With ChatGPT and other advances in artificial intelligence making daily headlines, it’s only natural that speculative fiction writers are tapping into the technology’s exciting—and daunting—possibilities. “Incorporating AI into fiction is a way to reflect on the human experience,” says Em X. Liu, debut author of The Death I Gave Him (Solaris, Sept.). “How do we define personhood once AI has its own drives and motivations?” PW spoke with sci-fi authors about how their upcoming novels reimagine AI’s place in fiction.
On the fritz
Artificial brains, some authors suggest, are just as fallible as human ones. In Emma Mieko Candon’s The Archive Undying (June, Tordotcom), which features “fresh, vivid worldbuilding,” per PW’s review, machine gods go mad and level entire cities. “These feral robots’ selfhood has been shattered,” Candon says. “Their mental break just obliterates their ability to do anything but follow these loops that they’re stuck in.”
In Sin Blaché’s and Helen Macdonald’s Prophet (Grove, Aug.), a mysterious goo called Prophet lures victims to their doom by physically manifesting their fondest memories. As human memories are often fractured, so too are Prophet’s creations (a diner without bathrooms, a horse with a human heart), say Blaché and Macdonald, who see Prophet as akin to generative AI making art: an inhuman agent taking human representations and making something deeply unsettling from them.
Scanning for stable connections
Some authors are exploring the complexities of intra-AI dynamics. In Sue Burke’s Dual Memory (Tor, May)—a “clever near-future adventure,” per PW’s review—a wily AI named Par Augustus bands together with robotic buildings and even mechanical toys to keep himself safe from humans who might misuse him. “What humans want is to survive, and so do machines,” Burke says. “If you accept Asimov’s three laws, the machine should not let itself be injured. So how will they work together if they’re in danger?”
The lumbering machine gods of Candon’s The Archive Undying have complex internal concepts of faith and belief. “There is a religion in this world that precedes robots, and these robots have their own version of religious devotion,” Candon says. “But they are not people, and to be like people is heretical to them.”
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that
Some science fiction authors play with AI’s potential to observe every aspect of our lives. In The Salvation Gambit (Del Rey, Sept.), Emily Skrutskie explores the terrifying prospect of artificial intelligence deliberately turning against humans. When a cadre of intergalactic con artists find themselves trapped aboard the Justice, a sentient warship that has taken group member Murdock hostage as its pet hacker, the group must find a way to escape its surveillance long enough to break out. “There are so many other fun ways of bringing out conflict with artificial intelligence than just a disembodied voice,” Skrutskie says. “It’s a bit of a haunted house—something that can watch every move you make and close every door in your face.”
In Liu’s The Death I Gave Him, a sci-fi retelling of Hamlet that doubles as a locked-room thriller, scientist Hayden Lichfield is trapped in Elsinore Labs with four people, one of whom is responsible for the murder of his father. His only companion is Horatio, an artificial intelligence who helps him piece together the truth. “AI is such a vast resource, and we rely on it a lot,” Liu says. “But with that vastness of information comes scrutiny. You have access to other people, but other people also have access to you. Technology is never neutral.”
