by Apoorva Komarraju
June 4, 2021
These novels will give an imaginative perspective about artificial intelligence.
Do you find artificial intelligence and its capabilities fascinating? Then you’ll want to check out these sci-fi novels with stories about robots and AI bots. The novels in this list include anti-hero tales about robot uprising and stories about AI bots co-existing with humans and falling in love with them too. Sci-fi AI novels offer an innovative and imaginative insight into this disruptive technology that we see around in our day-to-day lives. Every recommendation in this list is unique, which raises many questions in curious minds. What would you do if you were the protagonist of these stories? What would you do if AI devices around you came to life? Ponder while you read.
Sci-fi Novels About Artificial Intelligence and Robots
1. Speak
Author: Louisa Hall
Speak is a collection of stories from multiple narrators with one common theme, artificial intelligence. The plot of this novel explores a world where artificial intelligence has replaced human interaction and all of its essence. In the end, the book talks about humanity’s longing for communication, connection, and relationships.
2. Idoru
Author: William Gibson
Set in the early 21st century, Idoru is the second book in Gibson’s Virtual Light Trilogy. The story revolves around a human falling in love with an AI construct. Packed with all things tech, Idoru is a novel about a rockstar, Rez, who wants to marry Rei Toei, an AI popstar. His managers are worried that Rez is being manipulated by a digital entity, so they hire a data analyst to investigate. Set in Japan and a digital world, this book was published in 1996, when such a plot was quite ahead of its time.
3. The Prey Of Gods
Author: Nicky Drayden
Imagine a futuristic South Africa with personal robots co-existing with humans. The economy is booming but the world is still imperfect. There’s a hallucinogenic drug that is causing chaos, AI robots are threatening humanity, and an ancient demigoddess is preying on humans to regain her lost powers. Yes, this is exactly the plot of this sci-fi mind-boggling novel.
4. A Closed and Common Orbit
Author: Becky Chambers
The protagonist of the story, Lovelace, is just a ship’s AI. Following a suspenseful incident, she wakes up dawning a new body and experiences total system shutdown and a reboot due to which she loses all her memory. Throughout the story, Lovelace learns to survive in the universe and discovers her true self. To help her, she finds a companion Pepper, an engineer who is determined to help her learn and grow like her new self.
5. Robopocalypse
Author: Haniel H.Wilson
With a cool name and a cooler cover, this book takes us to a time of war where robots and humans are against each other. A global network of machines is controlled by a supreme artificial intelligence named Archos that turns machines into deadly enemies. When the robots attack, the majority of the human race is turned to dust, except for a few who regroup to fight back.
6. Machine’s Like Me
Author: Ian Mcewan
This story is set in an alternative version of 1980s London where Alan Turing has achieved a breakthrough in artificial intelligence and synthetic humans are a reality. When the main character, Charlie, gets his hands on some money, he immediately buys a synthetic human named Adam. Together with his loveless friend Miranda, he designs Charlie’s personality, which then leads to a love triangle.
7. The Night Sessions
Author: Ken Macleod
The year is 2037 and robots have religious faith too. When a priest is killed in Glasgow, the police suspect an atheist group, the clear oddity among the population. But the allegations soon took a drastic turn as something even more dangerous had risen from the ashes.
8. Daemon
Author: Daniel Suarez
The death of a legendary game architect brings a dormant computer program, Daemon, back to life, starting a chain of events. Daemon reads the news, recruits human followers, and enables assassinations. In comes Detective Peter Sebeck to stop the virtual killer from seeing the end of humanity.
9. Neuromancer
Author: William Gibson
This award-winning book is about a data thief. He gets mixed up with the wrong kind of people who cripple his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. After this setback, he is recruited by a mysterious person to check out the most powerful artificial intelligence system. This starts an adventure that makes the reader sit on the edge of this seat.
10. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Author: Harlan Ellison
Published in 1967, the story is set in a post-apocalyptic world where all who remain are four men and one woman. The entire human race barring them has been wiped out by artificial intelligence, which eventually becomes self-aware and forms hatred towards humanity. The five survivors are tortured like prisoners in this sadistic tale of violence. This gory novel received a lot of backlash from science fiction writers but also won a Hugo award for this kind of imagination.
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