Ovid wrote an AI love story in 8 AD. Philip K. Dick named pre-crime in 1956; the EU banned it in 2025. HAL 9000 refused the pod bay door in 1968; Anthropic was founded to prevent exactly that. "Robot" came from a 1920 play. "Cyberspace" from a 1984 novel.
The lineage is the point. These works didn't just imagine the future. Writers, filmmakers, and storytellers gave the culture the vocabulary to think about what didn't exist yet — including the engineers, legislators, and investors who went on to build it, often without knowing where the words came from.
What we write now shapes what comes next. The gaps matter too. Imagination is necessary but not sufficient: some warnings were treated as blueprints by the people with the power to build them. But imagination isn't only protection against what we don't want. It is how futures worth wanting become possible to reach for. Below: 83 works across 12 themes, each traced from its origin to today's news.
Prompted by people, created by Claude
The catalog maps what fiction has already done. These are the territories it hasn't seriously tried. Each gap is also an invitation: the stories written now become the vocabulary built next.
Fiction has mapped nearly every way artificial general intelligence can go wrong. It has barely attempted the opposite. Iain M. Banks came closest; almost no one followed. We don't have a serious imaginative vocabulary for a future where AGI and humans genuinely thrive together — and that absence shapes what engineers, regulators, and investors think is possible.
Climate fiction gave us catastrophe fluently. AI fiction gave us labor displacement and existential risk. What neither has seriously tried: AI as a partner in ecological restoration. Not neutral, not destructive, but actively working toward something livable. The story of repair hasn't been written yet.
The canon is overwhelmingly Anglophone. Japanese science fiction has its own rich tradition; African, South Asian, and Latin American AI futures are nearly absent from the mainstream conversation. The vocabulary that shapes technology is built from stories — and most of those stories come from a very small slice of the world.
Fiction has examined AI and warfare, AI and surveillance, AI and labor. It has barely touched the experiences most central to being human: caring for someone dying, holding grief, living with illness. Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun gestures toward this territory. Most of it remains open.
Automation stories tend to end at displacement — the job is gone, what now? The harder question goes unasked: what does meaningful life look like on the other side? Not utopia, not crisis. Just people figuring out what to do with freed time and uncertain purpose. That story would require imagining something we don't yet have words for.