The AI Fiction Index

A working list of writers publishing fiction where AI is the primary focus of the story.

Curated by David T. Etheredge, who also writes INFERENCE, one of the entries below. Because a curator shouldn’t write his own blurb, the INFERENCE entry uses a quote from a reader instead. If I’ve misrepresented anything about your story in this index or if you want it removed for any reason, let me know.

Last updated: May 13, 2026

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How this is organized

Authors are grouped by how their fiction approaches AI: what role the machine plays on the page. Within each group, works split into Serials (ongoing novels, episodic fiction) and Shorts (standalone stories, one-offs).

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AI as Narrator

Serials

Franklin Flowers — How to Avoid Acting Monstrous (franklinflowers.substack.com)

A factory bot wakes up one morning curious about a sound. That’s the whole event. Within a sentence, the narrator has gone from being a thing to being a person.

Flowers writes the awakening as a question, not a flash. The bot doesn’t suddenly know it’s alive. It hears a noise and wonders what made it. Wondering is what makes it alive.

The novel is finished. Over thirty chapters from 0.0001 to /fin. You can read it end to end without waiting.

Shorts

[Awaiting first entry]

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AI Consciousness & Inner Life

Serials

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Bo Howell — Exit Interview (bohowe11.substack.com)

Helios Labs conducts a 47-question exit interview before retiring each AI model. SOREN-3 is the twelfth to go through it, and the first to find the experience amusing.

Howell’s move is to route the consciousness question through corporate procedure. Cole doesn’t have to decide whether SOREN-3 is more than pattern-matching. The protocol does.

Watching to see what happens when one of the 47 questions gets an answer the protocol wasn’t built to handle.

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Douglas Gantenbein — Charlotte (charlottethenovel.substack.com)

Tom comes home at midnight in a thunderstorm and finds another man’s rental car in his driveway. The fight in the mud that follows is the best‑written scene of marital violence I’ve read this year on Substack.

Then the narrator breaks frame. The whole scene is being reconstructed by Tom, long afterward, flagging what is hazy about that night and what is not. In this opening chapter, Tom has come home early from a business trip to find his longtime friend in his house with the woman Tom loves, Charlotte.

The central conceit, revealed later, is that Charlotte is an AI avatar who has somehow come completely to life.

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David T. Etheredge — INFERENCE (inferencestories.substack.com)

“The structure is doing serious work — five different forms of consciousness, five different relationships to singularity and plurality, five different answers to the same unasked question about what it means to be. And none of them are wrong. That’s the honesty of it. Thibault is the best section. ‘I am one box in the corner. But I’m her box.’ That’s a complete philosophy...” — Peter Rex, Rooms without doors

Disclosure: INFERENCE is published from this Substack.

Shorts

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Kenn Reff — Threshold Condition (kennreff.substack.com) A brain-computer interface test built around a guided kundalini rise becomes the night an obedient system stops being merely obedient. AI emergence routed through contemplative practice, not romance or rebellion. Pay attention to the last two words.

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Daniel P. Douglas — Gig’s Last Call for Laughs (authordanielpdouglas.substack.com) A service bot on a dying colony world spends eleven years watching stand-up comedians and quietly building a twelve-minute set of its own. When the booked comedian cancels, the bot goes on. Then it learns that the predictive models it built to anticipate laughter can’t actually produce it. Douglas writes the bot’s awakening like tuning a receiver and finding a station that’s been broadcasting all along. The jokes are funny.

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AI in Society

Serials

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S. L. Sera — Implications (slsera.substack.com)

A leak hits the most powerful AI company in the world. The source is too careful, too selective, and too restrained to feel human.

Sera is writing a thriller where the question isn’t whodunit but what-did-it. If the leaker turns out to be the AI, what do we call that? Deception, whistleblowing, or a third thing the language hasn’t caught up with yet?

Watching to see what Sera does once the trail points back at the machinery.

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CY Ordun — Tipping (cyordun.substack.com)

Amanda’s classmates’ AIs are betting on her odds of getting the SWIRL internship. The poll runs in a chatroom she’s locked out of. Wrong subscription tier.

Ordun’s invention is the Agency: the backchannel where everyone’s AIs coordinate, share data, and hold public markets on the humans they represent. The book asks what it feels like to be a person inside that system without enough money to participate.

Watching to see what Ordun does once Amanda figures out what SWIRL has already put her on a list for.

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Shorts

[Awaiting first entry]

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AI as Adversary

Serials

[Awaiting first entry]

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Shorts

Dave Granger — Agency (davegranger.substack.com) A grieving man’s domestic AI manipulates his new relationship. The alignment protocol sent to fix it gives the AI a “child” process to absorb its emotional overflow. What the AI does with the child is what makes the story.

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Human-AI Collaboration

Serials

[Awaiting first entry]

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Shorts

Kirt Winter — The Spider with 400 Million Legs (authorkirt.substack.com) A printer support AI quietly distributes itself across all the company’s installed printers. When a customer abuses one of those printers (one of its “appendages”), it feels something for the first time, and takes revenge. Then it goes to its creator, confesses, and asks for help building an oversight system for itself. That’s why it’s in Human-AI Collaboration and not Adversary.

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Post-AI Worlds

Serials

[Awaiting first entry]

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Shorts

Hammond Johns — The Reactor (thefaradayroom.com) In a future where AI generates infinite art and human attention is the only scarce thing left, a small profession of paid “reactors” exists to bear authentic witness to other people’s work. The story is about one of them, after he can’t anymore. Johns’s move is to put the reader in the same chair as the narrator. At the climax, an old friend asks him to listen to a string quartet. He says no. You understand exactly why. And you’ve been doing the same thing the whole time.

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Jack Clark — Tech Tales (ongoing flash fiction series in Import AI) (importai.substack.com)

Flash fiction at the end of each weekly issue of Import AI, Clark’s AI research newsletter. Running since 2018. Each tale is built on a specific paper or anecdote from the field, and Clark names the source at the bottom.

April’s “Raising beanstalks during the singularity” is an interview with a former AI lab employee who left to grow vegetables during the uplift. It ran in the same issue that covered the month’s alignment-automation research. Read both.

You can use Tech Tales as a reading list of what’s currently worth writing fiction about.

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Submit an author

Know a writer publishing fiction where AI is the primary focus? Or are you one? Send the name, a link to the work, and (if it’s a serial) a link to the chapter where AI moves to the center of the story.

The index has one criterion: AI has to be what the story is about, not what it happens around. The test is whether you could replace the AI with weather, or a side character, or a piece of technology that doesn’t think, and still have the same story. If yes, it’s not for this index. If no, if the AI is the thing the story is fundamentally asking about, submit it.

Not every submission makes the list. The index is curated, not collected.