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Artificial intelligence in fiction: between narratives and metaphors

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• Published: 05 October 2021
• Volume 38 , pages 319–329, ( 2023 )

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• Isabella Hermann   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2226-8898 1  

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Science-fiction (SF) has become a reference point in the discourse on the ethics and risks surrounding artificial intelligence (AI). Thus, AI in SF—science-fictional AI—is considered part of a larger corpus of ‘AI narratives’ that are analysed as shaping the fears and hopes of the technology. SF, however, is not a foresight or technology assessment, but tells dramas for a human audience. To make the drama work, AI is often portrayed as human-like or autonomous, regardless of the actual technological limitations. Taking science-fictional AI too literally, and even applying it to science communication, paints a distorted image of the technology's current potential and distracts from the real-world implications and risks of AI. These risks are not about humanoid robots or conscious machines, but about the scoring, nudging, discrimination, exploitation, and surveillance of humans by AI technologies through governments and corporations. AI in SF, on the other hand, is a trope as part of a genre-specific mega-text that is better understood as a dramatic means and metaphor to reflect on the human condition and socio-political issues beyond technology.

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1 Introduction: AI narratives and science-fictional AI

In 2018, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met the humanoid robot Sophia produced by Hanson Robotics for a conversation event; the year before Sophia became citizen of Saudi Arabia as the first robot being granted the right of citizenship of a country. Another year earlier, in 2016, the software Alpha Go beat the world champion Lee Sedol in the board game Go—20 years after Deep Blue won against the then world champion in chess Gary Kasparov in 1996/1997. The progress in the broad field of artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be catching up with many films of the science-fiction (SF) genre, in which we have been watching humanoid robots and powerful computers for decades. The fictional android Data from the Star Trek franchise, for example, is a valuable member of the Enterprise crew and earned ‘his’ right to personal freedom before a trial; in the same vein, the board computer HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey appears to have its own will and by playing chess with the human astronauts “depict[s] the future birth of a superior intelligent being” (Bory 2019 : 628)—nowadays, this certainly applies to a software mastering the much more complicated game Go. It is, therefore, not surprising that SF has become a reference point not only in the media, but also for humanities scholars and social scientists on the ethics, opportunities, and risks around AI.

There are two ways to look at SF featuring AI, which I call science-fictional AI: First, it can be viewed as being a substantial part of a larger corpus of AI narratives. Narratives in general are cultural artefacts of various kinds that tell stories, which convey particular points of view or sets of values (Bal 2009 ). The term AI narratives applies to narratives featuring intelligent machines (The Royal Society 2018 : 5), they can be analysed as a reflection of our hopes and fears towards these technologies and thus may shape the development of AI by influencing developers, public acceptance, and policy makers (Cave et al. 2020 ; Cave and Dihal 2019 : 74). In this sense, AI narratives are understood as a serious representation of the potential of real AI and its possible consequences—like foresight or technology assessment. However, science-fictional AI—like the genre of SF in general—is not only about the hopes and fears of the particular technology, but about human dramas for a human audience and readership. From this perspective, it is not AI per se that inspires dramatic stories, but—quite the other way round—the desire to tell dramatic stories requires certain types of AI, for example humanoid robots or almighty systems. Thus, second, science-fictional AI is not necessarily about the technology but can be a metaphor for other social issues.

This second perspective is relevant, because if it is the case that AI narratives exert influence on AI research, public uptake and political regulation then taking AI in fictional stories too literally can be misleading, because it paints a distorted image of the present potential and functionality of the technology. The UK House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence writes in its report AI in the UK: ready, willing, able? (House of Lords 2018 : 22):

The representation of artificial intelligence in popular culture is light-years away from the often more complex and mundane reality. Based on representations in popular culture and the media, the non-specialist would be forgiven for picturing AI as a humanoid robot (with or without murderous intentions), or at the very least a highly intelligent, disembodied voice able to assist seamlessly with a range of tasks. […] this is not a true reflection of its present capability, and grappling with the pervasive yet often opaque nature of artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly necessary for an informed society.

In popular SF, precisely for the sake of dramatic storytelling, AI is often anthropomorphized and given human or even superhuman qualities that exceed the actual capabilities of the technology and can even become magical (Hermann 2020 ). Footnote 1 Unlike Data from Star Trek , for example, who possesses agency, the actions of Sophia are limited and scripted (Estrada 2018 ). And in contrast to HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey , which is presented as a faultless assistant, if not even a conscious being, Alpha Go —not to mention Deep Blue —is a specialised, albeit highly complex, computer programme (Silver et al. 2016 ) that has nothing of what we would call personal interests or affects, let alone consciousness. Taking science-fictional AI that can develop a will of its own for real obscures the fact that machines do not have intentions and reinforces existing misperceptions about the agency or autonomy of AI that are prevalent in the media discourse (Leufer 2020 ). Rather than AI being autonomous, everyone engaged in an AI undertaking is part of the AI-system, which includes, in addition to researchers, “those who set up the institutional arrangements in which AI systems operate, and those who fill roles in those arrangements by monitoring, maintaining, and intervening in AI systems” (Johnson and Verdicchio 2017 : 577). Ignoring all of these actors leads to a "sociotechnical blindness" that allows for the belief “that AI systems got to be the way they are without human intervention […] which facilitates futuristic thinking that is misleading” (ibid.: 587).

Hence, sociotechnical blindness obscures the fact that AI systems follow human interests and are embedded in social power structures set up by humans. This is problematic both in terms of a competent and realistic assessment of the opportunities, such as optimizing processes, and the challenges associated with the technology, such as algorithmic biases. Science-fictional AI can serve as techno-scientific inspiration and techno-philosophical thought experiment but taken as foresight or technology assessment it rather distracts from the chances and risks around AI in the real world (Giuliano 2020 : 1019). However, SF serves as a distorting mirror and metaphor to reflect on the human condition and socio-political issues in relation to and beyond technology. In this way, Data stands for what it means to be accepted as an equal human being (Barrett and Barrett 2001 : 87), not for robots becoming human. And among these lines, HAL 9000 “can be seen as a metaphor for those organizations and societies that cannot admit their flaws, and instead revert to the ‘human error’ explanation for what may be weak signals of systemic problems” (Shorrock 2013 ). Footnote 2 Thus, even though SF unfolds against the background of technological development, the genre tells stories about current and timeless social issues, which do not necessarily have to do with technology, but find their expression through it.

In this article, I offer alternative interpretations of science-fictional AI, moving away from literal readings towards understanding it as dramatic means and metaphor. In the following Sect. 2, I provide an overview of dramatic and metaphorical readings of AI as a trope and mega-text of science fiction, before discussing modern SF films featuring AI in more detail in Sect. 3. The focus is on films because not only do they visualize AI, but we can also assume that AIs from science-fiction films are generally known to a broader global audience than AIs from literature which is relevant for the argument of this article. Footnote 3 Next, a brief excursus in Sect. 4 critically explores the use of the science-fictional AI trope in science communication films. I conclude with further real-world issues concerning AI and a note not to confuse science fiction with reality in other areas as well such as climate change, space travel, or mega/smart cities. This article contributes to a more nuanced reading of AI in SF, in order not to be distracted from serious socio-political issues regarding AI in the real world, but also not to miss the metaphorical richness of the SF genre when it comes to robots and machines.

2 AI as a mega-text and trope in science-fiction films

SF as a genre emerged in the era of modernity with its social upheavals and belief in technological progress. Basically, SF tells stories about and through fictional technology, but within the prevailing paradigm of scientific thought. Thus, the departure point of SF is a fictional but scientifically explainable novelty, a “novum” (Suvin 1979 ), which establishes a new world different from the one we know. The scientific foundation, however, does not imply that the novum must be able to truly exist in the real world, but that it is cognitively imaginable within the story world (Roberts 2010 : 31, 32). In this way, the novum enables “what if”-questions to speculate about the present and alternative futures in various, but cognitively plausible constellations (Mehnert 2019 ). In SF, the novum of AI has become a common trope, which is generally understood as a theme or device that is used in a figurative sense, but it can also be overused and become a stereotype or cliché (Merriam-Webster 2021 ). The different nova and tropes of SF—including also for example space ships or futuristic cities—form part of the SF mega-text, which is composed of the intertextual references and relations of all SF works over time, and understood by the inducted creators and recipients of SF—the “native speakers”—in the “full semiotic density of a given text, most of which will overflow or escape the ‘realistically’-sanctioned definitions of the words in the fiction […]” (Broderick 2017 : 147). Under the AI trope, I subsume intelligent computer systems, smart machines as well as humanoid robots, in accordance with today’s use of AI in the public discourse as well as both in the SF genre itself and in the field of AI narratives research. Footnote 4 Generally, against the backdrop of the mega-text, AI and robots can be analysed in two ways, as dramatic means and as metaphor.

2.1 Dramatic means

SF, like any other genre, with its many formats including literature, comics, games, or movies, conveys dramatic stories that people can identify with. To fulfil its role in a narration, science-fictional AI often possesses qualities that go beyond real-world technological capabilities of a technical artefact operated by algorithms. One can roughly distinguish between two basic storylines in films: AI with a body trying or simulating to be more human, and AI at the level of computer systems that yearn to rule over humans/humanity (Irsigler and Orth 2018 ). Footnote 5 Apparently, AI in the form of a robot is often embodied by real human actors, because—independent of the production budget—if the plot dictates that a humanoid robot should be indistinguishable from real humans, the robot must consequently be played or voiced by a human actor to make the illusion perfect. Examples include next to the aforementioned android Data , Andrew from Bicentennial Man , the robot boy David from A.I ., the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica , the Hosts in Westworld , the Hubots in Real Humans , the Synths in Humans , the Replicants (even though not AI in the strict sense) and the virtual girlfriend/hologram Joi in Blade Runner 2049 as well as the operating system Samantha from Her ; all are played and/or voiced by real people and undergo human dramas (The Royal Society 2018 : 8).

A broadly discussed female film robot—or fembot—of recent years is the character Ava from Ex Machina . In the film, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur/programmer Nathan develops his latest version of a humanoid robot named Ava and brings in his rather shy employee Caleb to test how human-like ‘she’ is with a “reversed Turing test”. Ava makes Caleb fall in love with ‘her’ and in the end fools both men and escapes. The difficult balance of the film is that “[…] the audience has to understand she’s a robot, but for the movie to work that idea then needs to fall away, in the same way it does for Caleb” (Bishop 2015 ). Therefore, Ava was not meant to look like other film robots before her, such as metal (Metropolis’ Maschinenmaria), gold (Star Wars’ C-3PO), or white plastic (Björk’s music video All is full of Love) (Murphy 2015 ), but attractive, sleek, and vulnerable. And obviously, Ava was played by a human actress, who with the help of visual effects looked plausibly robot-like enough to fulfil the artistic and narrative necessities of the plot—not to serve as a sample for actual tech development.

Visual effects have always defined SF’s search for wonder (Pierson 2002 ). Against this background, science-fictional AI is not primarily about how realistically science and technology are portrayed in the films, but rather about "cinematic science", i.e., the technical achievement required to make the fictional images in the films look real (Telotte 1995 : 8). This does not only apply to Ava looking “mechanically plausible” (Murphy 2015 ), but also for example to the ground-breaking visual effects of the machines in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the Matrix franchise, or the completely animated robot Sonny in I, Robot , which was of course not state of the art in robotics of that time, but in CGI. Stories of conflict, if not epic wars between humans and machines, with their stunning images of devastation surely fulfil the audience’s expectation of watching SF blockbusters on the big screen. SF films “have consistently linked science and technology to the disastrous” (Telotte 1995 : 3), dealing “with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess” (Sontag 1965 : 44).

AI in films often serves plots of machines becoming human-like and/or a conflict of humans versus machines. Science-fictional AI is a dramatic element that makes a perfect antagonist, enemy, victim or even hero, because it can be fully adjusted to the necessities of the story. Footnote 6 But to fulfil that role, it often has capabilities that are way beyond actual technology—be it natural movement, sentience, or consciousness. If science-fictional AI is taken seriously as a representation of real-world AI, it provides a wrong impression of what AI can and should do now and in future.

2.2 Metaphorical means

Nevertheless, even though the scientific and technological progress is plausibilised within the story, what makes the SF genre most interesting is not the novum per se, but the social aspects that are told through it, the “fabulations of social worlds, both utopic and dystopic” as Sheila Jasanoff ( 2015 : 1) puts it. The fact that machines are part of our everyday lives might complicate the metaphorical alterity, however, “there can be little doubt that this [alterity] is precisely the space occupied by the machine in the SF text” (Roberts 2010 : 146). AI tropes analysed in a figurative sense serve as a magnifying glass for the human condition in its philosophical, cultural, psychological state, as well as current socio-political problematics (Hermann 2018 ).

On a basic level, SF films contain the fundamental motif of the human desire to create a living, intelligent or conscious creature of our own, independent of the real technical possibilities. In this sense, AI technology and especially robots in SF films resemble “a fundamental and unresolved anxiety that has always followed from our simultaneously creative and created natures […]—for it seems our nature to desire, Faust-like, a knowledge or power that, in other times, belonged to the gods" (Telotte 1995 : 10–11). Thus, the robot, according to Adam Roberts ( 2010 : 161), “is that place in an SF text where technological and human are most directly blended” [hence] “the dramatisation of the alterity of the machine, the paranoid sense of the inorganic come to life”.

We find this motif throughout human cultural history from antique myths over the Jewish legend of the Golem to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . The longing for creation is connected with the anxiety that the creature will grow over our heads that we will lose control and finally be dominated by it (Schelde 1993 ). This primeval desire and fear, which Isaac Asimov fittingly called the “Frankenstein complex”, has become a basic feature of twentieth and twenty-first century AI fiction (The Royal Society 2018 : 8). Specifically, humanoid AI and robots tend to be a projection canvas for the “Other” (Meinecke and Voss 2018 : 208) as a reflection on our humanity and humanness (Telotte 1995 : 3). Most often, these creatures want to be accepted as full humans, which makes them placeholders for marginalized or mistreated people missing equal human rights or status; they can be enemies, slaves, servants, and sex objects. The Replicants , for example, show us the consequences of a dehumanized hypercapitalism, the Hosts live through “escape and self-discovery” (The Royal Society 2018 : 8), the Cylons stand for the values of a critical humanism, according to which our humanity only reveals itself in dealing with the other and deviant (Jackson 2013 ). By that, the depiction of the humanoid AI also implies a critical cinematic discussion of humans themselves becoming more and more artificial in a technicised world:

Although the robot has, of course, given us a vehicle for exploring issues of gender, race, and a variety of forms of Otherness, and increasingly for asking questions about the very nature and meaning of life, this image of an artificial being, most commonly anthropomorphic in form, also invariably implicates the cinema’s own and quite fundamental artificing of the human (Telotte 2016 : 3)

When it comes to stories of powerful and omnipotent AI systems exercising total control over humans/humanity, they show the fear of impotence and helplessness of the individual in the face of superordinate structures. They reflect the dangers of dictatorship, anti-democratic societies, and suppression of freedom of choice, oftentimes working with historic references to colonialism and totalitarian regimes. Examples of that are Terminator ’s Skynet , the system Colossus in The Forbin Project , the threat assessment system Control in Star Trek: Discovery , the rule of the machines with their head Deus Ex Machina in the Matrix franchise, VIKI in I, Robot or Indra in the new series remake of Brave New World.

3 What AI tropes tell us

Apparently, what happens in SF stories is not necessarily what the story is about. In what follows, I will examine the dramatic and metaphorical means of AI representations primarily in the modern SF-films A.I. from 2001, I, Robot from 2004 and Ex Machina from 2015. Furthermore, science-fictional AI as humanoid robots or conscious machines distracts from current risks of AI in the real world and may rather be interpreted as a reflection of societal issues beyond technology. The films were selected for three reasons: First, because films in general, unlike literature, make AI visible; second, these films were international blockbusters, so we can assume that they are known to a wider audience than, for example, books that address AI; and third, because these films have also been analysed in the context of AI narratives (Cave and Dihal 2019 ).

3.1 Ex machina , Her , sexism, and manipulation

To return to Ex Machina : The way Nathan has developed Ava 's human-like AI appears quite plausible from a real-world perspective, namely by feeding it all available data from human interaction through his dominant company Bluebook, a counterpart to Facebook or Google. The basic plot idea that an AI trained with large sets of human social interaction data might result in an AI manipulating humans, can indeed be a relevant issue (Harari 2017 : 382–397). Nevertheless, whereas Murray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College, who was consulted by film director Alex Garland, finds it a great film because people after seeing it could “[…] spend the rest of the evening arguing with each other about whether the AI is or isn’t conscious” (Lamb 2015 ), I argue that such discussions are interesting philosophical thought experiments, but they do not help us to grasp where actual risks concerning AI are. These risks are not about the possibility that a fully autonomous/conscious human-like robot or software program eventually will manipulate us for its own will, but that software and algorithms we don’t even see manipulate us in the political and commercial interests of other people.

Even more, Ex Machina gives a wrong impression of what AI can do and how science works. How Ava ’s positronic shimmering blue “brain” functions and how it could be that her face looks human, and she moves naturally is implausible, if not pure magic (Maynard 2018 : 158). That Nathan, portrayed as quasi alchemist, has developed his different fembots in secrecy all by himself in a stylish, clean lab in the middle of natural wilderness is also not believable. What the film does tell us about technology, however, is a general critique of irresponsible science and innovation (Maynard 2018 : 162; Bilton 2015 ). In that sense, Ex Machina is another variation of the hundreds of years old “Frankenstein complex” and Nathan is virtually a textbook example of the type of God-like mad scientist (TV tropes 2021 ), whose creation gets out of his control. Tech journalist Martin Robbins ( 2016 ) describes him as follows.

And so Nathan becomes a kind of three-part study of ego. He represents the male ego-driven culture of the tech world. He represents the film's buy-in to the idea that great egos drive great scientific advances. And the decay of his character shows what happens when an ego faces the reality of its own extinction.

The quote already leads beyond the anxiety that technology might escape our control to a related problematic addressed in Ex Machina and other films, namely toxic masculinity, male hubris, and sexism in the tech world implying male fears concerning powerful women (Belton and Devlin 2020 ). Technology is not neutral but mirrors existing sexism in all stages—from the design to development to application. As a result, for example, real world digital assistants such as Alexa, Siri or Cortana are feminized—in line with the operating system Samantha from Her or the virtual assistant/girlfriend Joi from Blade Runner 2049 — to gratify the expectations of the developers and users (Adams 2019 : 574–575; Alexander 2016 ; Schwär and Moynihan 2020 ). Even though these issues have been widely discussed in academia and the media, and awareness of the issue has grown, it is still an example of existing sexism being inscribed in factual and fictional technology. Footnote 7 Films take this to extremes using fictitious technology—which is embodied by real women actors like in the case of the fembot Ava . Thus, the film shows a very old motif: women being designed and created by men to fulfill their pleasure, as we already know it, for example, from the ancient myth of Pygmalion, whose beloved statue came to life to serve him as a good wife.

There is agreement among many critics and researchers that Ex Machina starts as a story about objectification and suppression of women (and not robots). Footnote 8 However, on the question how the story develops, interpretations vary substantially. In a negative way, Ava is seen as a representation of the value of women in films in general “when the only female lead in your movie is one whose function is to turn the male lead on while being in a position to be turned off” (Watercutter 2015 ); thus, even though Ava would be the smartest character in the film, in the end we are left with the message that the best way for intelligent women to get what they want is to act as a manipulative “femme fatale” (ibid.). According to this view, the film does not criticize sexism in social life, in the film industry or in the tech world, but rather strengthens it. On the other side, the portrayal of gender in the film can also be seen as “bracingly modern and even poignant” exactly because it is a reflection that “Ava is born into a literally patriarchal system that measures her worth based on how men respond to her” (Buchanan 2015 ). In that way, robots have often been a way to critically question how much of gender is “literally constructed” and “to interrogate the formation of gender roles” (Telotte 2016 : 91) whereas “Ava’s demonstrated capabilities certainly present her as a kind of iconic representation of the power and emergence of women in contemporary culture […]” (ibid.). As stories of liberation and emancipation, speaking for Ex Machina and Her , “[b]oth of these films end with the female AI outsmarting her would-be lovers, owners and builders, leaving the men baffled and the viewer with a sense of doom” (Alexander 2016 ) creating the “new heroines: totally hot, bracingly cold, powerfully sovereign—and posthuman” (Dargis 2015 ).

Whichever way the films are interpreted, neither Ex Machina nor Her address pressing challenges around the future of AI, but serve as projection canvasses for questions around gender and sexism of our present, that find their expression through fictitious technology.

3.2 A.I ., I, robot , robot rights, and inequality

Another example is Steven Spielberg's A.I. , set in the twenty-second century, when various artificially intelligent, human-like robots called Mechas are built. They first lack emotions (or cannot simulate them), but there is a new model that looks like a human child and after being “imprinted” feels and needs love. A couple receives such a robot boy— David —because their real son suffers from a rare disease and is put into a coma. However, when the son is surprisingly cured, things get difficult with David and he is set out. He experiences various adventures on his Pinocchio -like quest for the Blue Fairy to win back the love of his human mother. He succeeds two thousand years in the future, when humans are extinct and the now highly developed, transcendent Mechas make David ’s wish come true by creating a simulation of his mother, who loves him for one wonderful day—after which they both fall asleep forever.

The film has been analysed as easing the way for possible robot rights in the future (Chu 2010 : 214–244). Of course, one is supposed to feel pity for David , who is played by a real child actor and is apparently no different in appearance from the other human boys. But still, the interpretation that we need to protect robots from suffering and mistreatment is primarily a distraction from enforcing human rights and guaranteeing social welfare to humans (Bryson 2010 ). This can lead to such an absurd situation that a robot like Sophia seems to have more "rights" as a citizen of Saudi Arabia than Saudi women. Anthropomorphizing machines can lead to a misguided image of what the current risks around AI are: The pressing question is not if robots—in film or reality—should be guaranteed rights, but how to handle machines that believably simulate emotions and thus manipulate people in the interests of other people. After all, building machines in the image of humans does not come naturally, but is a decision made my entrepreneurs and developers to achieve certain economic or other goals.

Even more, anthropomorphizing machines distracts from the often precarious working conditions of real people mostly situated in the Global South, who provide the data for AI systems by doing online tasks on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk or content moderation for social platforms, leaving the clickworkers suffering psychological damage from the violent and abusive material they have to watch (Mühlhoff 2020 ). Against this backdrop, a debate about ascribing robots certain "rights" comparable to human rights can be criticized as a rather elitist demand, which Birhane and van Dijk ( 2020 : 1) put this way:

Once we see robots as mediators of human being, we can understand how the ‘robot rights’ debate is focused on first world problems, at the expense of urgent ethical concerns, such as machine bias, machine elicited human labour exploitation, and erosion of privacy all impacting society’s least privileged individuals. We conclude that, if human being is our starting point and human welfare is the primary concern, the negative impacts emerging from machinic systems, as well as the lack of taking responsibility by people designing, selling and deploying such machines, remains the most pressing ethical discussion in AI.

Nevertheless, the film examines our relationship to technology and reminds us to handle what we create responsibly. But since the Mechas neither outsmart nor threaten us, it is not a narrative of the Frankenstein complex, but rather of how we as humans fail at our own humanness. The film shows in one scene how discarded robots are tortured by humans in a setting that resembles a Roman colosseum. The robots serve as placeholder for all kinds of cruelties that humans commit against each other. The human flaws are overcome by the Mechas, who have become new creatures of higher ethics saving David from the primal human fear of abandonment, which is a recurring theme in Spielberg's work (Newton 2016 ). As a modern form of Pinocchio , the film is in the tradition of nineteenth century melodramatic tales in which the "epic hero" has to endure great suffering to be redeemed in the end, making the film a story of suffering and resurrection tackling human issues rather than a realistic and serious assessment of the status of robots (Nida-Rümelin and Weidenfeld 2018 : 31).

Moreover, the film I, Robot , set in a future of 2035 in which robots serve humans in all aspects of life, is also—rather than a plea for equal rights for robots—a reflection on human enslavement, oppression, and inequality in a profit-driven economic system. With the topic of robots as slaves, I, Robot adds another perspective of a critical analysis of “race” and technology, as the new NS-5 service robot series in the film, including the “unique” robot Sonny , is coloured white, which can be interpreted as a reference to being White. Footnote 9 In a positive way, I, Robot can be read as a "Post-White Imaginary" as “[k]ey moments of the film […] may be read as a parable of white antiracism, driven by an impulse of reconciliation between a ‘unique’ white robot and a black detective” (Brayton 2008 : 72). The fact that AI and robots are very often embodied by White people and shown in white colour makes science fiction also an example to critically think about the “Whiteness” of AI in general, reflecting the White milieus from which these artefacts come (Cave and Dihal 2020 ). However, it can be argued that rather than showing machines imagined as white to allow “for a full erasure of people of colour from the White utopian imaginary” (ibid.: 685), particularly films and series quite bluntly show the marginalization and exclusion of people of colour in the film business. But they also reflect the changing paradigms concerning diversity when the humanoid robots in the newer series Westworld , Real Humans and Humans Footnote 10 are played by actors of diverse ethnic backgrounds and skin colours. Footnote 11 It seems that whether an AI system is played or voiced by diverse actors says more about social progress in terms of diversity in the film industry, less so when it comes to technology.

I, Robot also features an AI-system called VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence), which is the central computer system of U.S. Robotics, the company that produces the service robots. VIKI has evolved and reprogrammed the new NS-5 series via an uplink network to control humanity and sacrifice part of it for the greater good of the entire human race. The logic behind this is a reinterpretation of Isaac Asimov's "Zeroth Law of Robotics" which states: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” (Singer 2009 ). According to VIKI , humanity cannot be trusted with its own survival because “[…] despite our best efforts, your countries wage wars, you toxify your Earth and pursue ever more imaginative means of self-destruction. You cannot be trusted with your own survival” (IMDb 2021 )—so the consequence is to take control of humanity and sacrifice parts of it if necessary. In this way, VIKI in the film is a critique of excessive utilitarian thinking regardless of individual fates (Grau 2006 ). Such stories can serve as thought experiments to address philosophical problems, but using them as examples of what to consider when building ethical machines is problematic: On the one hand, because the zeroth law as well as the first, second, and third laws Footnote 12 are narrative devices invented by Asimov to create interesting stories and plot twists precisely because the laws of robotics don't work; and on the other hand, because “[t]he bigger issue, though, when it comes to robots and ethics is not whether we can use something like Asimov’s laws to make machines that are moral […] Rather, we need to start wrestling with the ethics of the people behind the machines” (Singer 2009 ).

Hence, the relevant problematics regarding AI are not autonomous science-fictional machines claiming or deserving human rights or engaging in human–machine conflict, but the effects that AI-systems have right now on socio-political fault lines between humans.

4 Excursus: AI, SF and science communication

SF applies the trope of AI with different meanings, ideas, and attitudes, using a fictional approach toward technology to tell stories of the human condition, primeval desires and fears as well as social issues, or reflect current trends of society. Science communication, on the other hand, is intended to inform about the facts of science-related topics. Therefore, it can be problematic when science communication resorts to typical SF tropes in order to educate or raise awareness about critical aspects, because without familiarity of the SF mega-text, science-fictional AI used in current science communication runs the risk of only conveying clichés about conscious and autonomous AI. To illustrate the point, let me present two examples. Footnote 13

The science communication documentary film Ghost in the Machine (Singler 2019 )—the last of a four-part short film series called Rise of the Machines—made together by the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, aims to inform about the concept of consciousness and discusses whether machines could become conscious. While the film features a variety of researchers and experts in interview situations, there is also a fictional storyline about a research facility where an embodied AI has been developed and is now being tested for consciousness, emotions, and its will to survive. The embodied AI is played by a real human child actor, mimics emotions and tries to fool the lead researcher to let it out of its cage. A review describes the piece as rather inconsistent concluding: “All in all, Ghost in the Machine dishes up a serviceable appetizer but for the main course be sure to leave room for Ex Machina.” (Seth 2019 ). Indeed, one can strongly suspect that the fictional sequences in the form of a dialogue between the researcher and the "AI child" were inspired by the successful predecessor. The problem with this is that while Ex Machina by definition uses fictional technology to tell a thrilling and dramatic story, Ghost in the Machine uses the science-fictional AI trope to make a statement about science. Obviously, Ava is played by a real actress, because Ex Machina is a dramatic story about and for humans, but what is gained in a science communication film when the AI is played by a real human child trying to break out of the research facility? After all, the portrayal of AI as a child with a mind of its own obscures the fact that AI systems are technological artefacts created by humans.

Another example is a short film called The Intelligence Explosion (Susman 2017 ), "a superintelligence sci-fi" by Guardian Original Drama. However, as part of The Guardian Brain Waves—"a series exploring the science and emotions of our daily lives"—the piece is actually marketed as science communication that "raises important questions about the ethics of artificial intelligence," namely, "How do you stop a robot from becoming evil?" (Hern 2017 ). Again, the "AI" named Günther is played by a real human actor with some robotic features. While a company representative, a programmer, and an ethicist discuss whether it is possible to program an AI with ethical safeguards against turning evil towards humanity, Günther becomes superintelligent and, like Samantha in Her , transcends to a higher structure. AI is being presented as uncontrollable by humans feeding into discourses of AI supremacy and Singularity (Kurzweil 2005 ).

These two films build on typical SF tropes that a human-looking autonomous AI will develop a mind of its own and could become dangerous to humanity in the future, instead of addressing the risks of AI applications in the here and now. While current SF films certainly address technological trends, the tropes are hard to reconcile with genuine forms of science communication. Apparently, these films reinforce AI clichés rather than fulfilling the goal of informing about science-based issued at stake.

5 Conclusion and outlook

Currently, with the rapid progress in the field of AI, it seems as if the SF genre with its stories about intelligent machines is being caught up with the present. Thus, SF analysed as a part of an AI narratives frame is supposed to reflect the hopes and fears of the technology and thus treated as a type of foresight or technology assessment. Against this background it is claimed that because of their importance "narratives about intelligent machines should broadly reflect the actual state and possibilities of the technology” (Cave and Dihal 2019 : 74). Whereas this should be the case for science-communication, it is not for AI in SF. While Darko Suvin acknowledges that using SF as futurological foresight can be a legitimate secondary function that the genre can bear.

[…] any oblivion of its strict secondariness may lead to confusion and indeed danger. Ontologically, art is not pragmatic truth nor fiction fact. To expect from SF more than a stimulus for independent thinking, more than a system of stylized narrative devices understandable only in their mutual relationships within a fictional whole and not as isolated realities, leads insensibly to critical demand for and of scientific accuracy in the extrapolated realia (Suvin 1972 : 379).

What Suvin indirectly refers to as the first function is in fact the SF mega-text as a way to engage in questions beyond technology—which to be understood, requires familiarity with the clusters of available meanings and the themes raised (Blackford 2017 :73,192) or simply being a “native speaker” (Broderick 2017 : 147). The mega-text of AI tropes and icons can thus be interpreted as dramatic and metaphorical means to address questions about the socio-political issues, the human condition, and philosophical questions in general.

Interpreting science-fictional AI too literally as serious representation of the technology can have the following implications: First, taking fictitious humanoid robots and autonomous machines in SF for real disregards of the technical limitation of AI, obscures the chances and risks already at stake and might mislead the public as well as policy makers. The chances of AI are manifold, for example optimization and improvement on a global scale in areas such as health, agriculture, infrastructure or environmental protection, which can contribute to the achievement of many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (but can also impede some of them) (Vinuesa et al. 2020 ). Here, however, it is important to see that optimization and improvement through AI cannot be a simple technical solution to a problem but is a social negotiation of goals set by humans (Mason 2019 : 152–160). Moreover, the fact that AI is built by humans and trained with human-defined and human-collected data can lead to various kinds of biases in AI systems that entrench asymmetric power structures, for example discrimination against women, institutional racism, or degradation of poor and marginalized people. It is worrying how AI tools are being used for scoring, nudging, and monitoring people by governments and corporations—whether in the US, China, Europe or elsewhere (Chiusi 2020 ; Eubanks 2017 ; Liang et al. 2018 ; Nemitz 2018 ; O'Neil 2017 ; Sowa 2017 ; Zuboff 2018 ). Exactly because the design, development and application of technology are never neutral, we need human interaction in the form of ethics, norms, standards, and regulation.

Second, demanding scientific and technological accuracy from SF would imply an impoverishment of the many metaphorical meanings of the genre and the artistic freedom as well as assign a responsibility to the authors and creators of SF that lies in the hands of politicians, scientists, and science communicators. Not only with regards to AI, also—because of the fast pace of technological advances in general—in other fields the genre of SF and its tropes get blended in different forms with the real world, most notably when it comes to climate change, space exploration or mega/smart cities. It is important to note that scholars working with SF in all these different fields understand that the genre is primarily about stories and metaphors, not about real science and technology.

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Code availability

There are, of course, other examples of AI in SF that are not portrayed as human-like or superhuman, but what is referred to here as “popular SF” is mainstream and commercially successful SF—mostly films and series – known to a wider range of people who are not necessarily genuine SF fans. For example, in a representative survey in 2019, the German Informatics Society asked Germans to name the ten best-known and the ten most influential science fiction AIs. Coming out on top in both categories were the Terminator, R2D2 from Star Wars, KITT from Night Rider, Data, Agent Smith from Matrix; and Sonny from I, Robot—all of them either humanoid, human-like with human traits, or endowed with superhuman abilities and/or consciousness (GI 2019 ).

In this sense, not only can AI be interpreted as systemic, flawed structures detached from humans, but conversely, opaque, and unaccountable systems can be interpreted as black-box AI systems, such as the bureaucratic judicial apparatus in Franz Kafka's Der Process (The Trial) (Hermann 2021 ).

For the same reasons of global prominence of the films and the AI depicted, also mainly AI representations from western culture were used.

It can be criticized that AI and robots are confused, since in the media as well as other reporting and communications AI-software applications are illustrated as quite unrealistic humanoid robots, which is deceptive as to what AI is and is not capable of. There exist projects collecting these misleading illustrations like https://www.aimyths.org or https://notmyrobot.home.blog/ .

There are of course more depictions of AI in science-fiction that do not fit in this frame, for example the service robots Dewey, Huey and Louie in Silent Running, Wall-E from the same film, and TARS and CASE from Interstellar, or the digital pets in Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects, the Daemon in Daniel Suarez’s book of the same name, and Clara in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Clara and the Sun—just to give a few random examples. However, the focus of the article is deliberately on these two most popular forms of science-fictional AI.

Film director Willi Kubica explained in a 2019 panel discussion on AI and SF at the British Embassy in Berlin, Germany, the use of AI in films as follows: "When you think of AI as a learning and adapting character in a film—it is the perfect thing to have for a story. Because your character should always learn something on its journey” (Kubica 2019 ).

Another obvious example is an internal recruiting tool of Amazon that learned, based on data from the past, that men were the optimal candidates for tech jobs at Amazon—"a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry" (Dastin 2018 ).

In the humanities, there is a large body of research dealing with sex, love relationships and robots, e.g. Levy ( 2008 ), Sullins ( 2012 ), Devlin ( 2018 ) or Wennerscheid ( 2019 ), which is beyond the scope of this article.

White in capital letters is meant to indicate social situatedness; thus, it does not so much describe a person's skin color or other phenotypic characteristics, but rather means social positioning in a racially structured society.

The British series Humans (2015–2018) is based on the Swedish original Äkta människor – Real Humans (2012–2014).

This inclusive process is very evident in the Star Trek franchise, where over the years to the present we have seen, for example, a female captain (Star Trek: Voyager), a Black commander/captain (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), and a Black female protagonist, a gay couple as leading roles and a transgender person (Star Trek: Discovery) (Krishna 2020 ).

Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics go as follows: First Law—A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; Second Law—A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; Third Law—A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law (Singer 2009 ).

Please note that these two examples are not defined by the author as science communication but are themselves marketed us such to inform the broader public.

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The role of literary fiction in facilitating social science research

• Bryan Yazell   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2263-3488 1 , 2 ,
• Klaus Petersen 2 , 3 ,
• Paul Marx 3 , 4 , 5 &
• Patrick Fessenbecker 6 , 7  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  8 , Article number:  261 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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Scholars in literature departments and the social sciences share a broadly similar interest in understanding human development, societal norms, and political institutions. However, although literature scholars are likely to reference sources or concepts from the social sciences in their published work, the line of influence is much less likely to appear the other way around. This unequal engagement provides the occasion for this paper, which seeks to clarify the ways social scientists might draw influence from literary fiction in the development of their own work as academics: selecting research topics, teaching, and drawing inspiration for projects. A qualitative survey sent to 13,784 social science researchers at 25 different universities asked participants to describe the influence, if any, reading works of literary fiction plays in their academic work or development. The 875 responses to this survey provide numerous insights into the nature of interdisciplinary engagement between these disciplines. First, the survey reveals a skepticism among early-career researchers regarding literature’s social insights compared to their more senior colleagues. Second, a significant number of respondents recognized literary fiction as playing some part in shaping their research interests and expanding their comprehension of subjects relevant to their academic scholarship. Finally, the survey generated a list of literary fiction authors and texts that respondents acknowledged as especially useful for understanding topics relevant to the study of the social sciences. Taken together, the results of the survey provide a fuller account of how researchers engage with literary fiction than can be found in the pages of academic journals, where strict disciplinary conventions might discourage out-of-the-field engagement.

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Introduction.

Interdisciplinary research has become the buzzword of university managers and funding agencies. It is said that researchers need to think out of the box, be innovative and agile, and—last but not least—be curious about other disciplines in order to solve the complex challenges of the modern world. The tension inevitably generated by calls for more interdisciplinary work between university administrators on the one side and researchers on the other risks obscuring a fundamental question: what exactly is new about interdisciplinary research in the first place? For all the handwringing about interdisciplinarity, there is no clear consensus about what the boundaries of a given discipline are in the first place. Debates have waged over the last several decades about the divisions between the sciences and the humanities, their origins, and possible methods for rectifying them. Perhaps most famously, British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow identified “two cultures” in the academy separated by “a gulf of mutual incomprehension” ( 1961 , p. 4). According to Snow, “literary intellectuals” and “physical scientists” not only distrusted each other’s pronouncements, but fundamentally saw the world differently ( 1961 , p.4, 6). Although this assessment has been influential in framing these respective disciplines for decades, its presentation of a binary division between the hard sciences and the arts does not account for the fields of study with overlapping interests and, at times, borrowed methodological tools: the social sciences and literature departments.

The social sciences and literary studies share an indelible link by virtue of their twinned emergence as academic disciplines in the early twentieth century. Both disciplines in the broadest sense share a keen interest in understanding and describing human behavior and social relationships. However despite—or perhaps owing to—these similarities, the disciplines have historically identified themselves in terms of opposition. On one side, Émile Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, published in 1895, defined the discipline in terms of positivism and quantitative study. On the other side, foundational literature scholars such as Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis understood literary study as a crucial component to the project of invigorating the national culture: to identify among the mass of popular culture the most elite examples of art. Critics in this early school of literary study therefore understood literature less as a mirror of society and more as a way to access what is best about cultural ideals or humanistic achievement (Arnold, 1873 ; Leavis, 2011 ). In this early context, social scientists were more interested in making society itself the object of study. While the features of each respective field have undoubtedly changed dramatically over the past century, this underlying division regarding the “science” in the social science persists. If the social scientist and literature scholar can speak with some degree of shared comprehension, they nonetheless are beset by disciplinary boundaries that make the task of mutual exchange harder than it might otherwise appear.

The decision to better document the uses of literature within the social sciences was born from an overarching drive to understand literature’s impact on researchers that often escape notice. After all, literary scholars are in general familiar with (if not thoroughly informed by) the works of sociologists, economists, and political scientists. Moreover, they are likely to be comfortable both with using the toolset of the social sciences in their own work and, more to the point, citing sociologists such as Émile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, and Bruno Latour. Over the last decade, for instance, several prominent literary scholars have advocated for a descriptive model for analyzing literary texts modeled on the social sciences (e.g., Love 2010 ; Marcus and Love, 2016 ). This relatively recent turn to the social sciences does not begin to consider, of course, the much longer history of literary scholars drawing critical concepts from the Frankfurt School (such as Theodor Adorno or Jürgen Habermas) or, more significantly, the works of Karl Marx. All of which is to say, one can easily expect references to sources broadly associated with the social sciences when reading a literary studies monograph.

However, if it is clear that literary scholars are familiar with prominent works by social scientists, it is much less apparent if the reverse is true. In an essay in World Politics, the political scientist Cathie Jo Martin outlines the profound insight literary sources can offer the field. Novels and other literary fiction provide “a site for imagining policy”, help define shared group interests, and create narratives that legitimize systems of governance (Martin, 2019 , p. 432). Elsewhere, Nobel prize-winning economist Robert J. Shiller calls for greater engagement with literature and fiction in Narrative Economics (2019). However, as we show below, cases of social scientists explicitly acknowledging literary sources are few and far in between. Rather than articulate yet another call for better dialog between the disciplines, we instead seek greater insight into the way social scientists are already referring to, engaging with, or simply using literature in their field as researchers and teachers. As explained in detail below, this task is not as straightforward as it may seem.

Our project proceeded in two steps. The first was a qualitative study of social science articles that included references to literary authors drawn from the collection of social science journals cataloged on the JSTOR digital library. The evaluation of literary references captured in our study (outlined below) made it possible to track the proliferation of literary sources across social science research and to create a loose typology of these uses. For the second step, we developed a survey for social science researchers to elaborate on how, if at all, their work engages with works of literary fiction. Before going into the field, the survey was tested and discussed with a small number of academics to ensure that the items capture the concepts of interest. The survey was then sent electronically to 13,784 researchers at all stages (from PhD students to full professors) from the top 25 social science departments as ranked in 2019 by Times Higher Education (World University Rankings).

If academic departments are guardians of their disciplines, then this sample of prominent departments might reflect the international standard for their respective fields. In other words, researchers attached to these institutions may be more inclined to protect conventions than to go against the grain. In contrast, we can imagine that scholars at smaller schools, colleges, or cross-disciplinary research centers might be more inclined to engage with other disciplines. Focusing on the former institutions rather than the later, our survey finds hard test cases for our questions about the use of literary references in social sciences. Finally, by calling attention to the different forms of influence literature may (or may not) assume, the survey made it possible to dwell in more detail on how social scientists esteem literary fiction as a tool for understanding social concepts.

Before conducting our survey, we first developed a typology of what we term uses of literature within the social sciences. This typology is the result of an ongoing project seeking to understand how literature might already play a role in the social sciences, no matter how small this role might appear at first glance. Our investigations were further motivated by the distinct lack of sources on the subject. While there are a number of prominent cases that call for social scientists to incorporate the insights of literature into their research (e.g., Shiller, 2019 ) and teaching (e.g., Morson and Schapiro, 2017 ), there are hardly any that demonstrate how (and where) they might already be doing so. For those of us who wish to expound on the value of not only literature per se but the study of literature specifically, a thorough account of how experts in an adjacent field like social science might already incorporate literary objects in their scholarship is a critical starting point. The absence of a generalized account of the field therefore required us to generate our own.

To do so, we first devised a plan to comb through the entire catalog of published social science articles on JSTOR, which spans nearly a century’s worth of material. Our goal at this point was to identify and categorize where and how social scientists refer to literary fiction in their published work. As will become clear, this approach’s limitations—namely, its reliance on a pre-determined list of searchable terms—set the groundwork for our survey, which was designed to account for surprising or unexpected responses. Nevertheless, the survey provided valuable insight into the more fleeting references to literary fiction in published social science research.

A brief account of this JSTOR project is useful for contextualizing the results of our social science survey. First, it was necessary to generate a delimited archive of social science articles that use, in some shape or another, literary sources. For the sake of producing an adequate number of sources, we composed a list of search terms that consisted of 30 prominent Anglophone authors, along with two famous literary characters, Robinson Crusoe, and Sherlock Holmes (Fig. 1 ). To determine these search terms, we cross-referenced popular online media articles (including blogs, short essays, and user forums) that offered broad rankings of, for example, the most important authors of all time. To best address the historical breadth of the JSTOR catalog, the names were edited down further to focus on authors who published before the middle of the twentieth century. It goes without saying that this initial list was far from exhaustive. Instead, it was intended to produce a large enough body of results in order for us to further generate a working typology of literary references as they appeared in the articles. Footnote 1 Second, we conducted a qualitative analysis of these articles alongside the rough typology of uses Michael Watts, Professor of Economics at Purdue, outlines in his study of economics and literature—the only workable typology we found.

Chart displays search terms (author name or fictional character name) and their corresponding total number of appearances across all social science articles on JSTOR. Figure shows 19 most popular results from the compiled search term list.

According to Watts, economists who engage with literature to any degree tend to do so according to four different categories: 1. eloquent description of human behavior; 2. historical evidence conveying the context of a particular time or place; 3. Alternative accounts of rational behavior that complement or challenge economic theory; 4. Evidence of an antimarket/antibusiness orientation in esthetic works. ( 2002 , p. 377)

When viewed alongside the JSTOR articles, however, the limitations to Watts’s typology were apparent. Most immediately, the emphasis on what one might call deep or sustained engagements with literature means that his typology will not capture those more fleeting uses of literature that make up the vast majority of literary references in the social science archive. Once one recognizes these limits, it becomes clear that any categorization or typology of literature in social science must be sufficiently flexible enough to capture the many and often surprising ways that the disciplinary fields might intersect. Of course, this latter point is underscored by the fact that Watt’s original typology is concerned with economics only. By expanding our search to include the social sciences in general, we allow for a wider scale for evaluating literature’s usefulness as seen by, for instance, political scientists, social theorists, and behavioral economists. After reviewing the JSTOR set of articles, we expanded on Watt’s initial typology to produce a more encompassing categorization of literary uses that better accommodated the range of literary references as they appeared in the archive. Ultimately, we determined that an expanded typology of uses of literature as they appear in published social science articles must include several more categories, never mind the four in Watts’s initial outline:

Literature as argument

Causal Argument/Historical data: marks studies that see literature as an agent of historical change along the lines of something a historian of the period can recognize.

Alternate Explanation: notes studies that see literary writers as rival social theorists whose arguments warrant proper countering.

Philosophical Position: refers to studies that associate an author with an argument that is developed or sustained across that author’s body of work.

Literature as context

Historical Context: designates studies that use information from literary texts as a way of characterizing a particular historical period, without claiming that the work was an agent of change in the period.

Biography: refers to studies that cite biographical details of an author or literary source as a way of situating concurrent historical events.

Literature as metonym

Cultural Standard: names studies that refer to literary texts as a cultural metonym, for example using Shakespeare as a way of referring to Renaissance England or to Western Culture as a whole.

Parable: designates studies that refer to a literary object that has lost its original literary contextualization and now stands in for something else entirely (e.g., Robinson Crusoe as a parable for homo economicus).

Literature as decoration

Literary effects/style: accounts for those literary texts that are evoked subtly via an author’s style or phrasing.

Decoration: names instances when the references to a literary text appear merely decorative and play no significant role in the argument.

Nonfiction quote: denotes direction quotations attributed to authors outside their published works.

Literature as Inspiration: marks moments in which a literary text plays no direct role in the argument but inspired the scholar’s thinking.

Literature as Teaching Tool: acknowledges instances where scholars use literary texts within the classroom or to help explain a concept.

As this expanded typology suggests, our initial assessment of the JSTOR articles highlights literature’s wide range of applications within the social sciences (Fig. 2 ). Moreover, it jumpstarts a dialog on what, exactly, constitutes a use of literature within this field. After all, it seems significant that a great portion of literary references as captured in the JSTOR survey are essentially non-critical uses—pithy quotations from authors or famous literary epigrams—when viewed from the perspective of literary studies. Nonetheless, to account for these references to literature is to acknowledge something of the role literary fiction per se plays, if not in the entire field of social science research, then in the academic conventions of social science publishing.

Chart shows the proportion of literary typographies across JSTOR’s social science catalog from among our compiled search term list. The presented types originate from our expanded typography based on Watts’s categorisations.

At the same time, our attempts to expand this typology ran into several hurdles of its own. First and foremost, our ability to generate search results from the JSTOR archive was limited by the terms we used: because any search for “literature” or “fiction” produces too many non-applicable and generalized results, one must enter specific search terms (e.g., William Shakespeare; Virginia Woolf) to produce relevant results. Along similar lines, our typology can only take shape in view of these limited sources; it is after all possible that an author or literary text that did not appear on our initial list has been received by social scientists in ways that confound expectations beyond even our expanded typology.

Finally, our reliance on both pre-conceived search terms and archived research articles prevents us from evaluating the newest trends in both literature as well as social science research. As our survey results below demonstrate, there is ample evidence that literature produced within the last twenty years has an outsized impact on those social scientists who acknowledge literary fiction as an influence in their work. The conventions of academic publishing in non-literary fields, however, might prevent researchers from likewise acknowledging these contemporary examples in their published material in favor of more familiar, canonical examples. In view of the affordances and limitations to our initial JSTOR study, we decided to approach the subject of literature and social science from another direction: by going directly to the source.

If publications are the end products of academic work, the product does not always reflect all details of the research process. Nobody leaves the scaffolding standing when the house is completed; likewise, the notes, readings, and other sources of inspiration that lay the foundation for an article or academic monograph often go unacknowledged. To be sure, simply searching for references to literary fiction in the published text of these sources is likely to return some results—for instance, the frequent conflation of the homo economicus model with the protagonist of Robinson Crusoe, albeit in a manner that elides any reference to Daniel Defoe, the author (Watson, 2017 ). As the example of Crusoe suggests, the small pool of literary sources that appear in the text of social science articles cannot adequately account for the wide range of influences literature might have at all stages of research. To better capture these invisible or unacknowledged uses of literature in the social science, we decided to simply ask social scientists themselves. The survey asked a few simple questions on their use (or not) of fictional literature in any stage of their academic work. The survey questions are included in the supplementary material as supplementary note . We received 875 responses at a response rate of 7 percent, a number which we deemed acceptable for allowing us to detect some overall patterns. Given the use of THE rankings, the sample is dominated by North American and European social science departments. The sample includes all career stages: Ph.D students (35 pct.), postdocs and assistant professors (20 pct.), and tenured staff (42 pct.). It includes the four major social science disciplines: economics (20 pct.), sociology (31 pct.), political science (26 pct.), psychology (19 pct.), whereas a small group (4 pct.) identified with other disciplines. A full demographic breakdown (Table S.1) is included in the supplementary material .

Discussion: what do social scientists say?

To be clear, not all social scientists use literature in a manner conforming with our typology above or even consider literature a factor in their work life. In the survey, we focused on the non-explicit uses of literature and the considerations behind their uses. In other words, the survey is meant to supplement our findings from the study of social science journals from the JSTOR digital library. The survey should not be taken as a test of the above-mentioned categories developed from the empirical study of academic publications. Still, it is possible to glean some points of overlap between the two approaches. Several of these categories can be easily applied to responses from the survey, especially the categories relating to literature’s inspirational value or its usefulness as a teaching tool. At the same time, other categories that feature heavily in the published articles—especially “literature as decoration” and “literature as metonym”—were hardly mentioned at all in the survey responses. The gap between what social scientists say about literature and what appears in social science articles reiterates the value of the survey, which captures some of the underlying motivations for using literature (or not) that otherwise would not come across in view of published academic work.

Even considering the general self-selection bias—i.e., respondents who react positively to the idea of using literature are also more likely to participate in the survey—93 percent agreed that “Literature often contains important insights into the nature of society and social life”, while only 2 percent disagreed. However, it is one thing to acknowledge that literature offers general insights into life and quite another to affirm that literature plays a role in individual research biographies. To address this issue, we posed the question if “Reading literature played a role in the formation of your research questions or the development of your research projects.”

We were somewhat surprised to learn that this was the case for almost half of the respondents (46 precent agree or totally agree), and only a third (34 percent) rejected this premise (Table 1 ). Looking at the comments in the open sections shed light on this. For some researchers there was a very clear link. For example, one respondent explained: “Toni Morrison and other women of color (Ana Castillo, for example) greatly enriched my understanding of the role of gender in society (I am a man).”

Raising the bar even higher, we then asked about publications. Publications are arguably the most delicate matter in our survey. After all, publications can make or break careers inasmuch as they factor into promotions and tenure reviews. In response to our publishing question (“How often do you quote or in other ways use a work of fiction in your publications”), 25 percent recorded occasionally using literary fiction in some form and an additional 13 percent affirmed doing so often or very often. In other words, almost 40 percent of the respondents acknowledge using literary sources in their publications (Table 2 ).

However, it must be stressed that these uses vary in form and substance. Based on our qualitative assessment of a subset of social science sources (outlined above), we found that explicit engagements range from the superficial (e.g., brief quotations of famous quips or observations from literary sources), the decontextualized (e.g., Robinson Crusoe functions only as a model of economic behavior), to more sustained engagements with the arguments or ideas presented in literature (e.g., Thomas Piketty’s references to Jane Austen and Balzac in Capital in the Twenty-First Century). In other words, a great many of these applications of literature do not resemble the type of work one finds in literature departments. Moreover, the depth or method for engagement is rather unsystematic.

Of course, publications and research only constitute part of the work academics do at the university. Our survey also asked about teaching in order to capture other literary uses that published papers are unlikely to acknowledge. As noted above, Robinson Crusoe appears in textbooks on microeconomics in the figure of the homo economicus. Elsewhere, there are several examples of sources who call for incorporating literary fiction in the teaching of the social sciences in order to benefit from the imaginative social logics embedded in, for instance, science fiction novels (e.g., Rodgers et al., 2007 ; Hirschman et al., 2018 ). As our survey demonstrates, most of the respondents use or have used literary sources as pedagogical tools: less than a third (30 percent) never do so, most do so at least sometimes, and a few (12 percent) frequently use literature in their teaching (Table 3 ).

If we had expanded the category from literature to art in a wide sense (including, for example, movies, television series, paintings, and music) we suspect the numbers would have been significantly higher.

Finally, our survey provides some insight into what characterizes social scientists who use literature in their work. We generally find only small differences between disciplines within the field of social science, with economists marginally more skeptical of literature’s usefulness in the classroom than researchers in sociology, political science, and psychology (Table 3 ). This confirms earlier findings. A survey from 2006 showed that 57 percent of economist disagreed with the proposition that “In general, interdisciplinary knowledge is better than knowledge obtained by a single discipline.” For psychology, political science, and sociology the numbers were 9, 25 and 28 percent respectively (Fourcade et al., 2015 ).

Larger contrasts appear when considering the career stage of the researchers. We find a very clear general pattern of early-career, non-tenured researchers expressing more skepticism regarding literature’s insights compared to tenured and more senior researchers (Table 4 ). This pattern is most apparent when the respondents consider the use of literature in their own publications. A striking 75 percent of PhD students and 78 percent of postdocs have never quoted literature in their publications, compared to 48 percent in the senior professor group.

Arguably, this gap might simply reflect the much larger publication portfolio expected of senior professors in relation to early-career scholars, but the same pattern holds when we asked more general questions on the importance of literature.

This last point casts into relief some of the internal and generational gaps existing between senior researchers and junior and early-career researchers facing an increasingly precarious academic workplace. For early-career researchers, there is little immediate benefit to working outside established borders when recognition and professional assessment (such as promotions and tenure) still largely derive from work within disciplinary camps (Lyall, 2019 , p. 2). At the same time, stepping into uncharted territory requires one to navigate disciplinary traditions, departmental gatekeeping, and new methodologies. These professional limitations are what observers have in mind when they call interdisciplinary research risky at best (e.g., Callard and Fitzgerald, 2015 ) and “career suicide” at worst (Bothwell, 2016 ).

Rather than ascribing literary interests to some form of academic maturity, then, we suspect this gap between early and later-stage researchers partly reflects how disciplines work. In general terms, it is easy to imagine how the institutional pressures on early-career researchers can translate to a stricter adherence to disciplinary guidelines. Facing an unstable job market and competing for a limited pool of external funding, these scholars are highly dependent on the recognition of their peers and will tend to be more risk-adverse with respect to publications. As noted above, explicit signals of inter- or cross-disciplinary interests may sound appealing in the abstract (and may be promoted by international funding agencies) but they face much more skepticism within academic departments and hiring committees. As a result, using literature in academic publications—and perhaps explicitly cross-disciplinary research in general—is a luxury that only the more professionally-secure researchers can afford.

This explanation might account for the lack of explicit references to literary fiction in social science research, but not the absence of more indirect literature-research relationships. For example, 39 percent of PhD students “totally agree” that one can “learn a lot about what humans are like from literature” as opposed to 60 percent of associate professors and over half of professors. While outside the bounds of our current project, this generational gap may also be evidence of the diminishing presence of literature departments on university campuses after successive years of administrative funding cuts and public pressure against humanities-oriented education in general (Meranze, 2015 ). Fewer literature classes may result in as scenario where even advanced degree holders in an adjacent field like social science may be less studied in literature than their more senior colleagues.

What is the social scientist reading list?

There is no shortage of arguments for those in the social sciences to read literary fiction. As noted in the introduction above, there are a handful of social scientists in fields like sociology and economics who emphasize not only the general value of reading literature but also the profound insights literature can offer their research. However, beyond acknowledging the need to read in general, the question remains: which books to open, and which pages to turn? As is perhaps unsurprising canonical examples of realist fiction, with their aspiration to represent the breadth of the social world, are often the first to come to mind. Critics interested in bridging the gap between literature and economics, for instance, tend to hold up nineteenth-century novels as key examples of the relevant insight fiction might offer (Fessenbecker and Yazell, 2021 ). This preference for major classics was also confirmed by the participants in our survey, who cited such canonical novelists as George Orwell and Leo Tolstoy with high frequency (Table 5 ). The full list of literary recommendations for “understanding society better” includes novels and authors and spans different national literary canons, with authors associated with novels far eclipsing other forms of literature.

The above list of frequently referenced authors comes with few surprises. Anglophone—and especially US—literature and writers dominate, which reflects of the high number of US and UK universities on our list of top departments in the field of social science. All authors except Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Austen, Eliot, and Twain belong to the twentieth century. The most contemporary authors are women—Adichie and Atwood the only living authors within the top twenty—in contrast to the heavily-canonized, uniformly male authors in the top five positions. These more recent authors to different degrees push back against the conventions of the realist novel. Atwood’s speculative fiction and the fantasy and utopian fiction of LeGuin thus demonstrate the range of novelistic genres cited in the survey responses.

The list also suggests something of the formative power of the standardized literature curriculum. Books typically assigned in US high schools are heavily represented on the list of recommended texts below, which includes The Grapes of Wrath and To Kill a Mockingbird (Table 6 ). The uncontested most recommended read for social scientists is the British novelist and essayist George Orwell. The specific recommendations include his most best-selling books, 1984 and Animal Farm, which together form the two most recommended titles according to the survey respondents.

Conclusion: the uses of trivia

To briefly summarize, we set out to study the way social scientists use literature in two broad ways. First, we compiled a dataset comprising a century’s worth of scholarship in the social sciences. Second, we conducted a survey of a large number of contemporary working social scientists. A qualitative review of the dataset revealed a number of different ways social scientists have used literature; these uses were categorizable into six broad categories, several of which contained discernible sub-categories. The survey reinforced parts of this analysis while diverging in intriguing ways. Almost all the surveyed social scientists agreed on the cognitive value of literature, and almost half (46%) reported that literary works had played important roles in their own intellectual biographies. Yet some common uses of literature in the dataset received virtually no mention in the self-reports and the survey revealed suggestive evidence of the impact of institutional structures on whether and how scholars use literature. Ultimately the analysis points towards the value of further research. Both the list of uses compiled from the dataset and the list of works compiled from the survey are necessarily limited in scope and would benefit from a more comprehensive consideration of social scientists and their research.

But by way of conclusion, it is worth responding to the worry that much of the data collected here is somewhat less than consequential—the collection of an offhand reference here, a novel read in grad school there—and to that extent cannot answer our opening question about the nature of interdisciplinarity. Or, perhaps more soberly, it does answer the question, but simply in the negative. There is in fact not much of a meaningful use for literature in the conduct of the social sciences, and one of the pieces of evidence for the argument is the limited use such scholars have made of it thus far. Such an objection is wrong in two ways, one rather boring and one relatively more interesting. The boring objection is simply the observation that the history of a discipline does not predict its future: it would not be at all surprising to see a discipline change as a new archive of material or a new method of analysis became available to it. Indeed, this is often precisely what leads disciplines forward. The more interesting objection is the implicit premise that interdisciplinary scholarship must make its interdisciplinarity overt and extensive, and that a new interdisciplinary connection must be innovative.

We reject both halves of this second premise. The kind of interdisciplinarity we have traced here is light and casual, using a quotation here or there, and there is little that is new about it: it has been with the social sciences for much of their history. However, interdisciplinarity need not be utterly novel to be worth explicating, theorizing, and defending. Against the model of interdisciplinary development that considers the key question to be the difficulty and complexity of bringing two disciplines together, we want to highlight how easy it really is. If it were to become ordinary practice to read a novel and a piece of literary criticism that addressed whatever issue a given social scientist happened to be working on, this would for many social scientists simply normalize and bring to awareness the way they already work. Moreover, rather than shaming social scientists for not using literature more, we submit a better way to evoke greater respect for and greater use of literature and criticism is to highlight the ways in which they already do. Carrots, as they say, rather than sticks.

Data availability

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

The JSTOR search terms did not include John Steinbeck, who is heavily cited by the respondents in our later survey. The omission, while regrettable, underscores the usefulness of the survey’s open-ended questions. Further research might well consider additional authors beyond this improvised list.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Rita Felski, Anne-Marie Mai, and Pieter Vanhuysse for their helpful feedback during the design of the survey. Thanks are also due to JSTOR for making available their digital archive and to the nearly 1000 colleagues who responded to the survey and, in some cases, provided additional comments by email. Research in this article received funding by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF127) and the Danish Institute for Advanced Study (internal funds).

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Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark, Odense M, Denmark

Bryan Yazell

Danish Institute for Advanced Study, Odense M, Denmark

Bryan Yazell & Klaus Petersen

Danish Centre for Welfare Studies, University of Southern Denmark, Odense M, Denmark

Klaus Petersen & Paul Marx

Institute for Socio-Economics, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn, Germany

Program for Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

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Yazell, B., Petersen, K., Marx, P. et al. The role of literary fiction in facilitating social science research. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8 , 261 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00939-y

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Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Teenage Witches Are Growing Up

New books by H.A. Clarke, Robert Jackson Bennett and Micaiah Johnson.

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By Amal El-Mohtar

Amal El-Mohtar is the Book Review’s science fiction and fantasy columnist, a Hugo Award-winning writer and the co-author, with Max Gladstone, of “This Is How You Lose the Time War.”

THE FEAST MAKERS (Erewhon, 412 pp., $18.95), by H.A. Clarke, concludes a trilogy that began with “The Scapegracers ,” a brutal and vivid evocation of the bonds between queer teenagers and the magic they can make together.

A witch is anyone with a “specter,” a lump of magic light that reflects the color of one’s soul. Witchfinders can steal these, condemning specterless witches to a slow and painful death. In the first book, Sideways Pike forms the Scapegracers coven with three others, but loses a specter. In the second novel, “Scratch Daughters,” the Scapegracers liberate dozens of stolen specters, including Sideways’s, from a Witchfinder hoard.

“The Feast Makers” follows the Scapegracers into a wider witch society, as many covens show up to search the recovered specters for those that belonged to their members.

Sideways also faces a dilemma: Madeline Kline, a former crush who stole Sideways’s specter to replace her own lost magic, has been condemned to death by her coven and is seeking help from the Scapegracers, who have a reputation for aiding others on principle. As they navigate intrawitch politics, Daisy, Yates, Jing and Sideways are courted by different covens that suit their individual temperaments and ambitions, but at the cost of their unity.

If you loved the first two volumes of this series, the third will not disappoint; it’s as fierce and funny as its predecessors, which I’ve loudly praised . Even if it’s a little more chaotic and slapdash, it’s still a worthy conclusion to an exciting series.

The phrase “stand-alone with series potential” has come up a lot in publishing circles lately, signaling a shift away from the fantasy trilogies and longer series of yesteryear. While this strategy can result in frustratingly unresolved stories with uncertain futures, Robert Jackson Bennett manages to thread the needle beautifully with THE TAINTED CUP (Del Rey, 410 pp., $28.99). This fantasy mystery novel introduces two dynamic detectives in a strange and frightening world, as if Nero Wolfe were solving mysteries in Area X.

Several rings of walls protect the empire of Khanum from leviathans, ocean creatures so vast that they’re less like animals than like chunks of wayward geography. Everything from people to architecture is bioengineered: Plant-fiber houses can withstand earthquakes, while humans can be altered to have enhanced memories or reflexes. Dinios Kol is an “engraver,” able to remember crime scenes in perfect detail, to the benefit of his employer, Ana Dolabra, an ostracized investigator whose sensory sensitivity often requires her to wear a blindfold. When a wealthy and unscrupulous man is spectacularly murdered in a powerful aristocrat’s summer house, Ana and Din are called in to solve the crime, while Din struggles to keep his own secrets from coming to light.

“The Tainted Cup” is a thoroughly satisfying delight from start to finish. If you, like me, enjoy an animating nonsexual relationship between a brilliant, eccentric woman and a devoted and highly competent man, this book is a cornucopia. Bennett pulls off his own feat of engineering in splicing genres together so effectively, marrying the imaginative abundance of a fantasy world to the structure, pace and character dynamics of detective fiction.

Micaiah Johnson’s sophomore novel, THOSE BEYOND THE WALL (Del Rey, 371 pp., $28.99) , meanwhile, could reasonably be called a stand-alone sequel. It returns to the postapocalyptic setting of Johnson’s debut, “ The Space Between Worlds ,” where multiversal travel exists, with a catch: People can survive the crossing only if no version of them exists in their destination world. Otherwise the traveler, or “traverser,” risks an extraordinary death from “backlash,” a force that can turn a body inside out.

The man who created the transport technology lives in Wiley City, a walled compound whose citizens enjoy artificial sunlight and a controlled atmosphere. But in order to travel the multiverse effectively, he needs the dispossessed and exploited people of Ashtown, a desert community outside the city walls.

“Those Beyond the Wall” is narrated by a woman named Mr. Scales, who carries a nesting doll’s worth of family secrets while working as an enforcer for Ashtown’s Blood Emperor, Nik Nik. After she witnesses a dear friend being torn apart in a way that can only be backlash, it becomes clear that someone has figured out how to shift the risk of death from the traverser to the inhabitants of the destination world. Preventing an invasion of these infiltrators will require old nemeses and unlikely friends to unite against a common enemy.

Where “The Space Between Worlds” was a structured book, unfolding its plot the way a scene would on a painted fan, “Those Beyond the Wall” is more tightly focused on character and voice, revolutionary ethics and practice. It’s about apartheid as a violent premise that requires violent resistance, not as a parade of suffering to be solved with pity and charity by those who profit from it. It’s a book that forces its characters and its readers to reckon with two questions: What side of the wall are you on, and what side of the wall do you want to be on?

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As book bans have surged in Florida, the novelist Lauren Groff has opened a bookstore called The Lynx, a hub for author readings, book club gatherings and workshops , where banned titles are prominently displayed.

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The complicated, generous life  of Paul Auster, who died on April 30 , yielded a body of work of staggering scope and variety .

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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

One of my most anticipated reads of the spring, Sierra Greer’s feminist sci-fi Annie Bot is much as I’d hoped it would be: frightening but measured, referential but fresh. The titular Annie is indeed a robot—a Stella model coded as a Cuddle Bunny, to be exact—designed for use by Doug, who’s customized her into a near-mirror image of his ex. She does housework; she does...other things. She can set her internal body temperature and read Doug’s annoyance rankings. He can set her libido levels. (“A four’s good,” he says. “She’s, like, ready at a four, but not actively assertive.”) As Annie notes early in the novel, “I only exist because I’m wanted.” These themes are certainly not new, but it’s how Greer writes this mash-up of Ex Machina , Her , Westworld , and The Stepford Wives that makes its tension resonate so loudly, even if it’s meant more as an allegory of women’s liberation than a treatise on the threats of AI. A quick read, but one you won’t soon wipe from memory.

Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson

Although set in the same universe as her debut, The Space Between Worlds , Micaiah Johnson’s Those Beyond the Wall is set 10 years after the events of the former, and can be read as a standalone. (But you should definitely read The Space Between Worlds .) This clear-eyed, undaunted sci-fi saga introduces readers to a woman who goes by the name of Mr. Scales, a street-savvy “runner” living outside the walls of the gleaming Wiley City, in a far poorer desert community known as Ashtown. After she witnesses a friend’s gruesome death, she follows the breadcrumb trail to the multiverse-hopping technology residing inside Wiley City. But to stop this tech (and its users) from destroying the people of Ashtown, she’ll need to rely on more than her own wits. Gritty and raw, this is a fine work of dystopian fiction, one sure to chafe and unsettle as much as it thrills.

I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger

To start, what an absolutely fabulous title. Peace Like A River author Leif Enger’s latest is so much more than its cheeky cover; in fact, it might be one of the most optimistic post-apocalyptic novels you’ll ever read, if also one of the more unusual. In Enger’s imagined near-future America, the president is proudly illiterate, pandemics and wildfires are growing by the hour, and an entirely new class of billionaires known as “astronauts” are happy to watch from above as the plebs flee their now-closed schools for solace in drugs and government labor. But protagonist Rainey does not see the end of the world as a black hole, especially when he looks to his wife, Lark, who runs a bookstore in spite of the enormous risk inherent in doing so. It is his unflappable faith in goodness that leads him, much like Orpheus, to sail Lake Superior in search of Lark when a visitor unexpectedly tears them apart. This is a triumphant, generous work of art—neither cloying nor nihilist.

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

Ninth House, Hell Bent, and Six of Crows author Leigh Bardugo steps into the Spanish Golden Age for a fantasy remarkably unlike her previous works. The Familiar is a stunning accomplishment, set in 16th-century Madrid, where the Inquisition haunts Luzia Cotado, an orphaned “not quite Spanish” scullion with a hidden talent for magic—and Jewish blood that puts her at imminent risk. When her mistress discovers Luzia’s unique skillset, she puts them to use, attracting the attention of the king’s secretary and his familiar, the immortal Guillén Santángel. With Santángel’s help, Luzia might just be able to survive—or even thrive—but, as any fantasy reader can tell you, power always has its consequences.

A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland

A Sweet Sting of Salt is an altogether entrancing retelling of the traditional folktale “The Selkie Wife,” in which a man steals a selkie’s skin and forces her to become his wife. (Selkies, as a refresher, are mythological creatures who take the form of seals in the ocean and humans on land.) In Sting , the selkie in question is discovered by midwife Jean Langille on the coast of 19th century Nova Scotia, where she’s wracked with birthing pains. Jean helps deliver the woman’s child, and soon surmises this mysterious stranger is Muirin, the wife of her fisherman neighbor, Tobias. But Tobias and Muirin are clearly hiding some sort of secret, and as Jean slowly realizes she’s falling in love with Muirin, so too must she face the danger that threatens them both should their relationship continue. A beautifully written Sapphic fantasy, Sutherland’s debut announces her as a writer to watch.

The Jinn Daughter by Rania Hanna

Rania Hanna’s debut novel The Jinn Daughter is a lush and mesmerizing story of motherhood and magic, its influences pulled from Middle Eastern mythology. Protagonist Nadine has a daughter, Layala, whom she’ll do anything to protect. But Nadine is also a jinn, one who tells the stories of the dead through the pomegranate seeds she collects each morning. Soon, Death herself arrives on Nadine’s doorstep—she has come for Nadine’s half-jinn daughter Layala, whom Death wants to replace her as the underworld’s ruler. This is not a fate Nadine can accept for Layala, and so a fight for her daughter’s life commences. This is a short but sweeping story of a mother’s unrelenting devotion.

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