Imagining Machines: Understanding AI Through the Lens of Science Fiction

About the Author

Price Doretha is a literary critic and cultural historian specializing in the intersection of technology and narrative. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, where her dissertation examined the role of artificial intelligence in twentieth- and twenty-first-century speculative fiction. Her work has appeared in *Science Fiction Studies*, *Configurations*, and *The Los Angeles Review of Books*, among other publications. She is a former research fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Future of Technology and Society, and has served as a consultant for several media projects exploring AI ethics. Doretha is also the author of *The Silicon Sublime: Dreams of the Machine in American Literature* (2019), which won the Modern Language Association’s Prize for Independent Scholars. She currently teaches courses on science fiction, digital culture, and narrative theory at the University of Washington. *Imagining Machines* is her second book, and grows out of her conviction that the stories we tell about AI are among the most important cultural artifacts of our time. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is at work on a third book about the narrative architecture of virtual worlds.