The Future Is Now: Novels About Artificial Intelligence

If anyone knows how to write about artificial intelligence, it’s someone working in the field today. Sike comes to us from Fred Lunzer, a former tech researcher who wanted to explore artificial intelligence through literature, not just scientific research. Lunzer’s insightful debut novel does just that, delving into technology’s influence on our relationships and our understanding of who we are. Adrian, depressed after the unraveling of another relationship, decides to try out Sike, a new AI therapy app that helps track your feelings and guide you toward contentment. Along his self-discovery journey, he meets and falls in love with Maquie, a venture capitalist on the hunt for the next big app who refuses to download Sike herself. The compelling narration jumps back and forth between the two protagonists as the reader is taken on a page-turning story of love, self-knowledge, and bleeding-edge tech.

You may be familiar with Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel turned film Never Let Me Go, but may not be as familiar with his take on AI in Klara and the Sun. Klara is an Artificial Friend who waits patiently in a store for someone to bring her home with them. A beautiful exploration of love, humanity, and loneliness, this poignant and prescient story is sure to have you questioning your take on artificial intelligence and companionship.

This electrifying new release is a debut speculative fiction novel from writer Silvia Park. Years after losing their humanoid robot brother Yoyo, an estranged brother and sister find themselves employed in careers that work with robots in a future reunified Korea. Morgan works as a robot designer, Jun is a detective in the Robot Crimes Unit. When an investigation digs up unsavory secrets, the two reconnect to uncover the truth about their past. Luminous is a vital examination of what it really means to be human.

We’re already outsourcing tasks like writing e-mails and planning recipes to artificial intelligence, but what about one of the most human things we do: parenting? In Hum, Helen Phillips offers a future-gazing dystopian vision of motherhood that, like the best science fiction, seems both familiar and strange. Climate change has run rampant and privacy is nonexistent. Against this backdrop, a desperate mother is forced to trust a robot to try to save her family after they decide to take a vacation to the kind of natural landscape made rare by runaway industrialization.

A classic of the genre that’s more a collection of short stories than a novel, this fundamental exploration of AI paved the way for most of the novels about artificial intelligence on our list. Written between 1940 and 1950, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot weaves together stories under the frame of a fictional scientist conveying stories to a reporter in the 21st century about the relationship between humans, robots, and mortality. Featuring Asimov’s signature blend of scientific fact and fantastic visions, the collected stories plot out a fictional history of robots and Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics. 

Neuromancer is up there with I, Robot as one of the most influential works of science fiction of all time. It is the first story in William Gibson’s groundbreaking Sprawl trilogy, set in an eerily familiar near-future world ruled by corporate power and computing. The novel features a hacker named Case who is recruited to complete a series of heists for a shady employer. 

The book changed the way we think and talk about artificial intelligence, the internet, digital reality, and tech corporations. The series explores everything from cyborg bodies to connection and community to runaway corporate greed and digital reality. This is another must-read for any science fiction lover who wants to brush up on the classics.

In her unsettling and often funny novel about artificial intelligence, Sierra Greer explores questions of consent and domination both in terms of AI and gendered power dynamics. Like Klara and the Sun, Annie Bot is told from the perspective of its robot narrator. Annie is a companion robot who was created to be her human owner Doug’s perfect girlfriend in the wake of a breakup. She even looks a little like his ex. But as Annie grows both in intellectual and emotional intelligence, she starts to question her circumstances, Doug, and even her own programming. 

Winner of a 2014 Hugo Award, this is the first of the beloved Ancillary series by Ann Leckie. While many of the works on our list might be considered more as speculative fiction, Ancillary Justice is for the hard-core sci-fi lovers out there. The distinctive plot is about a once-enormous artificially intelligent warship uniting the minds of thousands of soldiers that is now trapped within one human body. This unique premise is the jumping off-point for a series that is at once a thrilling space opera and a beautifully drawn character study of Breq, a heroine you won’t soon forget. 

Annalee Newitz, a science journalist and founder of the sci-fi blog io9, explores artificial intelligence through the lens of biotechnology in this debut novel. Autonomous is set in the year 2144 and follows Jack, a former scientist turned pharmaceutical Robin Hood who is on a mission to deliver medicines to those who can’t afford them. But when Jack’s newest knockoff-drug experiment starts hurting people, a military agent and his robot partner race to stop anyone from finding out about the drug’s secretive origins. 

The final classic in our list’s foundational novels about artificial intelligence is Philip K. Dick’s groundbreaking Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which inspired the equally groundbreaking 1982 film Blade Runner. Published in 1968, this dystopian postapocalyptic novel takes place in San Francisco after global nuclear war. Bounty hunter Rick Deckard is tasked with killing six escaped androids in a story that questions the nature of life, humanity, and the realities of our ever-growing techno-culture.

In one of the most-buzzed-about novels of 2024, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Powers uses ever-shifting narratives to tell the story of a future in which autonomous cities are sent floating out on the world’s oceans at the expense of the life that already exists there. The islanders of Makatea in French Polynesia are given a choice: Will they allow one such city to move to their corner of the sea or reject it? While the book is primarily an exploration of our relationship to our world’s oceans, artificial intelligence makes an important appearance in the form of Profunda, a collaborative app that can help the islanders make their decision.