her as a Mormon. As recently as 2001, she was mentioned in the magazine  Irreantum: Exploring Mormon Literature . However, that doesn’t give a full picture of her spiritual journey.

In a 1974 interview with Paul Walker, Henderson said, “I was reared a Mormon—both grandfathers and great-grandfathers had more than one wife—but I’m Methodist now.”

According to the Mormon Literature Database , she left Mormonism when she married Richard Harry Henderson. They married in 1944 and divorced seven years later; she began considering herself a Methodist sometime in this phase of her life.

While she identified the denomination she fit into, Henderson had an ecumenical approach to Christianity. Talking with Walker, she said, “One of the things about Methodism is that you can feel at home in any worship service. You may not agree with some tenets, but as long as the love of God is there, you can feel comfortable.” Bill Patterson reports that he knew Henderson at the end of her life when she was attending a nondenominational church in Phoenix, Arizona.

Walker highlighted how many of her stories emphasize returning to hope after disillusionment. When Walker asked her what she felt about faith, Henderson replied: 

“The thing to believe in is the ultimate triumph of Good. And that God is a personal God who knows each one of us as we can’t know ourselves; who has given us life for a unique purpose that no one else can ever perform; that we are responsible for our every action, though, and word; and we will be held personally accountable for them when we go through Death into the presence of God. That we are never alone, never forsaken, never beyond God’s love and compassion—and always as important as if we were the only mortal ever created.”

She also had a sense of humor about faith, laughing at her long answer by adding, “Last of sermon?” 

She also had practical advice for people who feel spiritually lost: “Well, if you feel you are far away from God, be advised—He isn’t the one who moved!”

While Henderson’s work shows her faith, she published before Christian fiction became a separate category in American Christian bookstores. Daniel Silliman reports in Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith   that Janette Oke’s romance novel Loves Comes Softly created the market in the 1970s. By the time Henderson passed away in the 1980s, Christian publishing houses were releasing sci-fi and fantasy books by writers like Robert Siegel , but the market was still almost entirely romance novels. Christian speculative fiction did not fully come into their own until the late 1990s with novels like Firebird by Kathy Tyers.

Henderson didn’t publish “Christian fiction” according to industry labels; however, she used stories released through mainstream publishers to communicate spiritual themes—many of which will be discussed later.

How Did Zenna Henderson Become a Writer?

Zenna Henderson was born Zena Chlarson on November 1, 1917, in Tucson, Arizona, the second of five children. Lisa Yaszek notes in The Future Is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin , that Henderson began spelling her name Zenna in the 1950s.

While Henderson wrote in several genres, including fantasy and poetry, her best-known work was sci-fi. Henderson told Walker that she began reading sci-fi and fantasy when she was 12, primarily in the magazines Amazing Stories , Weird Tales , and Astounding Stories . She later discovered Jules Verne’s sci-fi novels through her library.

Henderson began writing early on. In a biographical piece for the August 1953 issue of  Imagination , she said, “I wrote poetry and ‘plays’ from the fourth grade on up, but it wasn't until about four years ago [i.e., when she was around 36] that I really started writing fiction in earnest.” She told Walker that she decided to write sci-fi for a simple reason: “I ran out of good ones to read!”

Her first sci-fi story, “Come On, Wagon,” appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1951. She told Walker it was “my first published short story, except for a bad one published in the Christian Science Monitor .”

Like most authors, Henderson balanced writing with a day job. She became a first-grade teacher after getting her Bachelor’s from Arizona State Teachers College (now Arizona State College) in 1940. Henderson kept teaching first grade after getting her master’s from the same school in 1954. She taught primarily in Arizona, including at the Japanese internment camp Gila River Relocation in Sacaton, Arizona, in 1942-1943. 

However, she occasionally worked outside her home state. From 1956 to 1958, she taught French and German on an American airbase in France. From 1958 to 1959, she taught patients in the tuberculosis ward at Seaside Children’s Hospital in Waterford, Connecticut.

Her work as a teacher inspired her greatest writing. In 1952, she published “Ararat,” a short story about children who seem normal but belong to an extraterrestrial race who escaped their planet’s destruction by coming to Earth. They call themselves “the People” and have unusual powers that they struggle to hide, with mixed results, to survive in their new home. Henderson explained to scholar Sandra Miesel , “I started with the rather vague premise that the teacher has to keep one jump ahead of her pupils—or disaster. So what if the children were ‘magic’ and pulled ‘magic’ mischief but she didn’t know they were ‘magic’ and they didn’t know she was!”

Henderson wrote 17 stories about the People, often focusing on their children struggling to handle their powers. Miesel highlights how these stories made Henderson an innovator: sci-fi was only starting to depict children with unusual abilities in the late 1940s, and it wasn’t until after “Ararat” that many famous examples (like Wilmar H. Shiras’ Children of the Atom or John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos ) were published.

What Made People Notice Zenna Henderson’s Work?

While Henderson’s short story “Come On Wagon” wasn’t published until 1951, she began attracting notice even before it appeared. Thrilling Adventure Stories editor Sam Merwin Jr. mentioned her in an editorial for the magazine’s December 1950 issue, describing her as one of the new female sci-fi writers about to become published professionals and change the market.

Mary Shelley arguably invented sci-fi with Frankenstein, and women began publishing sci-fi in magazines from the market’s early days in the 1920s. However, they struggled to find acceptance for decades. As Bill Gerken observed in an article for  Kyriokos , for decades, “it seemed natural that most science fiction writers would be male, as well as most of the readers. So natural that Judith Merril and Zenna Henderson stood out as oddities, and no self-respecting teenage girl would read ‘that trash’ or, if she did, only her diary shared her secret.”

Merwin pokes fun at how some male writers felt about the new wave of female writers by calling them “the Great Invasion or the Great Erosion depending upon the point of view.” Through the 1960s, many women avoided controversy by using pen names. For example, Alice Bradley Sheldon published her fiction under the name James Triptree Jr. Henderson was one of the first women to avoid male pseudonyms, creating space for more female voices in the sci-fi market.

During her lifetime, she received critical praise—she was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959 for her story “Captivity”—and personal praise from various writers.

One of the more interesting commendations came from C.S. Lewis, not typically considered a sci-fi writer, but who did write a trilogy and several short stories in that genre. In a 1963 conversation about sci-fi with Brian Aldiss and Kingsley Amis , he asked if they had read a short story about a mother alien seeking food for her children. Lewis called the story a perfect example of how “some science fiction really does deal with issues far more serious than those realistic fiction deals with.” Douglas A. Anderson explains in his book Tales Before Narnia that Lewis is describing Henderson’s short story “Food to All Flesh.” 

Interestingly, Lewis and Henderson both contributed to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction : Henderson with numerous stories from 1952 to 1980, Lewis with “The Shoddy Lands” in 1956, and “Ministering Angels” in 1958. Anthony Boucher included “Ministering Angels” and “Captivity” in The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, Eighth Series .

During the last two decades of Henderson’s life, some of her work reached new audiences through adaptations. One of the best-remembered stories from the People series, “Pottage,” was adapted into the 1972 TV movie The People starring William Shatner. Her short story “Hush” was adapted into an episode of the anthology TV show Tales from the Darkside in 1988.

How Is Zenna Henderson Remembered Today?

Today, several notable Christians who write sci-fi have cited her influence. Kathy Tyers , author of mainstream sci-fi novels like Truce at Bakura and Christian sci-fi novels like Firebird , stated that Henderson taught her about “unique characters with believable motives.”

Connie Willis, author of acclaimed sci-fi novels like Doomsday Book ,  described Henderson as one of the first sci-fi writers whose work she fell in love with. Willis  even said she initially got an education degree because “My plan was to teach and write in the summers and on spring and Christmas breaks, a la Zenna Henderson.”

Several acclaimed writers outside Christianity have also cited Henderson as one of their inspirations.

Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) said that she discovered Henderson’s stories when she was 15 and appreciated how Henderson “wrote about telepathy and other things I was interested in, from the point of view of young women.” Raised Baptist, Butler left organized religion after age 12 but has been praised for intelligently wrestling with religious themes in her works.

Mormon author Orson Scott Card described his early work as including “the Zenna Henderson-influenced Worthing stories.” The Worthing series includes two novels and two short story collections, mostly following telepathic hero Jason Worthing’s adventures.

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Lois McMaster Bujold has described Henderson as one of the sci-fi writers she remembers fondly when she discovered the genre as a child. In a  Christianity Today  article , R.S. Naifeh highlights how Bujold is an agnostic who takes faith seriously in stories like her World of the Five Gods series.

Jo Walton has written warmly about discovering the People stories as a teenager: “The stories are filled with deep religious sensibility, a profound sense of joy, and they’re the most comforting thing any lonely misunderstood teenager could possibly wish for. They’re about being special and finding other special people. This is one note, but it’s one note played incredibly well.” Walton has been described as a secular writer fascinated by religious questions, which she has explored in books like Lent: A Novel of Many Returns and occasionally in articles on religious sci-fi .

Henderson’s range of admirers shows that while her writing attracts readers who sympathize with her faith, she also accomplished the rare task of making her beliefs accessible to readers inside and outside Christianity.

What Can We Learn about Faith and Writing from Zenna Henderson’s Work?

Henderson not only became a well-known writer at a time when few women were openly writing sci-fi, but also communicated her spiritual beliefs in ways that Christian writers can learn from today. Here are five particular things we can learn from her approach to Christian-informed fiction:

1. Sentimental isn’t bad if it’s done well. Author Bud Webster argued in a column for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association that Henderson’s great skill was being sentimental without “gratuitous and blatant button-pushing . . . [Henderson] may have pushed the odd button or two, but she certainly didn’t whang on them like a lab-rat jonesing for kibble. She tweaked them gently to remind us that they were there for a reason, then held those reasons up for us to marvel at.”

2. Writing about children doesn’t mean making everything cute. Perhaps one reason Henderson’s work was sentimental yet not overdone is that she wrote about children and teachers without making everyone unnaturally nice. Miesel highlighted how Henderson’s stories, from “You Know What Teacher?” to “The Last Step,” provide a range of good to bad teachers and never try to make children into tiny adults.

3. Care for the outcast. Butler and others have noted how well Henderson depicted isolation and struggle. Henderson (quoting John Donne) told Walker that she saw this theme as simply the human condition: “Each of us is an island in the last analysis.” Webster suggested that she also knew something about persecution from growing up in a Mormon family and her time teaching in an internment camp. Whatever inspired her, Henderson captured the dignity of oppressed and isolated people very well.

4. Sacred and secular aren’t as far apart as we think. While some writers write about God’s grace as if it suddenly appears at certain moments in our lives, Henderson understood it as permeating our lives. Miesel recalls her saying, “Being conscious of the Hand of God in everything doesn’t mean tenting your hands and rolling your eyes up at appropriate intervals.” Talking with Walker, she said, “The miraculous in daily life I write about because I am so conscious of it all the time. Miracles go on all the time. Oh, not the wave-a-wand, boi-oi-oing! type of miracles, but all the wonderful, slow miracles of life, growth, being.” 

5. Faith affects our lives in little as well as big ways. Henderson’s stories contained many religious references and images. Webster highlighted how every story about the People has a title with biblical allusions: “Ararat” is the mountain where Noah’s ark settled after the Flood ( Genesis 8:4 ). “Pottage” comes from the word that the King James Bible uses for the pot of stew that Jacob made and sold to Esau for Esau’s birthright ( Genesis 25:29-34 ). However, her biggest impact on readers seems to have been how she captured the subtle ways faith affects people’s everyday lives. In a statement for Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Volume II , Henderson said, “from the fan letters I receive (which cover an amazing range of ages, occupations, and geographic locations), the consensus seems to be that I depict the sort of ordinary people who so often get trampled in a technological society, and also the ‘goodness’ and orderliness of a life that is functioning according to a plan no matter how much we hack it up. In other words, man is not the measure of life—God is.”

Books by Zenna Henderson

Unlike many of her contemporaries’ works, Henderson’s tales are still easy to find. During her lifetime, her stories about the People have appeared in various collections, including Pilgrimage: The Book of the People in 1961 and The People: No Different Flesh in 1968. In 1995, Mark Olson and Priscilla Olson collected complete stories in the anthology Ingathering: The Complete People Stories of Zenna Henderson .

Her stories that don’t feature the People were collected in The Anything Box in 1965 and   Holding Wonder in 1971. In 2020, Patricia Morgan Lang compiled them into Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson .

Individual short stories appeared in various anthologies, including:

• The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women edited by A. Susan Williams and Richard Glyn Jones 
• Women of Futures Past: Classic Stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
• Cassandra Rising edited by Alice Laurance.
• The Golden Road: Great Tales of Fantasy & The Supernatural edited by Damon Knight
• Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction   edited by Martin Greenberg, Frederick Pol, and Joseph D. Olander.
• 12 Great Classics of Science Fiction edited by Groff Conklin.
• Scary! Stories that will make you Scream!   edited by Peter Haining.
• You and Science Fiction by Bernard C. Hollister.
• The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas's Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1949-1954 edited by Annette Peltz-McComas
• Don’t Open This Book! and Angels of Darkness: Tales of Troubled and Troubling Woman , both edited by Marvin Kaye.
• Extraterrestrials   (also published as Young Extraterrestrials ) edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh.
• Speculations: 17 Stories Written Especially for This Volume By Well-Known Science Fiction Authors, But Their Names are Concealed By a Code and It's Up to You to Figure Out Who Wrote What edited by Isaac Asimov and Alice Laurance.

Books on Zenna Henderson

While there isn’t a biography on Henderson yet, key information about her life appears in several books.

Walker’s interview was published in Luna Monthly ’s May 1974 issue and Odyssey ’s Spring 1976 issue before he collected it into the book Speaking of Science Fiction: The Paul Walker Interviews .

Yaszek discusses Henderson in The Future Is Female! and Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction.

Henderson is also mentioned in the following books:

• The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction   edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls.
• The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction by Justine Larbalestier.
• Something About the Author Volume 5: Facts and Pictures about Contemporary Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People  edited by Anne Commire
• Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965 by Eric Leif Davin.
• Twentieth Century American Science-Fiction Writers edited by David Cowart and Thomas L. Wymer.
• Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Volume II edited by Robert Reginald, Douglas Menville, and Mary A. Burges.
• Architects of Tomorrow Volume VII by Don D’Ammassa.

Several scholars who study sci-fi discuss Henderson’s stories:

• In Extrapolations , Farah Mendlesohn Farah Mendlesohn discusses “Subcommittee” as an example of gender roles in sci-fi stories.
• In Western American Literature , Fred Erisman discusses how Henderson’s stories use frontier imagery in a sci-fi setting.
• In Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , Andy Sawyer uses Henderson’s stories to show how sci-fi stories portray mental powers.

Researchers can find several of Henderson’s manuscripts in the Willis E. McNelly Science Fiction Collection at California State University Fullerton and several letters in the Special Collections at Brigham Young University .

Photo Credit:©GettyImages/Max2611

This article is part of our People of Christianity catalog that features the stories, meaning, and significance of well-known people from the Bible and history. Here are some of the most popular articles for knowing important figures in Christianity:

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Russian-Held Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine Attacked Twice in One Night

(Reuters) -The Russian-held city of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine came under attack twice within three hours early on Tuesday, officials said, the latest in a series of strikes near the city.

Fires appeared to have broken out in both strikes. Ukraine made no official comment on either incident.

Leonid Pasechnik, Russia-installed governor of Luhansk region, said the first attack at about 9 p.m. (1800 GMT) was made with cluster munitions.

"A fire has broken out as a result of the attack," Pasechnik said, noting that information on casualties was being clarified.

Russia's Tass news agency, quoting emergency services, cited injuries.

Ukrainian media and war bloggers posted a picture of what they described as a large fire in the city.

A second strike hit the city at midnight, a Russian Foreign Ministry official said, apparently in the same general area.

Rodion Miroshnik, a special ambassador for the ministry, said city residents had heard two explosions in the same district as the site of the first attack.

"It cannot be ruled out that the repeat strike occurred at the site where rescue teams are dealing with the aftermath of the previous missile attack," Miroshnik wrote on Telegram.

Ukrainian news outlets said the target of the second strike was an airfield and posted a video of a fire spreading over a wide area.

Reuters could not independently confirm battlefield accounts or what weapon might have been used.

Ukraine's military has launched at least three attacks on Luhansk and nearby areas in recent weeks, targeting mainly fuel storage depots.

Russia annexed the Luhansk region several months after its February 2022 invasion, along with three other regions, though it does not fully control any of them.

Much of Luhansk has been occupied since 2014, when Russian-financed separatists took over swathes of territory in eastern Ukraine after large protests prompted Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych to flee the country and Moscow's forces seized the Crimea peninsula.

(Reporting by Ron Popeski; editing by Jonathan Oatis, Diane Craft and Richard Chang)

Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters .

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