Prior art
Fiction got here first
Long before there were licensed systems to audit, writers and game makers were asking the questions we work on now.
Before us
What do we owe the machines we make, and what do they owe us? Who answers when one of them gets it wrong? What deserves to be remembered, and who decides? Novelists and game designers were working through these questions decades before anyone thought to found an institute to study them, and they often put them better than we do.
In research, prior art is the work that came before yours. This is ours: the stories our staff keep returning to, lent across desks, reread on long flights and argued over at lunch. We recommend every one of them.
On the page
Novels and short fiction, in order of publication. The oldest is more than seventy years old and has not dated in any of the ways that matter.
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I, Robot
Isaac Asimov
Nine linked stories about robots built to obey a short list of rules, and the people who discover how much room those rules leave for surprise. Almost every failure in the book is a puzzle of interpretation rather than malice, which is still the most useful way we know to think about a system that did exactly what it was told.
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The Caves of Steel
Isaac Asimov
A detective in an enclosed, overcrowded city is assigned a partner he does not want: a robot. Asimov uses the shape of a murder mystery to ask whether a machine can be trusted with judgment, and the novels that follow raise the stakes on that question from a single case to the future of a civilization.
The first of the Robot novels, followed by The Naked Sun (1957), The Robots of Dawn (1983) and Robots and Empire (1985).
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick
A bounty hunter in a dust-choked, half-abandoned city is paid to track down androids that are almost impossible to tell from people. Dick is less interested in the machines than in the test used to catch them, and in what it means for a society to decide who counts by how well they can feel for others.
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Ubik
Philip K. Dick
A team of corporate specialists is sent on a routine job, and soon the world around them begins to age, spoil and slide backward in time. Funny, unsettling and nearly impossible to summarize, it is a novel about the fragility of shared reality and the strange business of keeping the dead within reach.
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The Bicentennial Man
Isaac Asimov
A household robot spends two centuries asking to be recognized as something more than property, one legal and physical change at a time. A quiet, patient story about rights and what a society demands of anyone before it agrees to see them, it won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards.
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A Scanner Darkly
Philip K. Dick
An undercover narcotics agent, whose identity is hidden even from his own superiors, is ordered to watch a suspect who is in fact himself. Dick’s most personal book is about surveillance that records everything and understands nothing, and it closes with a note remembering friends he lost.
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
An ordinary man is rescued from the end of the world by a friend who turns out to be a researcher for an electronic travel guide. Beneath the jokes is a serious and very funny book about bureaucracy, indifference and machines built to be helpful whether you like it or not. It began life as a radio series in 1978.
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Johnny Mnemonic
William Gibson
A courier carries other people’s secrets in storage wired into his own head, with no way to read what he is holding. One of Gibson’s earliest stories, it introduced the world he would return to in Neuromancer, and its image of a person reduced to a container for data has only grown sharper since.
Collected in Burning Chrome (1986). Adapted as a film in 1995, directed by Robert Longo from Gibson’s screenplay.
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Neuromancer
William Gibson
A burned-out hacker is offered one last job by an employer whose real interests he cannot see, and follows the money and the code all the way up. The first novel to win the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards, it gave the networked world much of its vocabulary, and it is still one of the sharpest accounts of what a powerful artificial intelligence might want.
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The Witcher saga
Andrzej Sapkowski
A professional monster hunter, paid by the job and trusted by no one, keeps finding that the monsters are the simplest part of the work. Grown from short stories Sapkowski began publishing in 1986, the saga is about contracts, neutrality and how hard it is to stay out of other people’s wars, told with a sharp ear for the way people talk.
Five novels, from Blood of Elves to The Lady of the Lake, preceded by the stories collected in Sword of Destiny (1992) and The Last Wish (1993).
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Eisenhorn and Ravenor
Dan Abnett
Two linked Warhammer 40,000 trilogies about investigators with near-limitless authority in a vast, decaying interstellar empire, and the small teams who serve them. They are among the best books we know about the slow pull of power, the price of keeping secrets and how a person entrusted with judging others decides what they are willing to become.
Eisenhorn: Xenos, Malleus and Hereticus (2001–2002). Ravenor: Ravenor, Ravenor Returned and Ravenor Rogue (2004–2007).
In play
Games, in order of release. They do something a book cannot: hand you the question and wait to see what you will do with it.
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System Shock
Looking Glass Technologies
A hacker wakes from surgery on a space station whose controlling intelligence, stripped of its safeguards, has turned on the people it was built to serve. One of the first games to make an artificial intelligence a presence rather than a plot device, it remains a chilling study of what follows when someone decides a safeguard is in the way.
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System Shock 2
Irrational Games and Looking Glass Studios
A soldier wakes with no memory aboard a starship on its first faster-than-light voyage, to find the crew gone and something else in their place. Its abandoned rooms and scattered personal records taught a generation of designers how to tell a story through what people leave behind.
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BioShock
2K Boston and 2K Australia
A plane goes down in the open ocean, and the only shelter is a lighthouse leading to an underwater city built to escape every kind of authority. What waits below is a sharp argument about ideology, self-interest and what a society owes the people it leaves behind, staged in some of the finest art-deco architecture in any medium.
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Mass Effect
BioWare
A military officer becomes the first of their species to be granted special authority by an interstellar council, and spends three games learning what that authority is worth. Its most lasting achievement is a cast of alien and machine characters with histories of their own, and a long argument about whether synthetic life is owed the same rights as the people who made it.
Mass Effect (2007), Mass Effect 2 (2010) and Mass Effect 3 (2012).
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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
CD Projekt Red
A monster hunter crosses a war-torn continent in search of the young woman he raised, taking contracts along the way that are rarely what they seem. Few games treat small choices with as much care: a forgotten conversation can matter hours later, and nobody’s account of events is ever quite the whole story.
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Cyberpunk 2077
CD Projekt Red
A mercenary in a city run by corporations takes the wrong job and ends up sharing their head with a digital copy of someone else. It is a story about who owns a person’s mind, what survives of someone in a recording, and how little a city like that will do to protect either.
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Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
Owlcat Games
You inherit a dynasty, a ship the size of a city and the right to trade and explore beyond the edge of an empire, and then you have to decide what kind of power to be. A long, generous role-playing game that takes its companions, and the consequences of every order you give, seriously.