Planning for this collection began in 2019; ChatGPT arrived in November 2022, and the volume ended up documenting the aftershocks. Its subject is less artificial intelligence as depicted in fiction than what generative systems have done to authorship, literary creativity and criticism.

Slocombe and Liveley organize the ground with a short typology of how the West has imagined artificial minds: animated objects, automata, androids, and then algorithms with no body beyond their code, sorting the world's data and perhaps positioned to govern it. To these they add a fifth figure thrown up since 2022, the machine as author, apparently able to write poems, jokes, scripts and criticism, though whether that counts as creativity is disputed, not least by working writers.

Readers wanting studies of AI characters in novels and films are pointed elsewhere. The chapters gathered here work the overlap between two concepts, asking what studying, researching and writing literature now mean.

Cave and Dihal put together this collection against a lopsided picture. Across the anglophone West and well outside it, ordinary understanding of artificial intelligence arrives by way of Hollywood, while the people actually building the technology are drawn disproportionately from one narrow group: American, white and male.

The volume sets that picture beside the many other places where thinking machines have been imagined. Long before anyone could construct one, they were already appearing in religious and philosophical thought, in fiction and on film, in traditions scattered across the world. Contributors from scholarship and from the arts follow what happens where those local stories meet digital technology and the dominant Western versions of it, and how fresh imaginaries emerge from the collision, varying sharply from one setting to another.

Some of the resulting chapters speak directly to debates in AI ethics: how Chinese and American conceptions of the technology diverge, and what neo-colonialism looks like in digital form.