Philosophers’ Science Fiction / Speculative Fiction Recommendations, Organized by Contributor

November 3, 2014

Eric Schwitzgebel

In September and October, 2014, I gathered recommendations of “philosophically interesting” science fiction – or “speculative fiction” (SF), more broadly construed – from thirty-four professional philosophers and from two prominent SF authors with graduate training in philosophy. Each contributor recommended ten works of speculative fiction and wrote a brief “pitch” gesturing toward the interest of the work.

Below is the list of recommendations, organized by last name of recommender. Another version of the list is organized by author (for prose) or director (for film), with the most commonly recommended authors/directors listed first.

The recommenders, in alphabetical order below, are Scott Bakker, Sara Bernstein, Ben Blumson, Rachael Briggs, Matthew Brophy, Ross Cameron, Joe Campbell, Mason Cash, David Chalmers, Stephen Clark, Ellen Clarke, Helen De Cruz, Johan De Smedt, Josh Dever, Kenny Easwaran, Simon Evnine, Keith Frankish, Steven Horst, Troy Jollimore, Eric Kaplan, Jonathan Kaplan, Brian Keeley, David Killoren & Derrick Murphy, Amy Kind, Pete Mandik, Ryan Nichols, Paul Oppenheimer, Adriano Palma, Lewis Powell, Ina Roy-Faderman, Susan Schneider, Eric Schwitzgebel, Meghan Sullivan, Jonathan Weinberg, Dylan Wittkower, and Audrey Yap.

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List from Scott Bakker (SF writer and blogger who did graduate work in philosophy at Vanderbilt):

· Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin (movie, 2013).Terrifying meditation on different kinds of meat, alien and human, inhabiting different kinds of skin.

· Spike Jonze, Her (movie, 2013). The single most believable cinematic portrayal of the quotidian consequences of AGI.

· George F. Slavin and Stanley Adams, “The Mark of Gideon,”Star Trek original series (TV episode, 1969). Wonderful example of the way manipulating frames of epistemological reference can drive human behaviour.

· Frank Herbert, Dune (novel, 1965). Famed meditation on individual exceptionality, politics, and religion.

· Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom, The Jesus Incident (novel, 1979). The real story of the real Pandora (as opposed to James Cameron’s imperialistic pastiche), pitting organic and technological intelligences at multiple levels.

· Paul Verhoeven (and Edward Neumeier), Starship Troopers(movie, 1997). The fascistic tropes of American military narratives spoofed too well to be appreciated by American critics or audiences.

· Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote In God’s Eye(movie, 1974). First contact, not so much between species, as between technical intelligences (corresponding to the angels and devils of our own scientific natures).

· William Gibson, Neuromancer (novel, 1984). Watershed novel credited with euthanizing the Myth of Progess in science fiction.

· Cormac McCarthy, The Road (novel, 2006). The culinary fate of intentionality après le Deluge.

· Scott Bakker, Neuropath (novel, 2008). Because everybody’s gotta eat, Semantic Apocalypse or no!

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List from Sara Bernstein (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Duke University):

· Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud (novel, 1957). Begins as an impending-disaster-for-earth story, but introduces a twist: the giant cloud approaching earth is conscious and is surprised to find other conscious beings in the universe. Consciousness, multiple realizability, the works.

· Catherynne Valente, Palimpsest (novel, 1959). A city is transmitted through physical touch and is only able to be visited by those who have been infected. Physicalism.

· Ursula K. LeGuin, Changing Planes (short stories, collected 2003). Airports are not just places for transportation between spatial locations; they also host people who want to change dimensions in between changing flights. Traveler stops over in several other exotic dimensions, including one in which everything unnecessary for human life has been removed (“The Nna Mmoy Language”). Possible worlds with foreign-yet-familiar features.

· K.W. Jeter, Noir (novel, 1998). The dead can be brought back to life if they don’t meet their financial obligations, and must work to pay them off. Capitalism, ethics.

· Italo Calvino, “All at One Point” from Cosmicomics (1968). Everything exists at one spacetime point. Extended simples, conceivability, possibility.

· Joanna Russ, The Female Man (novel, 1975). Four women living in different times and places cross over to each other’s worlds and are startled by gender roles and assumptions of worlds that at not their own. Feminist philosophy, philosophy of gender.

· Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (novel, 1985). Narrator wanders around in his mind. Consciousness, physicalism.

· The Walking Dead (TV series, 2010-). Survivors of zombie apocalypse live out central questions of political philosophy in a Hobbesian state of nature: from whence does authority originate? Is it better to band together for protection and subject ourselves to a ruling power? Is remaining on one’s own a fundamental right?

· Jac Schaeffer, Timer (movie, 2009). Almost every person is outfitted with a device that counts down to the minute the wearer will meet his or her soulmate. (Not as cheesy as it sounds.) Some choose not to have timers, where others rebel and have relationships with people known to contradict their timers. Fatalism, free will, utilitarianism.

· Andrew Niccol, Gattaca (movie, 1997). Future society infused with pre-birth genetic engineering stratifies into genetically unlucky and genetically. Genetically unlucky rebel trades places with genetically lucky man to live out his dream of going to space. Bioethics, free will.

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List from Ben Blumson (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, National University of Singapore):

· Forest Ackerman, “Cosmic Report Card: Earth” (short story, 1973). This short story condenses most of the characteristics of the genre into a single letter.

· Edwin Abbott, Flatland (novel, 1884). A novel set in spaces of different dimensions.

· Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow (novel, 1991). The protagonist of this novel is a Nazi doctor who experiences time in reverse.

· John Barth, “Frame-Tale” (short-story, 1968). This metafiction on the theme of looping time has a twist.

· Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (short story, 1941). This short story is a beautiful illustration of a particularly strange form of anti-realism.

· Roald Dahl, “William and Mary” (short story, 1960). A non-sceptical brain-in-a-vat scenario.

· Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (novel, 1968). A novel about artificial intelligence which makes it difficult to believe that androids could be unconscious.

· Robert Heinlein, “All You Zombies” (short story, 1959). A looping and incestuous time-travel story.

· Ursula K Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”(short story, 1973). A purported reductio of utilitarianism.

· Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince (novel, 1943). This novel contains the most charming counterexamples to the sufficiency of resemblance for representation.

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List from Rachael Briggs (Research Fellow in Philosophy, Australian National University and Griffith University):

· James Tiptree Jr., “Love is the Plan the Plan is Death” (short story, 1973). A sentient arthropod contemplates free will, but everything he wills happens to match the typical life cycle of his species.

· Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (novel, 2003). Brilliant genetic engineer Glenn (“Crake”) is disgusted with human beings, their violence, and their environmental destructiveness. So he destroys the human race, and replaces it with a new species, the “Crakers”, which he has designed as a superior replacement. The story is told by the last surviving human, who was Crake’s best friend before the apocalypse.

· Ryo Hanmura, “Tansu” (short story, 1997). A magical tansu, or chest of drawers, motivates people to sit on top of it all night, chanting mechanically. When asked, people transformed by the tansu unanimously describe the the activity as deeply fulfilling, yet the narrator finds something frightening in the idea of being transformed.

· Joanna Russ, The Female Man (novel, 1975). A woman is introduced to her counterparts from three different possible worlds, in which feminism has taken three different historical courses.

· Rattle issue #38, Tribute to Speculative Poetry (poetry journal, 2012). Poems that explore a wide variety of science fictional and philosophical themes, including the inner life of an android created to be a pleasing companion (“Elise as Android at the Japan! Culture + Hyperculture Festival” by Rebecca Hazelton), various kinds of transformative experience (“The Creature” by Aimee Parkison; “Stairs Appear in a Hole Outside of Town” by John Philip Johnson), the relationship between humans and their pets (“BLACKDOOG™” by Charles Harper Webb), and even the possibility of divine intervention in sports games (“One Possibility” by Marilee Richards).

· Doctor Who, “The Aztecs” (TV serial, 4 episodes, 1964). The Doctor, a time-traveler, takes his companions Barbara, Ian, and Susan to the Aztec Empire in the 15th Century. Barbara is mistaken for the goddess Yetaxa, and immediately put in charge of the empire. She tries to use her power to stop the Aztecs’ human sacrifice, despite the suspicion that this policy creates among her subjects, and the Doctor’s warnings that her inconsistent approach to time travel could endanger the universe.

· Dark Matter: A Century of Science Fiction from the African Diaspora, edited by Sheree R. Thomas and Samuel R. Delany(short story collection, 2000). This varied collection of writing by black science fiction authors addresses the nature and ethics of race, but also explores a range of other philosophical questions, including: “How can a vampire live ethically, given her dietary needs?” (“Chicago 1967”, by Jewelle Gomez); “What would it be to borrow someone’s eyes and see from their perspective?” (“Can You Wear My Eyes”, by Kalamu y Salam); “How can human beings construct dignified lives in the face of an incurable terminal illness?” (“The Evening and the Morning and the Night”, by Octavia Butler) and “Who owns the rights to Santa Claus?” (“Future Christmas”, by Ishmael Reed).

· Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics (short story collection, 1968). Old man Qfwfq recounts the reader with stories of his youth, when he and his relatives witnessed the Big Bang, the formation of the galaxies, the time when the moon was so close to the earth you could jump from one to the other, the evolution of land animals, and other historic events.

· Jose Saramago, “The Centaur” (short story, 1978, English translation by Nadine Gordimer, 2004). An old centaur, oppressed by the human population, and frustrated by the struggle between his horse part and his human part, returns home to the sea.

· Alex Temple, Switch: A Science Fiction Micro-Opera (work of music, 2013, recorded in performance by the Cadillac Moon Ensemble). In a society that draws deep class distinctions between the left-handed and the right-handed, a group of “hand offenders” rebels against the social categories on offer.

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List from Matthew Brophy (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, High Point University):

· Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon (novel, 2002): A deceased mercenary is “uploaded” into a technologically augmented body to solve a mystery, 500 years in the future.

· Richard K. Morgan, Thirteen (novel, 2007): A genetically enhanced soldier is tasked with hunting down renegade “thirteens” like himself.

· Christopher Nolan, The Prestige (movie, 2006): Dueling magicians each make the ultimate sacrifice to perfect an astounding trick.

· Robert Venditti, Surrogates (comic book, 2005-2006): When android avatars, remotely controlled by human users, start to be mysteriously murdered, one detective must unplug in order to stop a societal genocide of surrogates and humans alike.

· James Cameron, Avatar (movie, 2009): A wheelchair-bound marine finds new freedom and identity as a bio-engineered alien.

· Christopher Nolan, Inception (movie, 2010): A con-man transverses through layers of shared dreams in this mind-bending “heist” movie.

· Rian Johnson, Looper (movie, 2012): A hit-man for the mob “terminates” other contract-killers, who are sent back in time when their contract is up.

· Duncan Jones, Source Code (movie, 2012): A soldier repeatedly awakens on a train, as another man who has mere minutes to find and defuse a time-bomb that will kill them all.

· Mike Cahill, Another Earth (movie, 2011): The appearance of a duplicate earth brings hope to a promising young student that a tragic accident she’s caused may have been averted on the twin earth.

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List from Ross Cameron (Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Virginia):

· Philip K Dick, Ubik (novel, 1969). As with many of Dick’s novels, his characters inhabit a disturbing world where appearances and reality seem to come apart, and out of multiple potential versions of reality, it’s not clear what is real, if anything.

· Alan Moore, Watchmen (comic, 1986-87). An otherwise realistic world contains an almost omnipotent superhero. His perception of time raises questions about free will and evitability, and his presence raises difficult moral and political questions.

· Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana (novel, 1990). A sorcerous dictator keeps his political enemies subordinated by making it literally impossible for them to express their shared sense of cultural identity.

· China Miéville, Embassytown (novel, 2011). An alien society that cannot speak falsely first learns from humans how to make similes, and ultimately learns how to lie, changing them irrevocably.

· Robert Heinlein, “All You Zombies” (short story, 1958). In a world where time travellers are responsible for going back to ensure that history happens as it did, a potential recruit is forced to grapple with the problem of other minds.

· Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: A Game of You (comic collection, 1993). A young woman encounters an imaginary character from her childhood, leading her and her female friends on a journey that causes them to examine their identity as friends and as women.

· Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (novel, 1985). In a near future - and a very close possible world - a theocratic dictatorship has emerged in which women are severely repressed and must struggle to gain agency and community.

· Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 5 (TV series, 2000-01). Buffy goes from being an only child to having a teenage sister overnight. Various characters grapple with their own identity, and what to do when duty seems to pull you in one direction and acting according to your nature another.

· Melinda Snodgrass (writer), Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Measure of a Man” (TV episode, 1989). The artificial intelligence, Data, is forced to go on trial to prove that he has the right to self-determination and is not the property of Starfleet.

· Paul Verhoeven, Total Recall (movie, 1990). In a world where memories can be implanted and erased, a man struggles to know who he is and what is real.

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List from Joe Campbell (Professor of Philosophy, Washington State University):

· Robert A. Heinlein, “—All You Zombies—” (short story, 1959). Classic sci-fi story that involves an especially interesting paradox of time travel.

· Futurama, “Roswell That Ends Well” (TV episode, 2001). An explicit example of the grandfather paradox of time travel, with shades of Robert A. Heinlein’s “—All You Zombies—.”

· Richard Kelly, Donnie Darko (movie, 2001). An example of the many-worlds interpretation of time travel, where time travel to the past requires travel to a different possible world that branches from the actual world. (See David Deutsch; J. Richard Gott; John Carroll et. al., A Time Travel Dialogue, 2014.)

· Terry Gilliam, Twelve Monkeys (movie, 1995). An example of the no-change view of time travel, where people travel to the past but there are no alterations of past events. (See David Lewis, “The Paradoxes of Time Travel” (1976); J. Richard Gott; John Carroll et. al.)

· Andrew Niccol, Gattaca (movie, 1997). Issues in bioethics, especially genetic determinism, free will, and moral responsibility.

· Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange (movie, 1971). Great for discussions about free will, moral responsibility, and punishment. One of the few films that asks the question: Can you be praiseworthy if you could not have done otherwise?

· Stephen Spielberg, Minority Report (movie, 2002). Covers the topic of pre-punishment: Can we punish people, or hold them morally responsible, for acts that they (arguably) will commit yet have not yet committed? (Based on the Philip K. Dick short story of the same name, 1956. See Saul Smilansky, “Determinism and Prepunishment: the Radical Nature of Compatibilism”, 2007.)

· Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (movie, 1982). Covers issues in philosophy of mind: consciousness and the possibility of artificial intelligence. Also, an illustration of film as philosophy (Mulhall, 2008). (Based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968. In On Film (2008, 2nd edition), Stephen Mulhall contends that there is a philosophical debate about the nature of mortality between Leon (a replicant) and Deckard (a blade runner hired to “retire” Leon), Ch. 20, Director’s Cut DVD. This is also discussed in the Philosophy Bites episode, “Stephen Mulhall on Film as Philosophy.”)

· Andy & Lana Wachowski, The Matrix; The Matrix Reloaded; The Matrix Revolutions (movies, 1999 & 2003). Deal with a spectrum of philosophical issues, especially knowledge vs. skepticism, realism vs. antirealism, free will and determinism, and subjectivity vs. objectivity about meaning and value. (Compare Cypher’s choice fromThe Matrix DVD, Ch. 19, with Robert Nozick’s experience machine thought experiment, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974).

· Honorable mentions (knowledge vs. skepticism): Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990); The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998); Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001).

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List from Mason Cash (Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Florida):

· Iain M. Banks, “The State of the Art” (short story, 1991). The Culture (featured in many of Banks’ SF/Space Opera novels), is a post-scarcity libertarian technological utopia, in which AI minds take care of just about all the heavy thinking and planning, and humanoid inhabitants can do and be whatever they want. The theme through many of these novels is how messed up people can still be in such a utopia. A Culture ship and its human crew discover Earth in 1977, at the height of the Cold War and on the brink of nuclear armageddon. Our narrator argues for contact. Another wants to defect to Earth (inconceivably to many of his colleagues). Another argues that the whole insane planet should be destroyed with a micro-black hole. The limits of utopia, the beauty of flawed humanity, the role of scarcity and risk and fragility in human life, and the possibility that important aspects of life might be lost when one can have and do whatever one likes, for as long as one likes.

· Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail (novel, 2010). Once any civilization develops realistic artificial realities, in which people can upload themselves and live, religious fanatics inevitably use this tech to make sure that there really is a Hell, in which “deserving” people can now be subjected to unending torture and torment. A war is being fought in a series of different virtual realities, to determine whether these Hells should exist. The anti-hell side (including the above mentioned Culture) is losing. Should the virtual war be brought into the real world, if it means saving millions of intelligent beings from eternal torment?

· Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine (a collection of connected short stories, 1957). Possibly the most charming existential novel you will find. Douglas Spaulding, 12 years old, living in Green Town Illinois in 1927, realizes that he is alive. But with that comes the realization that one day he also will die. A rumination about what it means to really live, love, and be happy. It’s not obviously SF, but by an SF author, and includes a time machine, an attempt to build a virtual reality “happiness machine” (c.f. Nozick’s “experience machine”), a tragic love story about a reincarnated lover, a ready-to-die great-grandma’s thoughts on immortality, a 9 year old’s inspiring thoughts on happy endings, a serial killer horror story and the need for scary stories that add danger to life, a mechanical gypsy fortune-teller who cries for help, and bottling all the joys of a summer day into a bottle of dandelion wine.

· Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (novel, 2008). Irrefutable proof of an alien civilization is discovered, and we could get there in just a few years’ travel time. While the UN is deliberating about what to do, the Jesuits recognize a message from God in the circumstances of the discovery, and so organize a secret Mission to this world. But the mission ends in horrific disaster. A Jesuit priest and linguist is the sole survivor, rescued 40 years later, now broken, bitter, disillusioned, and reluctant to discuss the mission. Alternating chapters set at the beginning and end of the mission explore how this disaster happened. Themes of interspecies interpretation (and misinterpretation), what the existence of an alien civilization means for religion (is our God also their God?), interpretation of God’s will (if He so obviously wanted us to go there, how could He let it become such a disaster)?

· Neal Stephenson, Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (novel, 1995). A cyberpunk novel set in a post-scarcity (sort of) world in which any material can be constructed by nanotechnology “compilers” out of “the Feed”; a supply pipe of energy and basic elements. A wealthy engineer creates an AI “primer” book that will provide the best possible education for his daughter, by telling her stories that teach her about life and help instill whatever skills she will need (the book is a combination of AI adaptive scriptwriter that learns what its person needs, and a remote human actor who gives the script real human voice and emotion). The primer falls into the hands of Nell, a slum dweller. Explores the role of education, the economics and class structure of a post-scarcity Earth, the power of those who control the Feed, and artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

· Neal Stephenson, Anathem (novel, 2008). In this advanced-tech world, Arbre, “avout” academics are cloistered from “saecuar” society, living simple lives in monastic institutions (“concents”) doing science, philosophy, and studying -- over thousands of years -- the way the civilizations outside their walls rise and fall. Many of the academics have views paralleling Earth philosophers and scientists. A recurring debate between advocates of platonic realism and mathematical formalism plays a role in solving a mystery/problem/potential threat of world-changing scale and significance. (Geek fun: identify the Earth philosopher/scientist whose views are paralleled.)

· Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (movie, 1982). Biologically engineered artificial intelligence “replicants” are indistinguishable from humans in almost every way. But they are not seen as “persons”. Humans fear them, and have banned them from Earth, they are only used off-world slave labor. They also have a four-year life-span. The main character, Deckard, is a Bladerunner, whose job is to hunt and “retire” any replicants found on Earth. A group of them have returned to Earth, because they are nearing four years, and don’t want to die. Are they really alive, and deserving of respect and autonomy? Or are they mere machines, that can be “retired” with impunity? Explores the important ethical dimensions of AI, especially critiquing the idea that humans are special as pure hubris, motivated by an unjustified belief in the “supremacy” of the biological over the artificial. (See alsoBattlestar Galactica (2004-9), Bicentennial Man, and Star Trek TNG’s “Measure of a Man” episode).

· George H.R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire (HBO drama 2011- / novels 1996- ). An extended meditation on the nature of power, set in a mediaeval/magical world. Many aspects of political philosophy are explored here. Political power, military power, religious influence, wealth, the institutions of nobility and inheritance, the irrelevance of “fairness”, the “soft” power of women in a patriarchy, the limitations of “honorable” conduct in a dishonorable world, the perceived importance (or not) of familial love and bonds, the military advantages of powerful weapons (dragons), the plight of the common people when “powerful” people go to war for more power, the horrors of war, what successful leadership requires, the distraction of human power-games in the face of a largely-ignored world-threatening common problem....

· Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (five book “trilogy” 1979-92; also 1978-80 radio play, 2005 movie, 1984 video game, a comic book, and a set of towels). SF comedy classic; tells the story of a “wholly remarkable book” through the story of Arthur Dent, an Earthling whose planet is destroyed to make room for a hyperspace bypass and his friend Ford Prefect who turns out to be from a planet near Betelgeuse, and who writes for the book. (Ironically the story of Arthur Dent is often punctuated by excerpts from the book.) The book’s entire entry on the planet Earth reads “Mostly harmless”. Explores many philosophical ideas. See especially the Total Perspective Vortex, a proof of God’s existence (which thus proves that He cannot exist), the End of the Universe, an ethical meat that wants to be eaten, a virtual reality universe, and a supercomputer programmed to compute the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (philosophers threaten to strike if the machine does their job, until the machine proposes a better idea). Also reveals the true origin of the Earth and of Humanity.

· Paul Verhoeven/ Phillip K Dick, Total Recall (movie, 1990; very loosely based on a PKD short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”). Themes of memory and identity; illusion and reality. Who are you really? and what is “real” anyway? Quaid dreams about Mars. He tries resolving this by taking a virtual vacation involving installing memories of a spy-themed adventure to Mars. Quaid emerges to realize he might be a spy who had had his memory erased, and who has mistakenly believed he was an ordinary guy. But is this really happening, or is the whole thing taking place in the virtual vacation? Who is Quaid “really”; a spy/assassin who thought he was an ordinary guy, or an ordinary guy who used to be a spy/assassin, or just an ordinary guy dreaming he is a spy (who used to be an assassin)? What matters more, who we “really” are, or who we choose to be?

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List from David Chalmers (Professor of Philosophy, New York University and Australian National University):

· john campbell, “the last question” (short story, 1932): the first and still the best singularity fiction: machines design smarter machines in order to design even smarter machines.

· isaac asimov, the end of eternity (novel, 1955): most philosophers like “consistent” time travel with a single timeline, but i love the complex structure here with time police hanging out in metatime.

· douglas adams, hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy (series of radio shows and novels, 1980ish): the babel fish disproves god; the cow wants to be eaten; the total perspective vortex; time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so; and 42.

· robert zemeckis, back to the future 2 (movie, 1989): another complex model of metatime -- i set my students to work trying to figure out the model of time travel here, and they at least got close.

· greg egan, “learning to be me” (short story, 1990): permutation city is great even if it’s philosophically incoherent, but this is a much tighter piece about consciousness and identity.

· andy & lana wachowski, the matrix (movie, 1999): still the best brain-in-vat and virtual reality movie, and it raises almost every issue in philosophy.

· christopher nolan, memento (movie, 2000): a wonderful depiction of the extended mind and pathologies of extended memory.

· charles stross, accelerando (novel, 2005): like most singularity fiction, the depiction of superintelligence is disappointing, but the exospecs get the extended mind right.

· ramez naan, nexus (novel, 2012): the philosophy doesn’t run so deep here, but it’s wildly entertaining neuroscience fiction.

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List from Stephen Clark (Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Liverpool):

· John C. Wright, The Golden Age (novels, 2002-2003). Set in a very far future capitalist utopia, about to be threatened by a very different form of society. Questions about identity, humanity, social control are implicit, and there are even clear and fairly compelling arguments, mostly drawn from Stoic sources, about the rational roots of ethics.

· C. J. Cherryh, Cyteen (novel, 1988). Issues about identity, cloning, slavery, enacted in part of Cherryh’s Alliance/Union universe.

· C. J. Cherryh, Chanur sequence (novels, 1981-1992). Issues about biological or cultural roots of behaviour, represented through several well-imagined intelligent species in an interstellar, multi-species compact.

· Lois McMaster Bujold, the Vorkosigan sequence (novels, 1986-2012), especially Memory (1996). Importance of memory for stable identity, dealing with temptation, social structures.

· Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (novel, 1953). The price of utopia, evolutionary leaps. Could an unchanged humanity be at home in the cosmos?

· C. S. Lewis, Ransom trilogy (novels, 1938-1945), especially That Hideous Strength (1945), which explores some of the ideas in his The Abolition of Man. Roots of morality, social pressures and wickedness.

· Philip K. Dick, Time out of Joint (novel, 1958) Not his best, nor yet his most disturbed, fantasy, but a neat demonstration of what it would be like to discover that one’s entire life and surroundings are fake!

· Clifford Simak, City (novel, 1952). Tales told about humanity by posthuman dogs - conflicting values of individual and collective; robot intelligence; cross-species compassion.

· George Effinger, When Gravity Fails (novel, 1986). What would it be like to be able to load new characters or new talents via computer add-ons, set in a future dominated by Muslim (and mostly criminal) culture. There were two sequels, continuing the story, but without any final resolution.

· Ruthanna Emrys, “The Litany of Earth” (short story, 2014). Set in Lovecraft’s cosmos - but turning Lovecraft’s racism round entirely so that the followers of Cthulhu et al. are a persecuted minority who know and accept that humanity is transient.

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List from Ellen Clarke (Postdoctoral Fellow of Philosophy, Oxford):

· Octavia Butler, Blood Child (short story, 1995). Men are forced to bear the progeny of aliens in a gory and powerfully emotional analogy of motherhood, portrayed as a paradoxically enjoyable form of abuse.

· John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (novel, 1951). Giant deadly shrubs ambulate around a London riven by a plague of blindness. Moody, scary, tense, dark. An early pioneer of biological scifi, Wyndham reminds us that plants can be evil too.

· Larry Niven, A Hole in Space (short stories, collected 1974). The master of ‘soft’ (sociological) sci fi, Niven was visionary at thinking through the human consequences of new technologies. Teleportation here acts as social lighter fluid, enabling the formation of dangerously volatile ‘flash mobs’, as well as adding new depths a to murder mystery challenge.

· Philip K Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (novel, 1974). If Dick doesn’t make you paranoid you’re probably not real. Here he explores celebrity and identity via a drug which snatches the targets of a users thoughts into a parallel reality.

· Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (novel, 1932). Noble savage meets techno-enhanced scientific rational future and comes off badly.

· George Orwell, 1984 (novel, 1949). A vivid polemic on the human cost of political authoritarianism, whose original ideas and phrases - Big Brother, Room 101 - are now firmly in the mainstream.

· Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (novel, 1953). State-administered book burning, anaesthetised life, an eloquent hymn to the power of the written idea.

· Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan (novel, 1959). A starkly beautiful spiral through loneliness, omniscience and the meaning of life.

· J G Ballard, The Disaster Area (short stories, collected 1967). A masterpiece of unsettling darkness. What happens if we switch off sleep? How does it feel to live in a towerblock of infinite height and breadth? What would life look like in reverse?

· Raccoona Shelton, “The Screw Fly Solution” (short story, 1977). We succumb to aliens as screw flies succumb to our biological controls.....a pitchblack feminist nightmare.

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List from Helen De Cruz (Postdoc in Philosophy, University of Oxford, and blogger):

· Ursula Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness (novel, 1969). Explores a society where its inhabitants do not have a gender.

· Daniel F Galouye, Dark Universe (novel, 1961). What’s it like to be blind, not just to be blind but to live in a world where everyone is blind and relies on echolocation?

· Daniel F. Galouye, Simulacron-3 (novel, 1964). There are several books and movies on the brains in a vat/deceiving demon theme (e.g., most famously, The Matrix), but if I had to pick a favorite, this would be it.

· Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light (novel, 1967). Features naturalistic versions of Hindu gods and reincarnation. Can the status quo be challenged by introducing Buddhism?

· Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (novel, 1966). Heinlein’s lunar society exhibits his libertarian ideas, as well as the view that there’s no such thing as a free lunch (expressed in the awkward acronym TANSTAAFL).

· Robert Heinlein, “Jerry Was a Man” (short story, 1947). Ponders the issue of human rights for nonhuman animals and what it means for someone to be human, with the protagonist, a genetically-modified chimpanzee.

· Richard Garfinkle, Celestial Matters (novel, 1996). Assumes that ancient science describes accurately how the world works - so we have things like Aristotelian physics, spontaneous generation, taoist Chinese alchemy, and geocentrism with real spheres in space.

· Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon (novel, 1966). On personal identity and mental disability.

· P.D. James, Children of Men (novel, 1992). Social criticism and theological reflection focusing on the results of mass infertility.

· Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (novel, 1954). If you’re the last surviving human in a vampire-apocalypse, does it make sense to want to survive? And who is the monster, to be feared, in a new world populated by vampires?

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List from Johan De Smedt (post-doc in philosophy, Ghent University):

· Battlestar Galactica: Home, part 2 (TV series, 2005-2006): What is the identity of beings (cylons) that always reincarnate upon death, and that have several clones living concurrently (some friendly to humans, others hostile to them)?

· Jack Vance, The Languages of Pao (novel, 1957): sketches a universe in which a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true.

· Richard Cowper, The Twilight of Briareus (novel, 1974): universal infertility and the fate of humanity/human cultures if there is no next generation, a trope that has been taken on by several other books (also P.D. James’s Children of Men, Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard).

· Robert A. Heinlein, Job: A comedy of justice (novel, 1984): C.S. Lewis meets David Lewis. A literalist interpretation of the Book of Job playing out across multiple actualized possible worlds.

· Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn (novel, 2008): sketches the perfect postmortem human body as outlined in the hereafter of e.g., Aquinas.

· Richard Adams, Watership Down (novel, 1972): alien society at the bottom of the food chain (rabbits!), experiments in diverse political systems, and the role of religion (prophecy, adherence to culture hero) in political decision making.

· Joss Whedon, Serenity (movie, 2005): How far can a government go to enforce its ideals upon its citizens (follow up of the space Western television series Firefly)?

· Joe Haldeman The Forever War (novel, 1974): two species are sucked into an interstellar war against unknowable enemies with an incomprehensible psyche. Human veterans have to adapt to cultures with norms that are ever more remote from the society they originate from.

· Daniel F. Galouye, Dark Universe (novel, 1961): about perception in a post-apocalyptic underground world without light (some cultures use echolocation, others have adapted to infrared seeing).

· Daniel F. Galouye, Simulacron-3 (novel, 1964): the ultimate brains-in-a-vat/evil demon story, superior to and predating The Matrix.

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List from Josh Dever (Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin):

· Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves (novel, 2000). The opening of chapter 4 is a beautiful test case in whether a tiny datum can drive a massive theory change.

· Samuel Delany, Dhalgren and Triton (novels, 1975 and 1976). Explorations of just about every imaginable alternative sociological and political structure and theory.

· Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth (novel, 1976). Time stopped in the first century AD, and restarted in 1945. Come up with a theory of time to make that consistent!

· Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (novel, 1980). Like that Star Trek episode “Darmok”, except, you know, good. Also, best post-apocalyptic novel ever by a significant author of children’s literature.

· Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, “Quadraturin” (short story, 192-something). There’s a superabundance of science fiction about weird physics and metaphysics of time, but a disappointing dearth of the same with space. This is an exception.

· Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Author of the Acacia Seeds, and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics” and “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” (short stories, 1982 and 1973). The first: always nice when science fiction remembers that linguistics is a science. The second: a powerful counterexample, but note only to certain forms of consequentialism. Think of it as an argument for good social choice theory.

· China Miéville, Embassytown and The City & The City (novels, 2011 and 2009). The first is a fun, if a bit clunky, bit of exploratory philosophy of language. The second is a particularly adventurous instance of exploratory metaphysics.

· Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, Episode 19 (portion of a novel, 1997). The story of the missing eleven days resulting from the transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. More fun metaphysics of time, plus a bit of philosophies of language and gender.

· David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (novel, 1996). Philosophy by virtue of mentioning “Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality”, science fiction by virtue of being set in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarmet, fun by virtue of including basically everything in between.

· H.G. Wells, “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes” (short story, 1895). The definitive counterexample to immunity to error through misidentification.

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List from Kenny Easwaran (Associate Professor of Philosophy, Texas A&M):

· Charles Stross, Accelerando (novel, 2005) - how much computer enhancement and dissociation of the self is compatible with remaining human? what are the differences between a software algorithm, a legal system, an organism, and a religion, and can all of them potentially be conscious?

· Neal Stephenson, Anathem (novel, 2008) - academics cut themselves off from causal contact with the world in order to develop theoretical knowledge independent of social and political fads. Trans-world communication plays an important role.

· George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire (series of novels, 1991-present) - the main plot content is not especially philosophical, but this series raises questions of the extent to which families rather than individuals are the units of action, in a world that is more economically and historically developed than most fantasy.

· David Gerrold, The Man Who Folded Himself (novel, 1973) - how many roles can one person play in a time travel love story?

· David Brin, Kiln People (novel, 2002) - there is technology for creating clones that can live for a day, and which have most or all of the capacities of the individual. The novel investigates consequences for economics, privacy, politics, and health, in the midst of a noir set in future Los Angeles.

· Greg Egan, Axiomatic (short story collection, 1995) - each story in this collection develops a strikingly original idea. In “The Hundred Light-Year Diary”, a method for sending messages to the past is invented, and everyone learns future history as well as past history, and is issued their life-long diary as soon as they can read. Rather than investigating free will and fatalism, the story investigates the political role of information. Several stories investigate computational alteration or replacement of biological brains and their consequences for moral responsibility and personal survival and identity. Some are more comedic.

· P.D. James / Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men (novel 1992, movie 2006) - centers on themes that have recently been explored by Sam Scheffler about the role of the ongoing existence of humanity in giving meaning to the life of an individual.

· Christopher Nolan, Batman: The Dark Knight (movie, 2008) - classic puzzles from decision theory and ethics are given the twist of unreliability.

· Duncan Jones, Moon (movie, 2009) - explores issues of personal identity and the ethical issues of technology related to space travel for the purposes of dangerous work. (Easwaran)

· Christopher Priest / Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan, The Prestige (novel 1995, movie 2006) - two different ways of performing the same magic trick raise very different worries about personal identity and one’s moral obligations to oneself.

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List from Simon Evnine (Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Miami):

· Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (novel, 1993). Gender roles, and the significance of empathy in discharging our responsibilities for each other.

· Michael Flynn, Eifelheim (novel, 2006). Aliens appear in a medieval German village; a deep reflection on love and sacrifice.

· Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (novel, 1980). Hermeneutics: In the far future, a story about people trying to make sense of their distant past (us), told in an invented dialect that makes it equally a problem for us to make sense of them.

· Liz Jensen, The Uninvited (novel, 2012). The nature of the adult world, and its relation to children and the future.

· Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice (novel, 2013). Having a divided mind, and the existence of social divisions, take on a whole new meaning when agents are composed of multiple people.

· Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (novel, 1969). The meaning of gender is explored when a male protagonist comes to a planet inhabited by humans who change their gender naturally.

· Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child (novel, 1988). How do we deal with the intolerable when we have an obligation to care for it?

· Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep (novel, 1992). A story involving a variety of kinds of minds, including transcendent minds, human minds infused by transcendent minds, and group minds.

· Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger (novel, 2009). How well do we know ourselves?

· Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun (4 novels, 1983). A haunting work about the experience of finitude.

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List from Keith Frankish (Senior Visiting Research Fellow, The Open University, and Adjunct Professor, Mind and Brain Program, University of Crete):

· Henry James, “The Jolly Corner” (short story, 1908). Revisiting his childhood home, a middle-aged man confronts his monstrous alter ego and achieves a sort of redemption. Raises questions about choice, responsibility, character, and personal identity. (For a different take on the same theme, see Basil Dearden’s 1970 film, The Man Who Haunted Himself, starring Roger Moore.)

· George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (novel, 1949). In a grimy Stalinist state, thought is controlled, history rewritten, and the minds of nonconformists ruthlessly reshaped. Themes include collectivism, power, censorship, propaganda, and the relation between language and thought.

· Nigel Kneale, The Year of the Sex Olympics (TV play, 1968). Depicts a future in which an elite pacify and control the rest of the population through sensationalist reality television. Themes of hedonism, populism, and the role of the mass media. Parallels with Plato’s case against the poets.

· Alain Resnais, Je t’aime, Je t’aime (movie, 1968). A man time travels through the last year of a tragic relationship, re-experiencing events in random order. Uses time travel as a metaphor for memory and the way we construct our identities through narrative.

· Terry Nation et al., Survivors (TV series, 1975-7). A plague wipes out most of humanity and the few survivors try to rebuild society. The series explores political and philosophical issues, including the relation between the individual and the collective, the trade-off between freedom and security, and gender politics. Highlights include the episodes “Law and Order”, “Lights of London”, and “Over the Hills”.

· Andrei Tarkovsky, Sacrifice (Swedish: ‘Offret’) (movie, 1986). A man makes an irrational personal sacrifice in order to prevent a nuclear war. A poetic film that is open to many interpretations (including religious ones), but which is broadly about how we give meaning to our lives.

· Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Inner Light” (TV episode, 1992). An alien probe causes Captain Picard to experience life in a long-dead civilization. A touching episode, which deals with identity, memory, survival, and the representation of time.

· Greg Egan, Diaspora (novel, 1997). A story of software-based posthumans, who can create their own identities and virtual environments. Explores what life might be like when completely freed from biology and massively enhanced by technology.

· Peter Watts, Blindsight (novel, 2006). An intelligent spaceship crewed by neurologically enhanced humans makes first contact with a terrifyingly alien species, while a narrator skilled in reading body language struggles to make sense of it all. Raises questions about the nature of intelligence and the function of phenomenal consciousness. This book is like crack cocaine for philosophers of mind.

· Duncan Jones, Moon (movie, 2009). A solitary moon worker discovers that he is merely a token of a person-type. (Or is he the type?)

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List from Steven Horst (Chair of Philosophy, Wesleyan University)

· C.S. Lewis, Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet /Perelandra / That Hideous Strength (novels, 1938-1945). Notable for using the sci-fi genre to explore Christian ideas of the fall, intelligent aliens, angels, celestial intelligences, magic, and the dangers of totalitarianism wrapped in the mantle of science.

· Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver / The Confusion / The System of the World (novels, 2003-2005). Set as historical novels and developed around the core of interactions between Newton and Leibniz, explores the origins of modern systems of science and finance in counterpoint with alchemical memes.

· Neal Stephenson, Anathem (novel, 2008). At the risk of a major spoiler, this book explores ideas of the quantum multiverse, with the added bonus that some characters are stand-ins for the views of people like Husserl, Gödel, and Bohr.

· Madeline L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time / A Wind in the Door / A Swiftly Tilting Planet (novels, 1962-1978). This may have been my first introduction to science fiction as a child, and while it is not the most intellectually challenging series about time travel (and dimensional travel, in the case of the memorable Cherubim that is both singular and plural), it is perhaps still the most memorable and endearing.

· Andy & Lana Wachowski, The Matrix (movie, 1999). Not only the most influential movie about virtual reality, but one that implicitly poses interesting questions about what counts as “real”, as the Matrix-world is both the world we assume to be reality and is thoroughly intersubjective.

· Larry Niven, Ringworld and sequels (novels, starting 1970). An enormous engineered world encircling a distant star provides a context for exploration of the variability of the human phenotype and contrasts with two alien species and a third that turns out to not be as alien as we first imagine.

· Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Measure of a Man” (TV episode, 1989). The trial to determine whether the Android Data is a person or the property of Star Fleet provides the context for an engaging exploration of personhood and artificial life.

· Battlestar Galactica (TV series, 2003-2009). Over six seasons, we are drawn into an increasingly complicated dialectic about the original metallic Cylons, the Cylon “skin jobs”, and by implication, the nature of humanity and personhood, as well as some teaser forays into shared virtual reality that were to be explored in the uncompleted prequel series Caprica.

· Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud (novel, 1957). The late British astronomer’s novel starts out looking like a novel about a disaster from deep space, but takes a turn to explore the prospects of communication with an alien intelligence very different from ourselves.

· J.R.R. Tolkien, “Ainulindalë” (in The Silmarillion, published 1977). Tolkien’s Neo-Platonic creation myth puts the rest of the stories about Middle Earth in a distinctly different cosmic context, hints of which can be seen in the better-known works only after one has read the cosmic “backstory”.

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List from Troy Jollimore (Professor of Philosophy, Cal State Chico, and poet):

· Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star (novel, 1974): Human scientists confront an apparent message from the far reaches of space, and come up against their own very human limitations in doing so. Makes a great pair with Lem’s His Master’s Voice (and, to a degree, Solaris).

· Terry Gilliam, Brazil (movie, 1985): A very dark, very funny dystopian film that explores the individual vs. the state, and whose conclusion has some interesting connections with Nozick’s Experience Machine. The excellent and very witty script was largely written by British playwright Tom Stoppard.

· Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (novel, 2005): Chronicles the plight of cloned humans (who do not know they are clones) raised for the sole purpose of donating their organs to “ordinary” humans. Sensitive, beautiful, and far-reaching.

· P.D. James, The Children of Men (novel, 1992): What would life on Earth be like if human beings suddenly lost the ability to have children? This novel is a compelling and disturbing imagining of the extinction of the human race that feels, to me, much more vivid and real than nearly any other apocalyptic work of fiction I can think of. (Samuel Scheffler cites the novel in his book, Death and the Afterlife; reading the two in conjunction would be productive.) The 2006 film, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is also excellent.

· Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (movie, 2004): A thoughtful, disturbing, and funny exploration of some of the possibilities, implications, and dangers of memory-altering technology.

· Ursula K. LeGuin, Always Coming Home (novel, 1985): A very nonstandard imagining of a potential human future, set in Northern California, in which humans have returned to a largely primitive and peaceful state of existence, turning their backs on consumerism and, for the most part, technology. A lovely act of anthropological imagination.

· Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (novel, 1961; English translation 1970): Astronauts on a station in a distant part of the galaxy confront a massive and deeply inscrutable alien being that may or may not be attempting to communicate with them, and people (or rather, reproductions of people) from their pasts, who may in fact be the alien’s attempt to communicate. Unforgettable and genuinely profound. (The 1972 Andrei Tarkovsky film alters the ending and, to some degree, the thematic focus, but it is also fabulous and very beautiful in its own right, a true cinematic masterpiece.)

· Stanislaw Lem, His Master’s Voice (novel, 1968; English translation 1983): A thoughtful and intelligent imagination of “first contact” girded by a deep pessimism about the possibilities of transcending the conceptual boundaries set by one’s species nature. It would be interesting to read this (and/or Ratner’s Star and/orSolaris) in combination with Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” etc.

· Boris & Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (novel, 1971; various English translations available). Yet another book about the difficulties of communicating with alien intelligences. (I seem to have a theme here – or an obsession.) Humans deal with the incomprehensible after-effects of an alien visitation. The novel was the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, Stalker.

· Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (novel, 1952): A satire of industrial and cultural automation in the near future, where technology has rendered most humans superfluous. Still one of the most intelligent deep critiques of the dangers of technology to be found in fiction.

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List from Eric Kaplan (TV writer and blogger who did philosophy grad work at U.C. Berkeley):

· Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (novel, 1937) -- What is the purpose of life and history?

· Gene Wolfe, The Hero as Werewolf (novel, 1991) -- What is evil? What is the role of universalizability in ethics?

· Futurama, “Why Must I be a Crustacean in Love?” (TV episode, 2000) -- What’s the relationship between ethics and sociobiology?

· Futurama, “Hell is Other Robots” (TV episode, 1999) -- Feuerbach thesis of the origin of religion -- is religion a human creation and if so what purpose does it serve?

· Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon (novel, 1960) -- What is personal identity?

· Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves (novel, 1972) -- What is personal identity?

· Theodore Sturgeon, Maturity (short stories, 1947-1958) -- What is the purpose of life? What is a well-lived life?

· Lewis Padgett, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (short story, 1943) -- Are other conceptual schemes possible?

· Eric Rücker Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (novel, 1922) -- Nietzsche and the myth of the eternal return -- the heaviest thought.

· G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (novel, 1908) -- Theodicy -- why would a good God allow evil?

· Alice Bradley Sheldon / James Tiptree, Jr., “A Momentary Taste of Being” (short story, 1975) -- biology and the purpose of life.

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List from Jonathan Kaplan (Associate Professor of Philosophy, Oregon State University):

· Michael Coney, The Celestial Steam Locomotive and Gods of the Greataway (novels, 1983, 1984). An adventure story in which various kinds of (post-)humans work together to achieve various ends, only some of which they understand. What is it to be human? to be a person? How should we think about choice and alternative possibilities?

· Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (novel, 1977). (The 2006 movie adaptation is quite faithful to the book.) An undercover drug enforcement agent loses touch with reality. Who are we, when we pretend to be who we are not? To whom do we owe loyalty?

· Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (novel, 1974). In a police state, a TV star wakes up to find he is now a nobody. What is “reality,” and whose reality matters?

· Harlan Ellison, “Shatterday” (short story, 1980). A man discovers that he has split in two. What if there was another you? What if the other you was a better person? What is it to be decent human being, and why does it matter?

· William Gibson, “The Winter Market” (short story, 1985). A producer works directly with artists’ emotions. Does this imply anything about consciousness? About the nature of our experiences? What is art? Some reflection on the potential for immortality.

· Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice (novel, 2013). An embodied fragment of an AI seeks revenge. How should we think about personal identity and responsibility in the case of distributed entities? Does this have any implications for thinking about ourselves?

· Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (novel, 1974). Follows a physicist from an “anarchist” society. Reflections on political systems, morality, political organizing. Do all great dreams fail? Is it the nature of all political systems to decay into bureaucracies, or worse?

· Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Word for World is Forrest” (novella, 1972, later expanded to a novel, 1976). A logging camp on another world uses the native species as slave labor. Reflections on colonialism and responsibility, as well as on social change. What is it to be a person? How do (and how should) societies change?

· George R. R. Martin, “With Morning Comes Mistfall” (short story, 1973). A scientific expedition comes to debunk to a local myth. Is there a value in leaving things unexplored? Should we want science to answer even the all the questions it can answer? Is there any value in remaining willfully ignorant of what we could easily learn?

· Dan Simmons, Phases of Gravity (novel, 1989). The story follows an Apollo astronaut who walked on the moon, as he moves through a world that no longer seems to be moving forward. Where do we find meaning in our lives? How do we reconcile ourselves to the world we find ourselves in?

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List from Brian Keeley (Professor of Philosophy, Pitzer College):

· Jocelyn Moorhouse, Proof (movie, 1991). A very early film of both Russell Crowe and Hugo Weaving (so, fun for that reason alone), in which Weaving plays a curmudgeonly blind person with real trust issues. Part of his worry about being deceived revolves around his lack of access to the visual world, so he has taken to taking photographs, having sighted people tell him what’s in the images, writing that (in braille) on the back, and then checking those descriptions against what other sighted people report. An interesting exploration of epistemology as well as what epistemic standards are appropriate to what situations. DISCLAIMER: Fiction, but not really speculative fiction, but connects in interesting ways with the next piece, which is a bit more speculative.

· H.G. Wells, “The Country of the Blind” (short story, 1904). In this short story, Wells describes an explorer, Nuñez, who accidentally discovers a valley in the Andes separated off from the rest of the world containing a population of humans who have all lost their sight several generations earlier. As such, they no longer believe in the phenomenon of vision. The story follows Nuñez’s frustrating attempts to first rule them (after all, in the country of the blind…) and then later even to convince them that he has access to a sense that they do not have. How would one go about convincing a group of extremely functional blind people, living in an environment that they have adapted to their needs, of the existence of the visual world? Wells argues that it would be harder than one might initially imagine.

· David Cronenberg, eXistenZ (movie, 1999). The story revolves around an virtual reality game in which you play a part in a story about a plot to murder the designer of a virtual reality game (and take a guess what the topic of the game within a game is!). This movie came out the same year as The Matrix and if you ever wondered what might have happened if they had explored the possibility of a Matrix running inside the Matrix, this is your movie. This film pairs well with Descartes’ Meditations by asking how would you know that you were in “reality” as opposed to a well-designed immersive video game? It also explores a number of Sartrean themes (hence, the title) concerning the nature of free will and the roles we adopt in life.

· Spike Jonze / Charlie Kaufman, Being John Malkovich(movie, 1999). A fanciful exploration of issues in personal identity. John Cusack’s character discovers a portal that lets you experience the world from the perspective of actor John Malkovich. It’s fun to get students to explore what’s incoherent in how this process works, according to the film. Also, you can pair this movie with Daniel Shaw’s “On Being Philosophical and Being John Malkovich, which explores the questions of whether and how a film can be “philosophical” or “do philosophy”. Be warned that this film depicts violence towards women and animals. Further, one of the main characters (albeit not a sympathetic one) expresses trans-phobic views.

· Star Trek: The Next Generation , “The Measure of a Man”(1989, TV episode). Can an AI be a person, in the moral sense or legal sense? In this episode, a scientist wishes to disassemble the android (and Second Lieutenant) Data, a procedure that might kill him. The scientist goes as far as arguing that Data is not a person, but property (and hence, has no right to self-determination). A trial is held to determine Data’s status.

· Ted Chiang, “Liking What You See: A Documentary” (short story, 2002). “Lookism” is the idea that how somebody looks -- that is, how attractive they are judged to be by society -- has an undue influence on the advantages and disadvantages a person experiences. If we were able to disable the part of the brain that judges the attractiveness of faces -- if we were able to reversibly induce the brain disorder known as prosopagnosia -- should we? This short story explores that possibility.

· Daniel Suarez (Leinad Zeraus), Daemon and FreedomTM(novels, 2006 & 2010). Originally written as a single work, but eventually published in two volumes, these two books can be seen as an exploration of the implications of a number of technologies currently on the horizon (with some coming to pass even in the few years since they were written). Written in the form of a cyberpunk thriller, AI, drones, 3D-printing, self-replicating autonomous machine warfare, video games, & virtual reality are all thrown into the mix, as an AI begins to organize a conspiracy to control (or at least significantly change) the world. Many themes in philosophy of technology are at play.

· Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (novel, 1884). A classic work written from the point of view of 2-dimensional beings in a 2-D world (the “author” of the book is “A Square”) upon their interaction with the 3rd dimension. Originally, it was renowned for its satire of hierarchical (Victorian) society, but after Einstein, how it handles the idea of there being more dimensions than those with which one is familiar became an important element of how it is read.

· Bruce Sterling, “Swarm” (short story, 1982). What is the function/advantage of intelligence? This story involves an encounter between a group of scientists and a (apparently) non-intelligent, superorganism species that resemble earthly social insects. Sterling’s piece looks at other forms that intelligent life might take.

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List from David Killoren (Ethics Fellow, Coastal Carolina University) & Derrick Murphy (Graduate Student, University of Wisconsin at Madison):
Philosophically interesting episodes of The Twilight Zone (original series)

· “The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine” (S1:E4, 1959). What is the ontological status of fictional worlds? Is it logically possible for an individual to move from the actual world to a fictional world?

· “The Lonely” (S1:E7, 1959). How can we know whether others have minds? What would an android need to do (or to be) in order to be a member of the moral community?

· “Long Live Walter Jameson” (S1:E24, 1960). Is immortality worth having? What moral obligations come with being an immortal who has to interact with mortals?

· “The Eye of the Beholder” (S2:E6, 1960). Is beauty a matter of stance-independent fact, or a social construction, or merely an illusion, or something else altogether? If a person is regarded as ugly by everyone in her society (including herself), does this mean that she really isn’t beautiful?

· “Shadowplay” (S2:E26, 1961). What would I have to do to convince you that I am dreaming and that you’re a figment of my imagination?

· “Nothing in the Dark” (S3:E16, 1962). Why fear death? What would death personified look like?

· “Person or Persons Unknown” (S3:E27, 1962). Is your identity in part constituted by others’ knowledge of your life? If everyone forgets who you are, can you continue to be the same person?

· “Four O’Clock” (S3:E29, 1962). Is it evil to obsess about others’ evils?

· “The Old Man in the Cave” (S5:E7, 1963). Do humans need to have a religion (whether that religion is true or not) in order to rein in our self-destructive impulses?

· “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” (S5:E18, 1964). Is homogeneity an aesthetic defect? Would a hedonistic utopia, in which pleasure levels are high and pain levels are low, really be all that great?

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List from Amy Kind (Professor of Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College) (short stories only):

· Isaac Asimov, “Evidence” (1946). Probes the plausibility of the Turing Test.

· Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal” (1947). An intriguing exploration of why immortality may not be quite what we’d bargained for; pairs well with Bernard Williams’ “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality.”

· Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild” (1995). Explores the nature of gender roles via a story about an alien race who need humans for procreative purposes.

· Arthur Clarke, “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953). Could God’s having a purpose for us provide our lives with meaningfulness?

· Greg Egan, “The Infinite Assassin” (1991). How are we related to our counterparts throughout the multiverse?

· Lois Gould, “X: A Fabulous Child’s Story” (1972). What role does gender identity play in our lives? What would life be like without it?

· Ursula K. Le Guin, “Nine Lives” (1968). What is it like to be a clone? And more specifically, what is it like to have one’s connection to other clones severed after having been raised together with them?

· John Morressy, “Except My Life3” (1991). Another story probing questions of identity via consideration of what life might be like when you’re one of a set of closely connected clones.

· Norman Spinrad, “The Weed of Time” (1970). What would it be like to experience time in a non-linear fashion?

· Roger Zelazny, “For a Breath I Tarry” (1966). A beautiful depiction of a machine’s quest to understand what it is like to be human. (See also Isaac Asimov’s novella, Bicentennial Man and Kurt Vonnegut’s “EPICAC”)

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List from Pete Mandik (Professor of Philosophy, William Paterson University, and co-host of SpaceTimeMind

· Peter Watts, Blindsight (novel, 2006). Cogsci savvy tale in which assorted transhumans and extraterrestrials get by just fine without phenomenal consciousness...or do they?

· Ted Chiang, “Understand” (short story, 1991) Thorough and convincing first-person phenomenology of human super intelligence--you’ll feel like you know what it’s like to get your IQ quadrupled overnight.

· Greg Egan, Diaspora (novel, 1997) Living indefinitely long as a godlike digital posthuman is all well and good, and when you run out of physical universe(s) to explore, there’s solace to be had in math.

· Black Mirror, “Be Right Back” (TV show, 2013) Digital simulacra of the recently departed may be exactly what the grief-stricken don’t want but can’t help but seek. (Mandik)

· Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix Plus (novel, 1995) Deeply weird political and economic turmoil in a solar system infested by post human factions (genetically engineered vs cyborgs) and, eventually, extraterrestrial investors.