by David Rando
Artificial Fiction: Imagining Literary Possibility Beyond the Human imagines great artificial fiction that represents the world in creatively nonhuman ways while challenging how we define and value fiction itself.
Tell us about Artificial Fiction.
This book imagines great artificial fiction—fiction created by an automated telling machine—to challenge some of the human-centered ways we think about fiction and its value. Few are holding their breath for AI to write the great machine version of Middlemarch, including me, but the book’s premise is that the mere idea of great artificial fiction forces us to freshly rethink how the human and the nonhuman relate to fiction, its subjects, and its uses. For instance, how would it change the ways we define fiction and conceive its purposes if we had to specify that something is “human fiction” rather than just “fiction”? My book imagines artificial fiction to reevaluate the limitations and affordances of human fiction. It scrutinizes the unreflective humanism that underlies our theories of fiction. It asks what fiction would be if set adrift from humans and envisions fiction that represents the world in wonderfully non-human-centered ways. I wrote this book, then, as a thought experiment about machine fiction that is oriented toward revaluing fiction today. I argue that in different ways human fiction and artificial fiction can both move our perspectives and emotions, intimate better worlds, and help us to imagine and respect lives and experiences of every variety.
What inspired you to write about artificial fiction?
There is a debate in literary studies and beyond about the limits and possibilities of AI creativity, art, and literature. Some are excited by the prospects, some deny that AI will ever be creative, some want to demystify AI as a masked expression of power relations, and some see the very idea of machine literature as an offense to the human spirit. In contrast, I wanted to take superlative artificial fiction as a given—to treat it as a science fiction, you might say—so that I could think about how our sense of fiction may be limited in ways we are not always aware of but at the same time open to vast expansion.
My grounding in critical social theory made me eager to consider the dialectic between AI’s ongoing capitalist rationalization, monetization, and instrumentalization, on the one side, and, on the other, the utopian energies and hopes that nonetheless attend its emergence. In other words, I wanted to think about AI in the tradition of wishful images as developed by Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. For these thinkers, wishful images are collective expressions that lead delicate existences around new technologies in the short period before capital definitively assimilates them and they can no longer attract our dreams.
Meanwhile, my grounding in critical animal studies, which looks to ways that we might live among other species in less dominating and destructive forms, helped me to think creatively about defining, valuing, and even wishing about fiction beyond the human horizon. My method was thus to join critical social theory and critical animal studies to uncover the nonhuman dimensions of our wishful images about AI and fiction.
What was the most exciting thing about this project for you?
I was excited to imagine what artificial fiction might offer to human readers. It was a chance for me to speculate about new forms of realism and modernism, to imagine new genres generated by machines, and to wonder about the new epistemologies, ontologies, pleasures, and challenges each would present to human readers. It was exciting to use artificial fiction to view human fiction as a sort of niche or genre fiction, thereby clarifying some things that are unique to human fiction while diagnosing its limitations. Human fiction appears in my book not as an arena of universals but of interesting myopias and unexpected human connections and temporalities that creatively cut across the desires of human authors and readers in ways that machines cannot.
It was also unexpected to see how often AI studies and animal studies intersect. It turns out that people who write about animals and those who write about AI often reflect similar concerns about the possibilities for human understanding and community with nonhuman beings. To give just one example, which I analyze about in the book, scholars in animal studies and AI studies both cite Wittgenstein’s aphorism—“If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it”—with striking regularly. So, there’s much to think about in these strangely parallel discourses and I argue that they should be thought together. Additionally, I enjoyed imagining how human writers might collaborate with machines to push the purview of their fictions beyond the already known.
Has your research in this area changed the way you see the world today?
In the social and technological sphere, it has confirmed for me that debates about AI would benefit from being less binary—human versus machine—and that not just environmental studies but also critical animal studies have an important role to play in thinking about AI and in intervening in any discourse that privileges humans (such as humanism) or machines (such as techno-utopianism). In the literary sphere, the project has kept me alive to the multifarious nonhuman affordances of fiction, especially its capacity to grant us experiences of non-human-centeredness that can inspire us to think and live differently with other species and intelligences.
About the author
David P. Rando is professor of English at Trinity University, Texas, USA. In addition to Artificial Fiction: Imagining Literary Possibility Beyond the Human (2026), he is the author of On Fiction and Being a Good Animal (2024), Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts (2023), Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce (2022), Hope and Wish Image in Music Technology (2017) and Modernist Fiction and News (2011).
