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How to organize research for your novel

Follow this step-by-step guide to learn the modern process of organizing research in Milanote, a free tool used by top creatives.

How to organize your research in 7 easy steps

Whether you're writing a sci-fi thriller or historical fiction, research is a crucial step in the early writing process. It's a springboard for new ideas and can add substance and authenticity to your story. As author Robert McKee says "when you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you'll have choices galore."

But collecting research can be messy. It's often scattered between emails, notes, documents, and even photos on your phone making it hard to see the full picture. When you bring your research into one place and see things side-by-side, new ideas and perspectives start to emerge.

In this guide, you'll learn the modern approach to collecting and organizing research for your novel using Milanote. Remember, the creative process is non-linear, so you may find yourself moving back and forth between the steps as you go.

1. First, add any existing notes

You probably know a lot about your chosen topic or location already. Start by getting the known facts and knowledge out of your head. Even if these topics seem obvious to you, they can serve as a bridge to the rest of your research. You might include facts about the location, period, fashion or events that take place in your story.

Create a new board to collect your research.

Create a new board

Drag a board out from the toolbar. Give it a name, then double click to open it.

Add a note to capture your existing knowledge on the topic.

Drag a note card onto your board

Start typing then use the formatting tools in the left hand toolbar.

2. Save links to articles & news

Wikipedia, blogs, and news websites are a goldmine for researchers. It's here you'll find historical events and records, data, and opinions about your topic. We're in the 'collecting' phase so just save links to any relevant information you stumble across. You can return and read the details at a later stage.

Drag a link card onto your board to save a website.

Install the  Milanote Web Clipper

Save websites and articles straight to your board. 

Save content from the web

With the Web Clipper installed, save a website, image or text. Choose the destination in Milanote. Return to your board and find the content in the "Unsorted" column on the right.

3. Save quotes & data

Quotes are a great way to add credibility and bring personality to your topic. They're also a handy source of inspiration for character development, especially if you're trying to match the language used in past periods. Remember to keep the source of the quote in case you need to back it up.

Add a note to capture a quote.

4. Collect video & audio

Video and movie clips can help you understand a mood or feeling in a way that words sometimes can't. Try searching for your topic or era on Vimeo , or Youtube . Podcasts are another great reference. Find conversations about your topic on Spotify or any podcast platform and add them into the mix.

Embed Youtube videos or audio in a board. 

Embed Youtube videos or audio tracks in a board

Copy the share link from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud or many other services. Drag a link card onto your board, paste your link and press enter.

5. Collect important images

Sometimes the quickest way to understand a topic is with an image. They can transport you to another time or place and can help you describe things in much more detail. They're also easier to scan when you return to your research. Try saving images from Google Images , Pinterest , or Milanote's built-in image library.

Use the built-in image library. 

Use the built-in image library

Search over 500,000 beautiful photos powered by Unsplash then drag images straight onto your board.

Save images from other websites straight to your board. 

Roll over an image (or highlight text), click Save, then choose the destination in Milanote. Return to your board and find the content in the "Unsorted" column on the right.

Allow yourself the time to explore every corner of your topic. As author A.S. Byatt says "the more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free".

6. Collect research on the go

You never know where or when you'll find inspiration—it could strike you in the shower, or as you're strolling the aisles of the grocery store. So make sure you have an easy way to capture things on the go. As creative director Grace Coddington said, "Always keep your eyes open. Keep watching. Because whatever you see can inspire you."

Download the  Milanote mobile app

Save photos straight to your Research board. 

Take photos on the go

Shoot or upload photos directly to your board. When you return to a bigger screen you'll find them in the "Unsorted" column of the board.

7. Connect the dots

Now that you have all your research in one place, it's time to start drawing insights and conclusions. Laying out your notes side-by-side is the best way to do this. You might see how a quote from an interviewee adds a personal touch to some data you discovered earlier. This is the part of the process where you turn a collection of disparate information into your unique perspective on the topic.

That's a great start!

Research is an ongoing process and you'll probably continue learning about your topic throughout your writing journey. Reference your research as you go to add a unique perspective to your story. Use the template below to start your research or read our full guide on how to plan a novel .

Start your research

Get started for free with one of Milanote's beautiful templates.

Sign up for free with no time limit

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On the Fine Art of Researching For Fiction  

Jake wolff: how to write beyond the borders of your experience.

The first time I considered the relationship between fiction and research was during a writing workshop—my first—while I watched the professor eviscerate some poor kid’s story about World War II. And yeah, the story was bad. I remember the protagonist being told to “take cover” and then performing several combat rolls to do so.

“You’re college students,” the professor said. “Write about college students.”

Later, better professors would clarify for me that research, with a touch of imagination, can be a perfectly valid substitute for experience. But that’s always where the conversation stopped. If we ever uttered the word “research” in a workshop, we did so in a weaponized way to critique a piece of writing: “This desperately needs more research,” we’d all agree, and then nothing more would be said. We’d all just pretend that everyone in the room already knew how to integrate research into fiction and that the failures of the story were merely a lack of effort rather than skill. Secretly, though, I felt lost.

I knew research was important, and I knew how to research. My questions all had to do with craft. How do I incorporate research into fiction? How do I provide authenticity and detail without turning the story into a lecture? How much research is too much? Too little?

How do I allow research to support the story without feeling obligated to remain in the realm of fact—when I am, after all, trying to write fiction?

I heavily researched my debut novel, in which nearly every chapter is science-oriented, historical, or both. I’d like to share a method I used throughout the research and writing process to help deal with some of my questions. This method is not intended to become a constant fixture in your writing practice. But if you’re looking for ways to balance or check the balance of the amount of research in a given chapter, story, or scene, you might consider these steps: identify, lie, apply.

I recently had a conversation with a former student, now a friend, about a short story he was writing. He told me he was worried he’d packed it too full of historical research.

“Well,” I said, “how much research is in there?”

“Uhhh,” he answered. “I’m not sure?”

That’s what we might call a visualization problem. It’s hard to judge the quantity of something you can’t see.

I’ve faced similar problems in my own work. I once received a note from my editor saying that a certain chapter of my novel read too much like a chemistry textbook. At first, I was baffled—I didn’t think of the chapter as being overly research-forward. But upon reading it again, I realized I had missed the problem. After learning so much about chemistry, I could no longer “see” the amount of research I had crammed into twenty pages.

Literature scholars don’t have this problem because they cite their sources; endnotes, footnotes, and the like don’t merely provide a tool for readers to verify claims, but also provide a visual reminder that research exists within the text. Thankfully, creative writers generally don’t have to worry about proper MLA formatting (though you should absolutely keep track of your sources). Still, finding a quick way to visually mark the research in your fiction is the least exciting but also the most important step in recognizing its role in your work.

Personally, I map my research in blue. So when my editor flagged that chapter for me, I went back to the text and began marking the research. By the end of the process, the chapter was filled with paragraphs that looked like this one:

Progesterone is a steroid hormone that plays an especially important role in pregnancy. Only a few months before Sammy arrived in Littlefield, a group of scientists found the first example of progesterone in plants. They’d used equipment I would never be able to access, nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectroscopy, to search for the hormone in the leaves of the English Walnut trees. In humans, aging was associated with a drop in progesterone and an increase in tumor formation—perhaps a result of its neurosteroidal function.

My editor was spot-on: this barely qualified as fiction. But I truly hadn’t seen it. As both a writer and teacher, I’m constantly amazed by how blind we can become to our own manuscripts. Of course, this works the other way, too: if you’re writing a story set in medieval England but haven’t supported that setting with any research, you’ll see it during this step. It’s such an easy, obvious exercise, but I know so few writers who do this.

Before moving on, I’ll pause to recommend also highlighting research in other people’s work. If there’s a story or novel you admire that is fairly research-forward, go through a few sections and mark anything that you would have needed research to write. This will help you see the spacing and balance of research in the fiction you’re hoping to emulate.

(Two Truths and a) Lie

You’ve probably heard of the icebreaker Two Truths and a Lie: you tell two truths and one lie about yourself, and then the other players have to guess which is the lie. I’d rather die than play this game in real life, but it works beautifully when adapted as a solo research exercise.

It’s very simple. When I’m trying to (re)balance the research in my fiction, I list two facts I’ve learned from my research and then invent one “fact” that sounds true but isn’t. The idea is to acquaint yourself with the sound of the truth when it comes to a given subject and then to recreate that sound in a fictive sentence. It’s a way to provide balance and productivity, ensuring that you’re continuing to imagine and invent —to be a fiction writer— even as you’re researching.

I still have my notes from the first time I used this exercise. I was researching the ancient Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang for a work of historical fiction I would later publish in One Story. I was drowning in research, and the story was nearing fifty pages (!) with no end in sight. My story focused on the final years of the emperor’s life, so I made a list of facts related to that period, including these:

1. The emperor was obsessed with finding the elixir of life and executed Confucian scholars who failed to support this obsession.

2. If the emperor coughed, everyone in his presence had to cough in order to mask him as the source.

3. The emperor believed evil spirits were trying to kill him and built secret tunnels to travel in safety from them.

Now, the second of those statements is a lie. My facts were showing me that the emperor was afraid of dying and made other people the victims of that fear—my lie, in turn, creates a usable narrative detail supporting these facts. I ended up using this lie as the opening of the story. I was a graduate student at the time, and when I workshopped the piece, my professor said something about how the opening worked because “It’s the kind of thing you just can’t make up.” I haven’t stopped using this exercise since.

We have some facts; we have some lies. The final step is to integrate these details into the story. We’ll do this by considering their relationship to the beating heart of fiction: conflict. You can use this step with both facts and lies. My problem tends to be an overload of research rather than the opposite, so I’ll show you an example of a lie I used to help provide balance.

In a late chapter in my book, three important characters—Sammy and his current lover Sadiq and his ex- lover Catherine—travel to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). They’ve come to investigate a drug with potential anti-aging properties that originates in the soil there (that’s a fact; the drug is called rapamycin). As I researched travel to Easter Island, my Two Truths and a Lie exercise produced the following lie:

There are only two airports flying into Easter Island; these airports constantly fight with each other.

In reality, while there are two airports serving Easter Island (one in Tahiti; the other in Chile), nearly everyone flies from Chile, and it’s the same airline either way. On its surface, this is the kind of lie I would expect to leave on the cutting room floor—it’s a dry, irrelevant detail.

But when I’m using the ILA method, I try not to pre-judge. Instead, I make a list of the central conflicts in the story or chapter and a list of the facts and lies. Then I look for applications—i.e., for ways in which each detail may feel relevant to the conflicts. To my surprise, I found that the airport lie fit the conflicts of the chapter perfectly:

Ultimately, the airport lie spoke to the characters, all of whom were feeling the painful effects of life’s capriciousness, the way the choices we make can seem under our control but also outside it, arbitrary but also fateful. I used this lie to introduce these opposing forces and to divide the characters: Sammy and Sadiq fly from Tahiti; Catherine flies from Chile.

Two airports in the world offered flights to Rapa Nui—one in Tahiti, to the west, and one in Chile, to the east. Most of the scientists stayed in one of those two countries. There was no real meaning to it. But still, it was hard, in a juvenile way, not to think of the two groups as opposing teams in a faction. There was the Tahiti side, and there was the Chile side, and only one could win.

This sort of schematic—complete with a table and headers—may seem overly rigid to you, to which I’d respond, Gee, you sound like one of my students. What can I say? I’m a rigid guy. But when you’re tackling a research-intensive story, a little rigidity isn’t the worst thing. Narrative structure does not supply itself. It results from the interplay between the conflicts, the characters, and the details used to evoke them. I’m presenting one way, of many, to visualize those relationships whenever you’re feeling lost.

Zora Neal Hurston wrote, “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” Maybe that’s why I’m thinking of structure and rigidity—research, for me, is bolstering in this way. It provides form. But it’s also heavy and hard to work with. It doesn’t bend. If you’re struggling with the burden of it, give ILA a shot and see if unsticks whatever is holding you back. If you do try this approach, let me know if it works for you—and if it doesn’t, feel free to lie.

__________________________________

Jake Wolff’s  The History of Living Forever is out now from FSG.

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How to Research a Book

by Sarah Gribble | 0 comments

I’m prepping for a new novel that I’m super excited about. My characters are floating around in my head, becoming more real as I write my first draft, and I have a decently detailed synopsis written.

My problem: I know next to nothing about my setting and my main character’s profession. Which means I need to do massive amounts of research. Yes, I have to conduct research for a book, even if it's a novel.

You might think you don’t need to do much research because you’re writing fiction. (Isn't fiction just making stuff up?!) You’d be wrong.

Your readers expect to be transported to your setting and to understand your characters so fully, they seem like real people. Little things like using the wrong jargon or having your main character wear the wrong type of bodice can jar your reader out of the story and cause them to lose respect for you as a writer. If they can’t trust you to get the facts right, why should they trust you to guide them through a story?

Like it or not, research is a writer's best friend. (Next to caffeine, anyway.) So let's talk about how to conduct research for a book.

The True Purpose of Research for Fiction

When you first start the research process for a novel, you’re going to be looking at the big picture. You want to get a general overview of the time period, location, and/or character profession. You want to immerse yourself in everything you can find that comes within your story's scope.

This isn’t because you’re going to regurgitate all that to your readers. It’s because you need to have a clear picture of what’s going on in order to successfully write your story. All of your research is for you so that you can translate your world to your reader.

It will also help speed up your writing process, since you'll know the details you need to include without getting bogged down in how something should work in your story.

Don't mistake this with the thought that you need to include everything you research in your book (especially if you're writing historical fiction, which can require more research than other genres).

Book research is a tool that should serve your story, not the other way around. You’re not writing an academic paper, so resist the urge to shove everything you’ve learned into your story. You’ll end up info dumping if you try.

Your story is the main purpose and your research should support it, not overwhelm it. Choose what you need to further the story and leave the rest.

How to Conduct Research for a Book

Okay, let's get to it! Here’s how to get started with researching your novel:

Lists are your friends

Because you’ll be dealing with a vast amount of (mostly useless) information, the first thing you need to do is get organized. Some fiction writers like to use Scrivener to keep track of their research. Others might use Evernote.

Really, the writing software you want to use is based on your preference of documenting subject matter.

It could be as simple as detailed notecards or thoughts in a journal.

Whatever method you use to research your own work, you'll want to make lists.

Do this for everything you need to look up. You don’t want to forget something hugely important and have to spend a lot of time in the middle of writing your novel to look it up.

In my case, my setting is on a small island and my main character is a commercial fisherman. I need to know island life, weather patterns, boat types, fishing jargon, etc. I have memoirs and nonfiction books about the area and the fishing industry. I’m reading them cover-to-cover, not because I’ll end up using all the information, but because I need to establish an overarching picture for myself .

If I can’t mentally place myself there, I can’t place my readers there.

Where can you collect these lists? Tons of places, some including:

• Local libraries (are also your friends)
• Field research (find someone who has had a personal experience in what you're writing)
• Search engines like Google (for setting, you might explore Google maps—just don't get too distracted and waste a ton of time here)
• Wikipedia (but make sure you fact check)
• Podcasts about what you're writing about
• Other books from bestselling authors (as long as you don't plagiarize content)

Establish a system

You need to be able to call up your research as needed, so establishing an organized, consistent system of keeping track of everything you’ve learned is a must.

Personally, since I spent so many years in school, I go with the standard method of taking notes (in a notebook that only serves my current project and nothing else) and then highlighting and sticky-noting facts I definitely want to use. There are plenty of note-taking apps out there if you'd rather not be so old school.

For fun, try establishing a system for a short story first. This decrease the pressure on trying out the same system for a longer creative writing work.

If the system works well for you, take it to the next level and use it to write a novella or novel.

Expand your idea of research

Don’t just scour the internet. Get a book. Better yet, get twelve. There’s no such thing as researching too much.

Talk to your librarian or a book seller (they’re magnificent at helping with this). Watch documentaries and YouTube videos. Look at pictures. Talk to people in person or online. Go to a museum. Read fiction novels that cover similar ground. Find all the information you can on your subject.

First-hand experience is always best, but don't worry if you can't afford a trip to France for your quirky French bookstore novel. You can go to a French restaurant. The taste of the food, the smells, and how the waiter pronounces the menu items are all fodder for your story.

Pay attention to details when you’re out and about. You never know what might inspire, fill in plot holes, or add an interesting tic to your character.

Stop researching

Once you have a solid overarching picture of your setting and your characters, stop researching and start writing. You can’t spend months researching without writing a word. That’s not writing. At some point, you have to put away the research and get moving on your novel.

You know you've researched enough when you already know the information you're reading in the umpteenth book you've checked out from the library.

(Hmm. Library again. A pattern, maybe? Seriously, ask your librarians for help.)

Remember how I said all this research was for you? Eventually, you'll have enough information. You have all that in your head (and hopefully in a nicely organized set of notes), so when you go to write, you’ll be able to recall details as you go along.

Your understanding of your setting, era, and character's profession is what will give you the ability to weave details seamlessly and organically into your story.

This goes for your first novel, up until your last one.

While it’s true you shouldn’t have to research anything major after you begin writing, you will find you need to look up some minor details as you delve into your story. There will always be some iota of information you don’t know you need until you need it. For instance, the most common types of knots fishermen use or the instruments on a surgical tray in an operating room.

These are things that are important to get right but are most likely not important to the flow of the story. Don't interrupt your writing flow to go back to researching for weeks on end.

When you come across the need to know something minor, make a note and keep writing . You can always look up small stuff later. Keep writing!

What's your favorite part of researching? What do you struggle with?  Let me know in the comments !

Today I want you to do something a little different. I want you to think of a story you want to write. Any story, any genre, but it  must be in a setting you don't know much (if anything!) about. Take fifteen minutes to brainstorm a list of things you'd need to research in order for that setting to come alive for your reader—and you!

Share your list in the comments and see if you can help your fellow writers think of anything else they need to look up!

Sarah Gribble

Sarah Gribble is the author of dozens of short stories that explore uncomfortable situations, basic fears, and the general awe and fascination of the unknown. She just released Surviving Death , her first novel, and is currently working on her next book.

Follow her on Instagram or join her email list for free scares.

Work with Sarah Gribble?

Bestselling author with over five years of coaching experience. Sarah Gribble specializes in working with Dark Fantasy, Fantasy, Horror, Speculative Fiction, and Thriller books. Sound like a good fit for you?

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EH -- Researching Short Stories: Strategies for Short Story Research

• Find Articles
• Strategies for Short Story Research

Page Overview

This page addresses the research process -- the things that should be done before the actual writing of the paper -- and strategies for engaging in the process.  Although this LibGuide focuses on researching short stories, this particular page is more general in scope and is applicable to most lower-division college research assignments.

Before You Begin

Before beginning any research process, first be absolutely sure you know the requirements of the assignment.  Things such as  

• the date the completed project is due 
• the due dates of any intermediate assignments, like turning in a working bibliography or notes
• the length requirement (minimum word count), if any 
• the minimum number and types (for example, books or articles from scholarly, peer-reviewed journals) of sources required

These formal requirements are as much a part of the assignment as the paper itself.  They form the box into which you must fit your work.  Do not take them lightly.

When possible, it is helpful to subdivide the overall research process into phases, a tactic which

• makes the idea of research less intimidating because you are dealing with sections at a time rather than the whole process
• makes the process easier to manage
• gives a sense of accomplishment as you move from one phase to the next

Characteristics of a Well-written Paper

Although there are many details that must be given attention in writing a research paper, there are three major criteria which must be met.  A well-written paper is

• Unified:  the paper has only one major idea; or, if it seeks to address multiple points, one point is given priority and the others are subordinated to it.
• Coherent: the body of the paper presents its contents in a logical order easy for readers to follow; use of transitional phrases (in addition, because of this, therefore, etc.) between paragraphs and sentences is important.
• Complete:  the paper delivers on everything it promises and does not leave questions in the mind of the reader; everything mentioned in the introduction is discussed somewhere in the paper; the conclusion does not introduce new ideas or anything not already addressed in the paper.

Basic Research Strategy

• How to Research From Pellissippi State Community College Libraries: discusses the principal components of a simple search strategy.
• Basic Research Strategies From Nassau Community College: a start-up guide for college level research that supplements the information in the preceding link. Tabs two, three, and four plus the Web Evaluation tab are the most useful for JSU students. As with any LibGuide originating from another campus, care must be taken to recognize the information which is applicable generally from that which applies solely to the Guide's home campus. .
• Information Literacy Tutorial From Nassau Community College: an elaboration on the material covered in the preceding link (also from NCC) which discusses that material in greater depth. The quizzes and surveys may be ignored.

Things to Keep in Mind

Although a research assignment can be daunting, there are things which can make the process less stressful, more manageable, and yield a better result.  And they are generally applicable across all types and levels of research.

1.  Be aware of the parameters of the assignment: topic selection options, due date, length requirement, source requirements.  These form the box into which you must fit your work.  

2. Treat the assignment as a series of components or stages rather than one undivided whole.

• devise a schedule for each task in the process: topic selection and refinement (background/overview information), source material from books (JaxCat), source material from journals (databases/Discovery), other sources (internet, interviews, non-print materials); the note-taking, drafting, and editing processes.
• stick to your timetable.  Time can be on your side as a researcher, but only if you keep to your schedule and do not delay or put everything off until just before the assignment deadline. 

3.  Leave enough time between your final draft and the submission date of your work that you can do one final proofread after the paper is no longer "fresh" to you.  You may find passages that need additional work because you see that what is on the page and what you meant to write are quite different.  Even better, have a friend or classmate read your final draft before you submit it.  A fresh pair of eyes sometimes has clearer vision. 

4.  If at any point in the process you encounter difficulties, consult a librarian.  Hunters use guides; fishermen use guides.  Explorers use guides.  When you are doing research, you are an explorer in the realm of ideas; your librarian is your guide. 

A Note on Sources

Research requires engagement with various types of sources.

• Primary sources: the thing itself, such as letters, diaries, documents, a painting, a sculpture; in lower-division literary research, usually a play, poem, or short story.
• Secondary sources: information about the primary source, such as books, essays, journal articles, although images and other media also might be included.  Companions, dictionaries, and encyclopedias are secondary sources.
• Tertiary sources: things such as bibliographies, indexes, or electronic databases (minus the full text) which serve as guides to point researchers toward secondary sources.  A full text database would be a combination of a secondary and tertiary source; some books have a bibliography of additional sources in the back.

Accessing sources requires going through various "information portals," each designed to principally support a certain type of content.  Houston Cole Library provides four principal information portals:

• JaxCat online catalog: books, although other items such as journals, newspapers, DVDs, and musical scores also may be searched for.
• Electronic databases: journal articles, newspaper stories, interviews, reviews (and a few books; JaxCat still should be the "go-to" portal for books).  JaxCat indexes records for the complete item: the book, journal, newspaper, CD but has no records for parts of the complete item: the article in the journal, the editorial in the newspaper, the song off the CD.  Databases contain records for these things.
• Discovery Search: mostly journal articles, but also (some) books and (some) random internet pages.  Discovery combines elements of the other three information portals and is especially useful for searches where one is researching a new or obscure topic about which little is likely to be written, or does not know where the desired information may be concentrated.  Discovery is the only portal which permits simul-searching across databases provided by multiple vendors.
• Internet (Bing, Dogpile, DuckDuckGo, Google, etc.): primarily webpages, especially for businesses (.com), government divisions at all levels (.gov), or organizations (.org). as well as pages for primary source-type documents such as lesson plans and public-domain books.  While book content (Google Books) and journal articles (Google Scholar) are accessible, these are not the strengths of the internet and more successful searches for this type of content can be performed through JaxCat and the databases.  

NOTE: There is no predetermined hierarchy among these information portals as regards which one should be used most or gone to first.  These considerations depend on the task at hand and will vary from assignment o assignment.

The link below provides further information on the different source types.

• Research Methods From Truckee Meadows Community College: a guide to basic research. The tab "What Type of Source?" presents an overview of the various types of information sources, identifying the advantages and disadvantages of each.
• << Previous: Find Books
• Last Updated: Nov 8, 2023 1:49 PM
• URL: https://libguides.jsu.edu/litresearchshortstories

• Our Mission

Making Research More Exciting Through Fiction Writing

Narrative writing that incorporates research can be a more engaging alternative to a classic research paper. 

For many students, writing a research paper can be a dull task. A more exciting option is for students to write fictional narratives about their topics and to embed facts from their research. With this approach, students learn both the elements of fiction and the research process simultaneously.

Set Expectations

When planning the course, find or create a place in the curriculum where students could research specific topics. Either make a list of topics that you know will have enough age-appropriate information or require students to create a list of self-generated topics that are then approved by the teacher. Either way, student choice is crucial. 

Set clear expectations about the dual purposes of this project: Students need to find lots of facts about their topic and then incorporate those facts into a short work of fiction. Students are often inspired by story-writing because so many ideas will come to them during the research process. 

Set a low word limit for the short story, and require students to include a set number of facts within it. For example, for my middle school students, I set a maximum word count of 750 words, and I require a minimum of 20 interesting facts from their research. 

Essentially, students have ongoing, built-in writing prompts. For example, if a student is researching orcas and comes across the fact that orcas can jump out of the water to snatch penguins or seals, they might be inspired to write an exciting—and true-to-life—penguin-snatching scene in their story. 

The Research and Writing Process

Once students know the specific expectations, begin the research process. A few mini-lessons about research can help students set the parameters of their work. Talk with students about how to find good sources, why it’s important to use a variety of sources, and how to use keywords. Even if these lessons are just reminders, students will have a clearer sense of how to be efficient.

If your class doesn’t already have a note-taking system in place, set one up. For younger students, a mini-lesson on paraphrasing is probably in order. Ask students to paraphrase the relevant information they find during the research process in bulleted form, with each bit of information they find functioning as a “fact” they can use in their story. After each fact, have them include their source in parentheses—hyperlinked, if possible. 

About halfway through the research process, students should begin drafting their stories. Make the transition from mini-lessons on researching to mini-lessons on writing short fiction. Students can alternate days of research and writing, or they can split the period and do research for half and writing for half. 

The first fiction mini-lesson could be sharing and discussing an age-appropriate example of flash fiction in which the author manages to tell a compelling story with a satisfying ending in very few words. I tend to prioritize mini-lessons on creating and sustaining conflict, applying various methods of characterization, and using their authentic voice. 

I discourage students from writing non-endings like “To be continued” or “It was all a dream!” because these are easy-outs from the difficult work of crafting a complete story. Ask them to imagine they are the reader and not the writer of their story: Would they find the ending satisfying or not? 

Most important, throughout the drafting process, students should find creative ways to embed facts into their story. As they write, they underline or highlight the facts they’ve included. Help them find ways to sneak the facts into the story. For example, if a student is researching the geography of a state, he or she could use specific geographic features to describe the setting in the narrative.  

Share Successes

To assess the projects, ask students to submit both their research notes and their stories. Create a simple rubric that includes all the skills from the mini-lessons, such as paraphrasing, source citing, and characterization. When the projects are complete, organize a listening party. Encourage students to listen on two levels: to enjoy the stories as stories and to identify the facts within them. 

Whenever we successfully tap into students’ creativity, they naturally become more curious and see that they really do have interesting stories to tell. 

Table of Contents

Tip 1: Start with Your Positioning and Outline

Tip 2: make a research plan, tip 3: ask the internet, tip 4: read books, tip 5: talk to experts, tip 6: collect survey data, tip 7: keep everything organized.

• Tip 8: Set a Deadline & Stop Early

Tip 9: Write the First Draft

How to conduct research for your book: 9 tips that work.

If you’re like many first-time nonfiction writers, you’ve probably wondered, “How do I research for my book?”

I get this question a lot, and there are plenty of tips I can share. But before I dive into it, I’m going to throw you a curveball:

Don’t assume you have to do research for your book.

Because the purpose of nonfiction is to help the reader solve a problem or create change in their life (or both) by sharing what you know. If you can do this without a lot of research, then don’t do research.

We’ve had many Authors who knew their topic so inside and out that they didn’t need research. That is perfectly fine. They still wrote incredible books.

When it boils down to it, there are only 2 reasons to do research for your book:

• You know enough to write the book, but you want to add sources and citations to make the book more persuasive to a specific audience.
• You don’t know enough, and you need to learn more to make the book complete.

We’ve had many Authors who–despite knowing their stuff–wanted to include additional data, expert opinions, or testimonials to ensure that readers would find their arguments credible. This is important to consider if you’re writing for a scientific or technical audience that expects you to cite evidence.

Likewise, we see many Authors who know their industry but have a few knowledge gaps they’d like to fill in order to make their arguments more robust.

In fact, that’s the whole key to understanding how much research you should do. Ask yourself:

What evidence does a reader need to believe your argument is credible and trustworthy?

Research can be complicated, though. Many Authors don’t know where to start, and they get bogged down in the details. Which, of course, derails the book writing process and stalls them–or worse, it stops them from finishing.

The bad news? There’s no “right way” to make a book research plan.

The good news? The basic research tips apply for either person.

In this post, I’ll give you 9 effective research tips that will help you build a stronger, more convincing book.

More importantly, these tips will also show you how to get through the research process without wasting time.

9 Research Tips for Writing Your Book

Don’t jump into research blindly. Treat it like any other goal. Plan, set a schedule, and follow through.

Here are 9 tips that will help you research effectively.

Before you start researching or writing, you need to figure out two main things: your audience and your message.

This is called book positioning , and it’s an essential part of the book writing process.

Your job as an Author is to convince readers that your book will help them solve their problems.

Every piece of research you include in the book–whether it’s a survey, pie chart, or expert testimonial–should help you accomplish that.

Once your positioning is clear, you can put together your book outline.

Your outline is a comprehensive guide to everything in your book, and it is your best defense against procrastination, fear, and all the other problems writers face . It’s crucial if you don’t want to waste time on research you don’t need.

With an outline, you’ll already know what kind of data you need, where your information gaps are, and what kinds of sources might help you support your claims.

We’ve put together a free outline template to make the process even easier.

All this to say: without solid positioning and a comprehensive outline, you’ll wander. You’ll write, throw it away, write some more, get frustrated, and eventually, give up.

You’ll never finish a draft, much less publish your book .

If you don’t know your subject well enough to figure out your positioning and make a good outline, it means you don’t know enough to write that book—at least not right now.

Your plan will vary widely depending on whether you are:

• An expert who knows your field well
• Someone who needs to learn more about your field before writing about it

The majority of you are writing a book because you’re experts. So most of the information you need will already be in your head.

If you’re an expert, your research plan is probably going to be short, to the point, and about refreshing your memory or filling small gaps.

If you’re a non-expert, your research plan is probably going to be much longer. It could entail interviewing experts, reading lots of books and articles, and surveying the whole field you are writing about.

The outline should highlight those places where your book will need more information.

Are there any places where you don’t have the expertise to back up your claims?

What key takeaways require more evidence?

Would the book be stronger if you had another person’s point of view?

These are the kinds of gaps that research can fill.

Go back through your outline and find the places where you know you need more information. Next to each one, brainstorm ways you might fulfill that need.

For example, let’s say you’re writing a book that includes a section on yoga’s health benefits. Even if you’re a certified yoga instructor, you may not know enough physiology to explain the health benefits clearly.

Where could you find that information?

• Ask a medical expert
• A book on yoga and medicine
• A website that’s well respected in your field
• A study published in a medical journal

You don’t have to get too specific here. The point is to highlight where you need extra information and give yourself leads about where you might find it. ​

The kinds of research you need will vary widely, depending on what kind of nonfiction book you’re writing.

For example, if you’re giving medical advice for other experts, you’ll likely want to substantiate it with peer-reviewed, professional sources.

If you’re explaining how to grow a company, you might refer to statistics from your own company or recount specific anecdotes about other successful companies.

If you’re writing a memoir, you won’t need any quantitative data. You might simply talk with people from your past to fill in some gaps or use sources like Wikipedia to gather basic facts.

Different subject matter calls for different sources. If you’re having trouble figuring out what sources your subject needs, ask yourself the same question as above:

Ask yourself what evidence does a reader need to believe your argument is credible and trustworthy?

Generally speaking, an expert can do their research before they start writing, during, or even after (depending on what they need).

If you’re a non-expert, you should do your research before you start writing because what you learn will form the basis of the book.

It may sound obvious, but the internet is a powerful research tool and a great place to start. But proceed with caution: the internet can also be one of the greatest sources of misinformation.

If you’re looking for basic info, like for fact-checking, it’s fantastic.

If you’re looking for academic information, like scientific studies, it can be useful. (You might hit some paywalls, but the information will be there.)

If you’re looking for opinions, they’ll be abundant.

Chances are, though, as you look for all these things, you’re going to come across a lot of misleading sources—or even some that straight-up lie.

Here are some tips for making sure your internet research is efficient and effective:

• Use a variety of search terms to find what you need. For example, if you’re looking for books on childhood development, you might start with basic terms like “childhood development,” “child psychology,” or “social-emotional learning.”
• As you refine your knowledge, refine your searches. A second round of research might be more specific, like “Piaget’s stages of development” or “Erikson’s psychosocial theories.”
• Don’t just stop with the first result on Google. Many people don’t look past the first few results in a Google search. That’s fine if you’re looking for a recipe or a Wikipedia article, but the best research sources don’t always have the best SEO. Look for results that seem thorough or reputable, not just popular.
• Speaking of Wikipedia, don’t automatically trust it. It can be a great place to start if you’re looking for basic facts or references, but remember, it’s crowd-sourced. That means it’s not always accurate. Get your bearings on Wikipedia, then look elsewhere to verify any information you’re going to cite.
• Make sure your data is coming from a reputable source. Google Scholar, Google Books, and major news outlets like NPR, BBC, etc. are safe bets. If you don’t recognize the writer, outlet, or website, you’re going to have to do some digging to find out if you can trust them.
• Verify the credentials of the Author before you trust the site. People often assume that anything with a .edu domain is reputable. It’s not. You might be reading some college freshman’s last-minute essay on economics. If it’s a professor, you’re probably safe.

Using a few random resources from the internet is not equivalent to conducting comprehensive research.

If you want to dive deeper into a topic, books are often your best resources.

They’re reliable because they’re often fact-checked, peer-reviewed, or vetted. You know you can trust them.

Many Authors are directly influenced by other books in their field. If you’re familiar with any competing books, those are a great place to start.

Use the internet to find the best books in each field, and then dive into those.

Your book will have a different spin from the ones already out there, but think of it this way: you’re in the same conversation, which means you’ll probably have many of the same points of reference.

Check out the bibliographies or footnotes in those books. You might find sources that are useful for your own project.

You might want to buy the books central to your research. But if you aren’t sure if something’s going to be useful, hold off on hitting Amazon’s “one-click buy.”

Many Authors underestimate the power of their local libraries. Even if they don’t have the book you’re looking for, many libraries participate in extensive interlibrary loan programs. You can often have the books you need sent to your local branch.

Librarians are also indispensable research resources. Many universities have subject-specific research librarians who are willing to help you find sources, even if you aren’t a student.

Research doesn’t always require the internet or books. Sometimes you need an answer, story, or quotation from a real person.

But make sure you have a decent understanding of your field BEFORE you go to experts with your questions.

I’m an expert at writing nonfiction books, so I speak from personal experience. It’s annoying as hell when people come to you with questions without having done at least a little research on the topic beforehand—especially when you already have a 3,000 word blog post about it.

Experts love it when you’ve done some research and can speak their language. They hate it when you ask them to explain fundamentals.

But once you find a good expert, it condenses your learning curve by at least 10x.

To figure out who you need to talk to, think about the kind of nonfiction book you’re writing.

Is it a book about your own business, products, or methods? You may want to include client stories or testimonials.

In Driven , Doug Brackmann relied on his experience with clients to teach highly driven people how to master their gifts.

Is it a book that requires expert knowledge outside your own area of expertise (for example, a doctor, IT specialist, lawyer, or business coach)? You might want to ask them to contribute brief passages or quotations for your book.

Colin Dombroski did exactly that for his book The Plantar Fasciitis Plan . He consulted with various colleagues, each of whom contributed expert advice for readers to follow.

It’s much easier to contact people who are already in your network. If you don’t personally know someone, ask around. Someone you already know may be able to connect you with the perfect expert.

If that doesn’t work out, you can always try the cold call method. Send a polite email that briefly but clearly explains what your book is about and why you’re contacting them.

If you do this, though, do your research first. Know the person’s name. Don’t use “To whom it may concern.” Know their specialty. Know exactly what type of information you’re seeking. Basically, know why they are the person you want to feature in your book.

Some Authors like to collect surveys for their books. This is very optional, and it’s only applicable in certain books, so don’t assume you need this.

But if you want to include a section in your book that includes how people feel about something (for example, to back up a point you’re making), you might want to have survey data.

You might have access to data you can already cite. The internet is full of data: infographics, Pew data, Nielsen ratings, scholarly research, surveys conducted by private companies.

If you don’t have access to data, you can conduct your own surveys with an online platform like SurveyMonkey. Here’s how:

• Consider your research goals. What are you trying to learn?
• Formulate the survey questions. Most people prefer short, direct survey questions. They’re also more likely to answer multiple-choice questions.
• Invite participants. If you want a reliable survey, it’s best to get as many participants as possible. Surveying three family members won’t tell you much.
• Collect and analyze the data.

That will work for more informal purposes, but surveys are a science unto themselves. If you require a lot of data, want a large sample size, or need high statistical accuracy, it’s better to hire pros. Quantitative data is more effective and trustworthy when it’s properly conducted.

Don’t go overboard with statistics, though. Not all books need quantitative data. There are many other ways to convince readers to listen to your message.

Organize your research as you go. I can’t stress this enough.

If you research for months on end, you might end up with dozens of articles, quotations, or anecdotes. That’s a lot of material.

If you have to dig through every single piece when you want to use something, it’ll take you years to write.

Don’t rely on your memory, either. Three months down the line, you don’t want to ask, “Where did I find this piece of information?” or “Where did that quotation come from?”

I suggest creating a research folder on your computer where you collect everything.

Inside the main folder, create subfolders for each individual chapter (or even each individual subsection of your chapters). This is where your outline will come in handy.

In each folder, collect any pdfs, notes, or images relevant to that section.

Every time you download or save something, give the file a clear name.

Immediately put it into the correct folder. If you wait, you might not remember which part of your book you found it useful for.

Also, be sure to collect the relevant citation information:

• Author’s name
• Title of the book, article, etc.
• The outlet it appeared in (e.g., BBC or Wired) or, if it’s a book, the publisher
• The date it was published
• The page number or hyperlink

If you have photocopies or handwritten notes, treat them the same way. Label them, file them, and add the necessary citation information. This will save you a lot of time when you sit down to write.

Some Authors use programs like Scrivener or Evernote to keep track of their research. I personally use the software program Notion, which is similar to Evernote.

These programs allow you to collect references, notes, images, and even drafts, all in one convenient place.

They save you from having to create your own digital organizational system. They also make it easier to consult documents without opening each file individually.

Once you’ve got a system in place, don’t forget: back up your data. Put it on the cloud, an external hard drive, or both. There’s nothing worse than spending hours on research just to have it disappear when your computer crashes.

All of this takes time, and it may seem tedious. But trust me, it’s a lot more tedious when you’re racing toward your publication deadline, and you’re hunting down random data you quoted in your book.

Tip 8: Set a Deadline & Stop Early

Research is one of the most common ways Authors procrastinate.

When they’re afraid of writing or hit roadblocks, they often say, “Well, I just need to do a little more research…”

Fast-forward two years, and they’re still stuck in the same spiral of self-doubt and research.

Don’t fall into that trap. Learn when to stop.

When I’m writing, I set a research deadline and then stop EARLY. It’s a great way to beat procrastination , and it makes me feel like I’m ahead of the curve.

Here’s the thing: there’s always going to be more information out there. You could keep researching forever.

But then you’d never finish the book—which was the point of the research in the first place.

Plus, excessive research doesn’t make better books . No one wants to read six test cases when one would have worked.

You want to have enough data to convincingly make your case, but not so much that your readers get bogged down by all the facts.

So how will you know when you’ve done enough?

When you have enough data, anecdotes, and examples to address every point on your outline.

Your outline is your guide. Once it’s filled in, STOP .

Remember, the goal of data is to support your claims. You’re trying to make a case for readers, not bludgeon them with facts.

If you feel like you have to go out of your way to prove your points, you have 1 of 2 problems:

• You’re not confident enough in your points, or
• You’re not confident enough in your readers’ ability to understand your claims.

If you’re having the first problem, you may need to go back and adjust your arguments. All the research in the world won’t help support a weak claim.

If you’re having the second problem, ask yourself, If I knew nothing about this subject, what would it take to convince me? Follow through on your answer and trust that it’s enough.

When you think you have enough research, start writing your vomit draft.

If it turns out you’re missing small pieces of information, that’s okay. Just make a note of it. Those parts are easy to go back and fill in later.

Notice: I said “later.” Once you start writing, stop researching.

If you stop writing your first draft to look for more sources, you’ll break the flow of your ideas.

Research and writing are two completely different modes of thinking. Most people can’t switch fluidly between them.

Just get the first draft done.

Remember, the first draft is exactly that—the first draft. There will be many more versions in the future.

It’s okay to leave notes to yourself as you go along. Just be sure to leave yourself a way to find them easily later.

I recommend changing the font color or highlighting your comments to yourself in the draft. You can even use different colors: one for missing data and another for spots you need to fact-check.

You can also use the “insert comment” feature on Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or any other writing software you prefer.

Another useful tip is to simply type “TK.” There’s no word in the English language where those two letters appear together. That means, when you’re ready to go back through your draft, you can use the “Find” option (Control+F). It will take you back to all the spots you marked.

Whatever method you choose, don’t stop writing.

Also, don’t worry about how “good” or “bad” it is at this point. No one ever wrote an amazing first draft. Not even bestselling Authors.

Just keep at it until you have a complete first draft.

That won’t be hard because you won’t be missing any huge pieces. The whole point of the outline was to zero in on exactly what you want to write for the exact audience you want to reach. If you followed that outline when you researched, you’ll be able to stay on track during the writing process.

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How Researchers Are Using Fiction to Make Their Reports Accessible to the Public

"Knowledge shouldn't belong to the few who have highly specialized education but must be opened up for review and discussion among the many."

Most research reports are about as interesting to read as car manuals or insurance plans. They're long, boring, inaccessible, jargon-filled and impossible to make sense of. This is how most people feel about research articles across different fields -- medicine, health, psychology, education and so forth -- and with good reason. Honestly, who among us actually reads this stuff?

Here's the issue: because research is too boring and too difficult to read, very few people actually read it. The problem is that much of the research we're not reading is impacting us, or could. Moreover, we may want to be involved in how this information is used or what research receives funding and attention, but it's so inaccessible that we're uninvolved.

In recent years there has been a big push to make research findings more available to the public. The public has become increasingly engaged and aware of a myriad of health and social issues (as a result of Internet-based knowledge sharing). Simultaneously, the hierarchical structure of academic and research institutions has been challenged (with people frustrated at the idea of researchers in 'ivory towers' who seem out of touch and cut off from the communities in which they are enmeshed). As a result, there has been a movement towards using fiction as a vehicle for representing research findings. If this sounds far-fetched, it really isn't at all. Remember, there is a historical precedent for trying to share information by telling good stories. For instance, in recent decades reporters have shifted their writing style to draw on creative nonfiction as a way of making newspaper articles more interesting. Using literary tools to present research findings also makes a lot of sense for several reasons.

First, people like fiction. In fact, most of us like it so much that we elect to spend our free time enjoying it -- at the movies, theatre or reading novels. Let's face it, two of the most crowded places on any given Saturday are your local movie theater and big chain bookstore (which now include coffee shops because people like to hang out there for as long as possible). The turn to fiction as a way of sharing research findings taps into what many people already elect to spend their time doing. This is also important because exposure to research studies promotes learning (we read studies and learn more about something). Learning isn't a passive activity, and it doesn't have to be miserable either. Learning should be engaged and joyful.

Second, conducting research is resource-intensive. It takes money, time and energy. By using fiction as one way to represent the product of that research, our effort becomes more worthwhile because the distribution of the research findings is maximized.

Third, there is an ethical mandate for making research more accessible to the public. Knowledge shouldn't belong to the few who have highly specialized education but must be opened up for review and discussion among the many. This is a foundational principle guiding the structure of our society from our public school system to public libraries to our democratic political system. We need to find ways to bring sophisticated research studies into the public domain as well.

Researchers across different fields are developing ways to use fiction in different mediums in order to reach broad and diverse audiences and to include more stakeholders in the research process.

For example, healthcare researchers have created theatrical productions about topics ranging from living with mental illness to philosophical questions surrounding genetic testing. When these plays are performed in hospitals, schools and other community spaces, audience members are exposed to new learning, prompted to engage in reflection and/or invited to engage in productive debates about issues such as medical ethics, harmful stereotypes, caregiving, health policy, and medical technology and morality (Jeff Nisker chronicles this work in his 2012 book  From Calcedonies to Orchids: Plays Promoting Humanity in Health Policy ).

For another example, social scientists are writing novels informed by their research. They are drawing on popular genres like "chick-lit" and mystery in order to share their knowledge about topics ranging from corporate greed to eating disorders to the psychology of dysfunctional relationships and self-esteem. For instance, Sense Publishers, an academic press in the field of education research, is publishing the  Social Fictions series  which exclusively publishes books written in literary forms but informed by scholarly work. Although the first series of its kind, one imagines there will be more.

Social research is making its way to the silver screen too. Recently the  New York Times  online edition  featured a story  about a three-year study out of Bournemouth University in England called "The Gay and Peasant Land Project." Led by sociologist Kip Jones, researchers studied gay identity in older people living in rural areas. Jones partnered with film director Josh Appignanesi to produce the short film  Rufus Stone  which has since been screened at various festivals and received numerous accolades.

It is clear from even this cursory glance that researchers are developing creative ways to use fiction to make their research available for public consumption and engagement and this seems like a very good thing for all of us.

Follow Patricia Leavy, PhD on Twitter . 

Visit Patricia's website: here  

Books by Patricia Leavy:

Buy " Fiction as Research Practice: Short Stories, Novellas, and Novels" here .

Buy "Essentials of Transdisciplinary Research: Using Problem-Centered Methodologies" here .

Buy "Method Meets Art: Arts-based Research Practice" here .

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How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation

P. matthijs bal.

1 Department of Management & Organization, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Martijn Veltkamp

2 FrieslandCampina, Deventer, The Netherlands

Conceived and designed the experiments: PMB MV. Performed the experiments: PMB MV. Analyzed the data: PMB. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: PMB MV. Wrote the paper: PMB MV.

The current study investigated whether fiction experiences change empathy of the reader. Based on transportation theory, it was predicted that when people read fiction, and they are emotionally transported into the story, they become more empathic. Two experiments showed that empathy was influenced over a period of one week for people who read a fictional story, but only when they were emotionally transported into the story. No transportation led to lower empathy in both studies, while study 1 showed that high transportation led to higher empathy among fiction readers. These effects were not found for people in the control condition where people read non-fiction. The study showed that fiction influences empathy of the reader, but only under the condition of low or high emotional transportation into the story.

Introduction

Reading books and watching movies, plays, and operas are activities that people carry out on a day-to-day basis in their lives. Activities like these are referred to as the experience of fictional narratives [1] , [2] , and they may provide people with distraction from daily demands and possibly initiate intellectual inspiration [3] . Fictional narrative experience may have an important and profound impact on how people feel and behave in their daily lives [4] . For instance, it has been suggested that fictional narratives provide personal insights, and therefore are important for people in order to learn about themselves [2] , [3] . One direction that research on the effects of fiction experience has taken is whether fiction experience influences empathy of the reader [5] – [7] . It has been suggested that people who read a lot of fiction become more empathic, because fiction is a simulation of social experiences, in which people practice and enhance their interpersonal skills [3] . However, although studies have shown that fiction is correlated with empathy, there are several shortcomings to previous research.

First, researchers have questioned the causal relationships between experience of fiction and empathy. Does the experience of fiction really lead to higher empathy, or is it that highly empathic people tend to read more fiction, and therefore fiction is positively associated to empathy, as Argo et al. [8] have suggested? In other words, empathic people might simply enjoy fiction reading, and therefore the two are positively related to each other, excluding the possibility to draw conclusions about causal relations between fiction reading and empathy. A strict test of this question requires an experimental design in which effects of fiction experience over time can be assessed. Second, there have been no studies where effects of fiction reading on empathy are investigated using real existing stories. Until now, research designs have been based on either proxies of experience of fiction (e.g., knowledge of fiction authors) [6] – [7] or on very short texts that participants in experiments have to read [9] , [10] , limiting the ecological validity of studies on the effects of fiction on empathy. Therefore, it is imperative that the effects of fiction reading on empathy are investigated under realistic conditions in an experimental design, in order to rule out reversed causality in the relationships [5] . There have been very few studies that have investigated effects of fiction over time. The current study addresses these limitations of earlier research by presenting two experimental investigations of the relationships between fiction experience and empathy, while comparing these relations to a control condition where people read non-fiction.

Finally, the study investigates the role of emotional transportation [11] in the aforementioned relationships. We propose that fiction experiences will change an individual’s empathic skills only when the reader is emotionally transported in a story, as suggested by Oatley [3] . By looking at the moderating role of transportation [11] – [14] , we investigate the assumption that people’s empathic skills will only be enhanced when the reader becomes emotionally transported by a fictional narrative. Although researchers have mentioned the role of transportation, there are very few studies that have empirically tested the influence, and until date, no study has looked at the role of transportation in predicting empathy.

The current article presents two experiments on the effects of fiction reading on empathy, and thereby makes several contributions to the existing literature. Through two empirical investigations of actual experience of literature reading (compared to a control condition), through studying the effects of fiction experience over time whilst controlling for previous levels of empathy and experienced negative and positive emotions during reading, and finally through investigation of the conditions under which fiction leads to changes in empathy (through looking at the moderating role of transportation), this study contributes to the field of investigation of effects of fictional narrative experience, and provides an answer to the question whether actual fiction experience influences individuals [7] .

Fiction, Non-fiction and Narrative Structures

It has been argued that fiction may elicit stronger emotional and behavioral effects than nonfiction reading (e.g., newspapers and nonfiction books) [15] . Hence, a difference can be made between fictional narratives and non-fictional writing. Bruner [16] argued that narrative cannot be separated from fiction because every narrative told by an individual includes an interpretation of an event, and the narrator’s goals in telling the story. Hence, the difference between fiction and non-fiction is difficult to establish [16] , and the narrative structure of the text determines the extent to which the text is able to influence a reader. Bruner, however, distinguished logico-scientific mode of thinking and the narrative mode. While the first is aimed at seeking universal truth conditions through argumentation and logic, which can be represented by for instance scientific publications and newspapers (henceforth nonfiction), the narrative mode aims at particular truth conditions, and establishes verisimilitude, or truthlikeness. The central focus of the narrative mode is believability, as assessed by the reader. This narrative mode of thinking is best represented by fictional literature [17] . Fiction focuses on believability; a fictional text is not assessed on its consistency as is the case in non-fiction, but rather on whether it establishes verisimilitude, or truthlikeness [16] , [18] . A reader will be affected by a fictional narrative only when it creates a narrative world that is real within its context, and more importantly, when it is realistic for the reader, thereby creating an opportunity to be drawn into the story, which is discussed in more detail later on. However, nonfictional logico-scientific thinking will not be able to elicit those feelings [16] , [19] . Fictional narratives present characters, events and the setting of a story in such a way that the reader can become transported and hence change through the narrative [17] , [20] .

Effects of Fiction Experience on Empathy

Even though little research has been conducted on the effects of fiction reading on empathy, there are several researchers who have explained why fiction reading influences empathy. Mar and colleagues [6] , [7] , [21] argued that fiction reading may have profound effects on empathic skills of the reader. When an individual reads a story, emotions are triggered by that story, such that an affective impression is elicited by the narrative. According to Oatley [2] , fiction presents a simulation of real-world problems, and therefore has real consequences for the reader. Often when someone reads a fictional story, identification with the characters in the story and emotional involvement in the story causes the reader to sympathize with the characters, and perhaps even experience the events in the story as if the reader experiences the events him−/herself. Consequently, the reader practices being empathic while reading a fictional story. We define empathy in line with Davis [22] , [23] as: the cognitive and intellectual ability to recognize the emotions of other persons and to emotionally respond to other persons [24] . It includes sympathy and concern for unfortunate others [23] . Study of empathy is important because high empathic persons are more prosocial which is associated for example in the workplace to higher performance, productivity, and creativity [25] , [26] . There are several reasons why fiction reading may be related to empathic skills.

First, the simulation of real-world experiences in fiction might be associated with processes that people use in daily life to comprehend what happens in the world [7] . Consequently, through this sensemaking process, people gain a better understanding of the world and how they should interact with other people. People learn from fiction about the human psychology, and gain knowledge about how to react to other people in social situations, as argued by Mar et al. [7] . When an individual reads a story, he/she predicts the actions and reactions of the characters, by inferring what they are thinking, feeling, and intending. In order to do this, the reader sympathizes with the characters in the story, through taking the perspective of the characters and to experience the events as if it is the reader’s own experience. Moreover, some stories are able to make sense out of the senseless, and offer possibilities to understand other people across time and space, an opportunity which is not readily available in daily life [27] . The sympathy a reader feels for the characters is then integrated in the self-concept of the reader, through which the reader accumulates his/her ability to take the perspective of others, and to feel empathy [28] . Moreover, enhancement of empathic skills through fiction reading can contribute to people’s goals of who they want to be in their lives, such as to become a person that cares for other people’s welfare [29] . Hence, sympathetic reactions to fictional characters are integrated into broader response patterns in daily life, and empathic skills of the reader are enhanced [30] .

Second, Mar et al. [6] argued that fiction experiences enhance imaginative thinking. In line with the Immersed Experiencer Framework [20] , fictional words and stories activate neural processes that reflect real-world events which are similar to the story. Zwaan [20] , [31] introduced the Immersed Experiencer Framework to explain language comprehension by three mechanisms. When an individual reads a text, neural webs are activated while reading, through which an event in a story is simulated mentally by the reader. Finally, the reader integrates that what is read with existing mental models. Hence, this model explains at the language comprehension level that readers actively process texts and integrate these texts in their own human experiences [20] . Indeed, there is evidence suggesting that seeing or reading about another person experiencing specific emotions and events activates the same neural structures as if one was experiencing them oneself, consequently influencing empathy [32] . Thus, by reading a story, people imagine a narrative world that is similar to our own world. In this narrative world, people imagine how it is to see through the eyes of other people, by imagining and actually experiencing the thoughts and feelings of characters in a story. Hence, imaginative processes, evoked by fictional narrative experience, make people more empathic. Consequently, we argue that the reader becomes more empathic while reading fiction. The question however, is why fiction has such a potential impact on people.

Why does Fiction have an Impact on our Lives?

Fiction is primarily aimed at eliciting emotions [2] , [3] . To become engaged in a fictional story, a reader suppresses the notion of fictionality of the story and the characters to experience the emotions of the characters [15] . According to Goldstein [15] , a person reading fiction tends to react more strongly towards a story than when he/she would read a non-fictional story, because fiction provides a safe arena in which a reader can experience emotions without the need for self-protection. Because fiction does not follow the reader into real life, the reader can allow oneself to freely experience strong emotions, without immediate transfer of these emotions to real life. Moreover, we can allow ourselves to sympathize strongly with a character of a fictional story, because we do not have obligations towards the characters of a fictional story, while sad reports in a newspaper may cause feelings of obligation towards the victims to help them.

Another reason why fiction may have stronger effects on empathy than nonfiction is that fiction is processed differently than communications that aim to persuade a reader, such as commercial messages, scientific articles, opinion articles in newspapers, et cetera [33] , [34] . The effects of persuasive communication are likely to diminish over time, unless people are highly motivated and hence process the information in a systematic and elaborative way, in line with the Elaboration Likelihood Model [35] . For instance, a message about the negative effects of smoking may only temporarily change the beliefs of a reader. However, research has shown that individuals may be strongly influenced when they read fictional stories [34] , [36] , [37] . While readers are likely to read critically within the context of persuasive communication, a fictional narrative is more likely to be read with a willing construction of disbelief: the readers accepts assertions from a fictional narrative unless the reader is highly motivated to reject the assertion and is able to reject the assertion based on available knowledge [36] , [38] . Hence, the possible effects of stories on empathy are expected to be greater for fiction readers than for non-fiction readers.

Finally, another reason why nonfiction may have less strong effects on empathy than fiction has been presented by the theory of psychic numbing [39] . Slovic argues that the way a message (e.g., about victims) is presented to people influences their capacity to experience the affective information in that message and to feel sympathy. Specifically, it is easier to experience affect if a message presents information about a single, identifiable individual, than when information is presented about entire groups or using statistics (i.e., you can place yourself in the shoes of one other, but not of thousands). As a result, it has been shown in research on donating behavior that people will donate more money after reading information about an identifiable individual that suffered (e.g., one individual faces hunger) than after reading a message showing group statistics (e.g., 3 million people face hunger) [40] . In other words, a process of psychological numbing towards stories about large groups of people or objectified or statistically presented facts (which are often presented in non-fiction such as newspapers) is likely to occur, while fictional narratives, which are characteristically about individuals and their personal stories, may influence people to a much stronger degree.

In sum, because the focus of fiction is primarily on eliciting emotions, rather than on presenting factual information, fiction reading will be more likely influence empathy than non-fiction reading. The question remains, however, how fiction may influence empathy. Gerrig [12] argued that people may change as the consequence of fiction reading because they become fully immersed in a story, or in other words, they are transported into a narrative world. Gerrig [12] therefore presented the transportation metaphor to explain the effects of fiction on outcomes.

The Role of Transportation in the Effects of Fictional Narratives

According to Gerrig [12] , when people read a fictional narrative, they may become fully immersed into the story, which presents an alternative narrative world that is distant from the real world. While reading, people become transported into this narrative world, which often has been referred to a ‘being lost in a book’ [41] . Fiction can be an escape from the current world and by means of reading or watching, one is absorbed into the story told in the narrative. Transportation is defined as ‘a convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narrative’ [14] . People lose track of time and fail to observe events going on around them; a loss of self-awareness may take place [42] . The narrative world is distant from the world in which the reader lives, and makes it possible that the events in the story are perceived as real within the story context, even when events would not be possible in reality [43] .

The mental journey elicited by transportation makes it possible for readers to change as a consequence of reading fiction, because it elicits various processes, including emotional involvement in the story and identification with the characters [2] , [3] . Many studies have shown that when readers become transported into a narrative, personal change is more likely to occur. For instance, Green and Brock [14] showed that when readers became transported into a story, their attitudes about topics that were included in the story changed more strongly than those who were not transported into a story. Similar findings were obtained in studies by Appel and colleagues who found that transportation into narratives are the main precursor of changes in the individual [33] , [44] , [45] . Although researchers have argued that transportation may refer to both cognitive and emotional involvement in a story, we propose that it is primarily through emotional transportation that people may change, because fictional narratives are primarily written to elicit emotions among the readers, such as fear, surprise or joy [2] . In sum, personal change is more likely to occur when a reader is emotionally transported into a story.

Sleeper Effects of Fiction on Outcomes

Finally, in line with Appel and Richter [33] , we expect that the effects of fiction experience on empathy are guided by an absolute sleeper effect [46] , [47] . Absolute sleeper effects occur when the effects of a manipulation do not present themselves immediately, but manifest themselves over time. Absolute sleeper effects in fiction research assume that the effects of fiction reading on empathy will increase over time rather than present itself directly after the experience [33] , [47] . There are two main reasons why these effects occur. First, Schank and Abelson [48] argue that when people organize information in stories (a process that fiction should facilitate, as it consists of stories already), the representations of these stories last better and longer. Thus, the effects of fiction should generally last longer than in logico-scientific mode of thinking (like in newspaper reports). Thus, when people are transported into fictional narratives, they are better in remembering the story, because they were more intensely involved in reading the story, which enables mental representations afterwards. Hence, fictional narratives as mental simulation of real world events [7] deepen the readers’ general tendencies to feel empathy with other people. Support for the idea that the effects of narrative fiction remains constant or may even increase over time comes from Paluck [49] , who studied how a reconciliation radio program influenced perceptions of social norms in postwar Rwanda and found that through these radio stories, people’s perceived norms about how one should behave in social situations increased over time.

Second, for sleeper effects to occur, an incubation period is needed, in which people can rethink and relive that what has been read. Research on incubation has shown that spending some time on unrelated activities may enhance the effects of resolving problems, because an individual unconsciously connects the information from fictional narratives (e.g., people facing problems in their lives) with daily encounters, and consequently find new solutions through perspective taking and showing sympathy for other people [50] , [51] . This process may occur both consciously and unconsciously. As an example of the unconscious influence of narrative fiction, Marsh et al. [10] showed that false statements from fictional stories were used by readers when they had to conduct a knowledge task one week after reading the story. Moreover, Appel and Richter [33] found that the influence of false statements in fictional stories on people’s beliefs increased over time. Therefore, we propose that the effects of fiction on empathy do not present themselves immediately but manifest themselves over time. To test this idea and show long term effects of fiction reading on empathy, in both experiments we measured empathy both directly after reading a fictional story and after a one-week delay.

The Present Research

All in all, we expect that fiction will affect empathy over time only when a reader is emotionally transported into a story. The formal hypothesis of the study is:

Hypothesis 1: Fiction reading is positively related to empathy across time, but only when the reader is emotionally transported into the story.

To test the hypothesis, we present two studies in which the effects of fiction reading on empathy are investigated. In study 1, we investigated whether reading a Sherlock Holmes story influences empathy over the course of one week for readers who become emotionally transported into the story, while comparing these effects to non-fiction readers. In study 2, we sought to replicate these findings using a different story (a chapter from Blindness by Saramago), again using a control condition, while controlling for experienced negative and positive emotions. Stories were chosen because both stories include an event that happens to the main character (i.e., the murder to solve, and the spontaneous blindness of the man), and provided the opportunity to identify with the main characters, through which a reader was able to be transported into the story. Hence, readers could learn from the stories, as has been shown in research using these stories [52] , [53] . Second, the authors are well-known and the stories would appeal a wide audience, and would not be appreciated only by a limited number of people who favor a particular genre. Moreover, stories were chosen for which Dutch translations were available, since we aimed to avoid any problems with translating the stories into Dutch (the language of the participants)

Materials and Methods

Participants.

Participants were 66 Dutch students who received course credits for participating in the study. They were randomly assigned to either the fiction or the control condition. All scales were measured using a self-report method. 36 participants completed the fiction condition, and 30 participants completed the control condition. There were no dropouts in the study; everyone who started the experiment finished it. Participants were on average 26 years old, 52% was female, and they spent on average 3.32 (SD = 3.88) hours per week on reading fictional books. We found no significant differences between the fiction and control condition in age, gender or amount of time weekly spent on reading fiction.

Participants worked from home where they filled out the questionnaires and read the stories online via computer. The ECP (Ethische Commissie Psychologie/Ethical Commission Psychology) of the university where the study was conducted approved the consent procedure. All participants provided written informed consent of being participants in the study prior to participating in the study. The experiment leaders documented this digitally. All data were analyzed anonymously. Any information that could potentially lead to the identification of individuals (e.g., email-addresses, student registration numbers) was deleted after completing the study, and prior to the analyses. The study has been conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki. The same procedure was followed for Study 2.

All participants started by filling out some demographic variables, a range of study-irrelevant scales, and the empathy scale (T1). We included study-irrelevant scales (e.g., attitudes toward work measures) to hide the purpose of the study. Subsequently, participants were instructed to read either a few newspaper reports or a chapter from a fictional book. Participants read the fictional narrative (fiction condition) or a selection of articles from the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (control condition). After reading the text, they filled out the emotional transportation measure, the empathy scale, and some other irrelevant scales (T2). Participants had to provide a summary of what they had read, in order to check whether participants read the texts carefully. All participants provided accurate summaries, and hence no participant was deleted because of this reason. Precisely one week after reading the text, participants filled out a digital questionnaire from home, including the empathy scale (T3) and again irrelevant scales to avoid demand characteristics.

Text Material

In the fiction condition, participants read the first part of a short story from Arthur Conan Doyle, called ‘The Adventure of the Six Napoleons’ [54] . The story contained 2750 words and was read directly from the computer screen. The chapter was shown on one page, and readers could scroll-down to read the whole chapter. In the story, a plaster bust of Napoleon is shattered, a man is murdered and detective Sherlock Holmes is asked to solve the case. Participants did not read how Holmes solved the case.

In the control condition, participants read two stories from the Dutch high-quality newspaper De Volkskrant . The text was also around 2750 words long, and included a story about riots in Lybia and the nuclear disaster in Japan, which took place in March 2011. The stories were selected because they included experiences from individuals who were interviewed and followed during the riots in Lybia and disaster in Japan, and therefore would allow the reader to become emotionally transported into the non-fictional reports. The newspaper stories fitted the logico-scientific mode because the texts were primarily aimed at explaining events (what has happened), and why a particular event has happened. The newspaper reports were factual and focused on conveying information to the reader about a particular situation. Moreover, the nonfiction condition was not narrative in nature, but consisted of factual reports about real people. However, both conditions were matched in length and in content such that in both conditions, readers had the possibility to become transported into the text because individual people were central to the report or the story.

Emotional Transportation (α = .85) was measured directly after reading the text, using the scale from Busselle and Bilandzic [11] . It was measured with three items being: “The story affected me emotionally”, “During reading the text, when a main character succeeded, I felt happy, and when they suffered in some way, I felt sad”, and “I felt sorry for some of the characters in the text”. Answers could be provided on a 5-point scale (1 = not at all, 5 = to a very great extent). Transportation did not differ between the two conditions (F = 1.38, df 1,64, ns ).

Empathy was assessed directly before the experiment (T1), directly after reading the text (T2) and one week after the experiment (T3), using the empathic concern scale of Davis [22] , [23] . This subscale of Davis’ broader empathy scale was chosen because it reflected the part of empathy we were most interested in, being feeling sympathy and concern for others. It was measured using seven items, indicating the extent to which the participant feels empathic with other people. Example items are: “Sometimes I don’t feel sorry for other people when they are having problems” (reverse-scored), and “I am often quite touched by things that I see happen”. Davis found this scale to be valid and reliable [22] , [23] . Reliability for the scale in this study was.71 at T1,.75 at T2, and.79 at T3. We also assessed whether transportation and empathy are distinct from each other. We ran a factor analysis and included the transportation items (measured at T2) and the empathy items (measured at T2). Two factors emerged, with the items loading on their corresponding factor, with item loadings all above.55 and no cross-loading of items on the other factors. The transportation scale correlated between.13 and.19 with empathy across the various time points. Hence, transportation and empathy represent two empirical different constructs.

We did not find gender differences in transportation (F = .36, df 1,64, ns ). In our analyses, we controlled for the influence of difficulty of the texts. At T2 (directly after reading the stories) we measured whether participants understood the stories they read through the Narrative Understanding scale [11] (α = .76). Example items of this scale are: “At points, I had a hard time making sense of what was going on in the stories” and “My understanding of the character is unclear” (both items recoded). Moreover, we also measured at T2 the extent to which readers were able to focus their attention to the stories, through the Attentional Focus scale [11] (α = .91). Examples are: “I found my mind wandering while I was reading the story” and “I had a hard time keeping my mind on the stories” (both items recoded). We found that the fictional story was significantly higher in attentional focus (F = 5.05, df 1,64, p <.05) while narrative understanding was not significantly different between the two conditions, indicating that the fictional story was easier to focus the attention to. We added these scales to the regression analyses in order to control for the alternative explanations that that readers who have more difficulty in understanding the text or to focus their attention to the text will be less likely to change in empathy over time.

Results and Discussion

Hierarchical regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses. To reduce multicollinearity bias, emotional transportation was first standardized before interaction terms were calculated [55] . In the first step, empathy T1 and the control variables were added to the equation, after which in two separate steps, the independent variables and the interaction term were added. For significant interactions, slopes were calculated for the two experimental conditions. Table 1 presents the variable means and the correlations among the variables under study. Standardized coefficients (betas) are reported for the regression analyses in order to be able to compare effect sizes with other predictors in the model, while unstandardized coefficients (B’s) are reported for interactions in order to ascertain strength of the effect [55] . To show the sleeper effect, we estimated the effects of transportation on empathy both immediately (T2) and after one week (T3).

Table 2 presents the results of the hierarchical regression analyses. As predicted, there was no immediate effect of the interaction between condition and transportation on empathy T2 ( β  = .03, ns ). Empathy T1 was a strong predictor of empathy T3 ( β  = .81, p <.001). Narrative understanding ( β  = −.16, ns ), attentional focus ( β  = .14, ns ), condition ( β  = −.04, ns ), and emotional transportation ( β  = −.09, ns ) were unrelated to empathy T3. However, in line with the study hypothesis, the interaction between emotional transportation and condition was significantly related to empathy T3 ( β  = .17, p <.05). Figure 1 presents the interaction pattern in relation to the change in empathy from T1 to T3. The relation of emotional transportation with empathy T3 was positive and significant for fiction readers (unstandardized slope B = .09, p <.05), and not significant in the control condition (B = −.02, ns ). Further analyses revealed that especially under conditions of low transportation, empathy differed significantly between the two conditions ( p <.10), but with increasing transportation, empathy increased for fiction readers while it was not significant for the control condition. We also calculated regions of significance for the effects of emotional transportation on changes in empathy [56] . Regions of significance indicate between which values of emotional transportation the impact on change in empathy is significantly different between the two conditions. It was found that the region of significance ranged between −21.05 and −1.35 of the standardized score of transportation. These values are outside the range of the standardized transportation score (−1.33 to 1.97). Hence, while the relationship was non-significant for nonfiction readers, the relationship was positive for fiction readers along every point of the slope. This indicates that for low transportation, empathy of fiction readers became significantly lower than of nonfiction readers, and for highly transported readers, empathy significantly increased over time. Therefore, our hypothesis is supported; fiction readers become more empathic over the course of a week when they are emotionally transported into the story, while lowly transported fiction readers became less empathic over time. As expected, this was not the case in the control condition.

Study 1 provides first evidence that fiction reading causes empathic skills to increase over time when the reader becomes emotionally transported into the story, while the reverse occurs when the fiction reader does not become transported at all: then the reader actually becomes less empathic. Hence, when people read a Sherlock Holmes story and become fully engaged in the story and identify strongly with the main characters, empathy is enhanced over time and empathy decreases for non-transported readers. To further test the hypothesis that fiction reading can influence empathy and to cross-validate the findings, we conducted a second study. In this study, we used another fictional story to ascertain whether the effects hold across fictional stories and genres. Moreover, the question is whether the effects of transportation into fiction experience cannot be attributed to the emotions people experience while reading a fictional text. Therefore, in analyzing the effects of emotional transportation on change in empathy over one week, we now controlled for experienced negative and positive emotions, in order to rule out the possibility that it is only the emotions people experience after reading that changes their empathic skills [7] .

Participants were 97 undergraduate Dutch students who received course credits for participating in the study. They were randomly assigned to either the fiction or the control condition. All scales were measured using a self-report method. Fifty participants completed the fiction condition, and 47 participants completed the non-fiction condition. There were no dropouts in the study. None of the participants from study 1 could participate in this study. Before reading the text, age, gender (1 = male; 2 = female) and narrative experience were measured. On average, participants were 24 years old, and 74% were female. Narrative experience was rated by the average amount of fictional books one reads annually. On average, participants read 13 fictional books per year.

Participants worked again from home where they filled out the questionnaires and read the stories online via the computer. All participants started by filling out some demographic variables, a range of study-irrelevant scales, and the empathy scale (T1). Subsequently, participants read the fictional narrative (fiction condition) or a selection of articles from the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad (control condition). After reading the text, they filled out the emotional transportation measure as well as the narrative understanding and attentional focus measures, the empathy scale, and some other irrelevant scales, such as engagement in leisure activities, attitudes about work and creativity, in order to avoid demand characteristics (T2). Furthermore, participants were asked to give a summary of what they had read. The first author and two colleagues assessed whether participants gave accurate summaries. Since all of the participants provided accurate summaries, none of the responses were deleted because of inaccurate reading of the text. Precisely one week after reading the text, participants filled out a digital questionnaire from home, including the empathy scale (T3).

In the fiction condition, participants read the first chapter from Nobel Prize winner José Saramago’s Blindness [57] , [58] . A Dutch translation of the chapter was used for the study, since all of the participants were native Dutch citizens. Work from a Nobel Prize for Literature (1998) winner was selected because this work would appeal to many readers. The chapter describes a man who, while in his car waiting for the traffic lights, spontaneously becomes blind. Passengers bring the man to his home, while another man, who promises to bring his car home, steals it. When the man is home, he falls asleep and dreams. When his wife returns home, she brings him to an ophthalmologist, who is not able to diagnose his condition (end of chapter). While being fictional, the chapter contains a strong emotional component, through picturing the man who instantly becomes dependent upon other people when turning blind. The chapter contains 5330 words, and was read directly from the computer screen. The chapter was shown on one page, and readers could scroll-down to read the whole chapter. In the control condition, participants read parts of the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad . It was 5220 words long, and included in total five stories (e.g., about riots in Greece and liberation day in the Netherlands). Again, newspaper articles were selected that included stories about individual people and therefore provided means to become transported into the stories. Participants read the articles directly from the computer screen.

Emotional Transportation was measured directly after reading the text, using the same scale as study 1 [11] . Reliability of this scale was.87. Transportation was higher in the fiction condition than the nonfiction condition (F = 13.56, df 1,95, p <.001). Empathy was assessed directly before the experiment (T1), directly after reading the text (T2) and one week after the experiment (T3), using the same scale as in study 1 [22] . Reliability for the scale in this study was.75 at T1,.79 at T2, and.77 at T3.

We controlled for age, gender and narrative experience, narrative understanding (α = .67), and attentional focus (α = .92). We did not find gender differences in transportation (F = .13, df 1,95, ns ). Narrative understanding and attentional focus were measured at T2 using the same scales as in study 1 [11] . We found that the fictional story was easier to understand and to focus the attention to (narrative understanding: (F = 9.80, df 1,95, p <.001; attentional focus: F = 7.03, df 1,95, p <.01). We also controlled for positive and negative emotions. These two were measured directly after reading the text (T2), with scales from Djikic et al. [28] . Participants were asked to rate for eight emotions the extent to which they felt these emotions after reading the text. Positive affect was measured with four items (happiness, contentment, excitement, and awe; α = .80). Negative affect was also measured with four items (sadness, anxiety, anger, and fearfulness) and was found to be reliable (α = .74).

Hierarchical regression analyses were used to test the hypothesis. To reduce multicollinearity bias, independent variables were first standardized before interaction terms were calculated [55] . In the first step, control variables were added to the equation, after which in two separate steps, the independent variables and the interaction term were added. For significant interactions, slopes were calculated for the two experimental conditions. Table 3 shows the means of the variables and the correlations of the variables under study. As expected, age was positively correlated with narrative experience ( r =  .24, p <.05), and gender was also positively related to narrative experience ( r =  .22, p <.05), indicating that women on average read more fictional books than men. Gender was also positively related to empathy T1 ( r =  .35, p <.01), empathy T2 ( r =  .31, p <.01), and empathy T3 ( r =  .38, p <.01), indicating that women on average rated their empathic skills to be higher than men, which is consistent with previous studies by for instance Mar et al. [7] .

Hierarchical regression analyses are shown in Table 4 . The interaction between condition and transportation was not related to empathy T2 ( β  = .04, ns ). Neither narrative understanding ( β  = .04, ns ), attentional focus ( β  = −.12, ns ), condition ( β  = −.05, ns ), nor emotional transportation ( β  = −.12, ns ) were significantly related to empathy T3, while controlling for age, gender, narrative experience, stability of empathy ( β  = .82, p <.001), and positive and negative affect. The interaction term between condition and emotional transportation was significant ( β  = .18, p <.05; ΔR 2 =  .01). The interaction term in relation to changes in empathy from T1 to T3 is graphically represented in Figure 2 . The slope for non-fiction readers was negative (B = −.12, p <.05), while the slope for fiction readers was positive (B = .07, p <.05). Similar to study 1, at low levels of transportation the two conditions were significantly different ( p <.05), but the effects of transportation were opposite in the two conditions. We estimated a region of significance outside −.38 to 25.03. Given the range of the standardized score of transportation from −2.16 to 2.35, it can be concluded that at low levels of transportation, fiction readers became lower in empathy over time, and when transportation increased somewhat, empathy increased as well, while for nonfiction readers who were low in transportation, the effect was negative when they became more transported. Thus, the study hypothesis is partially supported in study 2; emotional transportation in fiction reading influences empathy over time, but only when fiction readers have low levels of transportation become less empathic.

In sum, while we found that in study 1, empathy was enhanced over a period of one week, in study 2, we found that low transportation led to lower empathy over time. Inspection of the interaction effects revealed that especially at low levels of transportation, empathy became lower among fiction readers. However, since transportation is a continuous variable, increase of transportation only enhances empathy for fiction readers, and not for non-fiction readers. Moreover, these effects could not attributed to difficulty of the texts, or experienced negative or positive emotions. Although the regression analyses showed that when people experienced negative emotions while reading, the interactions of condition and transportation were also significant, showing that fiction reading influences empathic skills beyond simple emotional effects and this can be both negatively and postively.

General Discussion

The current study investigated the influence of fictional narrative experience on empathy over time. In two experimental studies, we were able to show that self-reported empathic skills significantly changed over the course of one week for readers of a fictional story by fiction authors Arthur Conan Doyle or José Saramago. More specifically, highly transported readers of Doyle became more empathic, while non-transported readers of both Doyle and Saramago became less empathic. These effects were not found for readers in the control condition in both studies, although nonfiction readers in study 2 decreased in empathy when transportation increased. Increase of emotional transportation enhances empathy for fiction readers while it does not for nonfiction readers, such that it leads to higher empathy at relatively high levels of transportation. For study 1, indeed high transportation led to increases in empathy for fiction readers, while for both studies 1 and 2 absence of transportation was associated with decreases in empathy for fiction readers. This could be explained because when a reader is not able to identify with a text and does not become transported, this might lead to disengagement, with the reader being distracted and frustrated, as suggested by Pelowski and Akiba [29] . In other words, a reader has to become fully transported into the story to change as a consequence of reading, to become more empathic. When a reader is not able to identify with a fictional narrative and does not become transported, this might lead to disengagement, with the reader being distracted and frustrated. When readers disengage from what they read, they possibly become more self-centered and selfish in order to protect the sense of self in relation to others [17] . Yet, these results are important, because previous research has claimed that fiction reading has positive effects [6] – [7] , while we are amongst the first who also show that fiction reading might have negative effects, when readers do not become transported, and hence, disengage from literature.

For the participants in study 2, empathic skills decreased somewhat when they became emotionally transported into the newspaper stories. Finally, from study 2 we conclude that these effects hold even after controlling for factors such as general narrative experience, experienced negative and positive emotions during reading and the experienced difficulty of the texts. Therefore, the effects of increased empathic skills cannot be solely attributed towards the emotions people experience in response to either a fictional or non-fictional text or the difficulty people have in reading a texts.

These are the first empirical studies showing under realistic conditions that fiction reading is related to empathic skills. Although previous studies have pointed towards these effects [6] , [7] , we show that reading real stories relates to how people sympathize with others, are able to take multiple perspectives, and feel for unfortunate others. Increase of empathy is important for people because empathy is positively related to creativity [26] , performance at work [25] , and prosocial and cooperative behaviors [59] , [60] .

Research Implications

The current study has a number of implications for future research on the role of fictional narrative experiences. First, and most importantly, the current study followed the transportation framework of Gerrig [12] , [17] to postulate specific predictions of the conditions under which fiction experience relates to outcomes. We have shown that emotional transportation influences the reactions toward fiction reading in terms of changes in empathy. Since the main effects of the conditions were not significantly related to change of empathic skills over time, it is not the activity of reading itself that transforms the self, but the emotional involvement in a narrative [28] , [45] . Thus, this study adds to the recent empirical findings that it is transportation that influences whether people’s beliefs about the world are influenced [28] . Therefore, it is imperative for future research on the effects of fictional narrative experience to take the role of transportation processes into account. We have argued that it is through sympathizing with the characters in a story that people become more empathic. However, not every fictional narrative will provoke sympathy; for instance characters in a story may act in ways that the reader disapproves, and consequently no sympathy is felt for the characters. It might be possible that other effects of these experiences of disapproval are established, such as changes in moral values [44] . This study also corroborates this hypothesis by showing that low transportation leads to lower empathy over time. Future research may shed more light on this issue.

Moreover, the study has shown that effects of fictional experience are different from the control condition in which non-fictional texts were used [12] . Although both types of narratives may elicit strong emotions, and people may become engaged in reading both types of narratives [15] , the outcomes may be opposite to each other. While transportation into fiction may cause people to sympathize with other people, through felt emotions, high involvement and sympathy for people in non-fiction stories may create felt obligations to do something while not possible, which consequently leads to lower empathy [39] , [40] . When we read non-fiction, readers have to suspend disbelief to be changed by the story. When reading fiction, however, disbelief has not to be suspended because readers are likely to accept information from fiction without asking themselves whether the information is true or not [12] . Therefore, the processes through which fiction experience relate to outcomes is wholly different from more logical processes, which are guided by non-fiction reading [16] . Future research should further disentangle the differential impact of these fictional and non-fictional narrative experiences.

Finally, the current study has shown that the effects do not present themselves immediately, but that the effects are guided by an absolute sleeper effect [33] . Theoretically, fictional narratives are more likely to influence behavior over the course of a week rather than directly after the narrative experience, because the process of transformation of an individual needs time to unfold [38] , [44] . For instance, people think back and mentally relive the story they have read. The effects of fictional narrative experience may flourish under conditions of an incubation period, in which the changes in empathy become internalized and part of the self-concept [29] . Therefore, research on fictional narrative experience should be guided by a temporal design of the proposed effects. For instance, if the proposed outcomes of fictional narrative experiences are experienced emotions or psychological detachment from work, the effects will be more immediate and direct rather than when outcomes such as empathy or creativity are investigated.

Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research

One of the limitations of the current study was that the participants in the fiction condition only read the first part of a Sherlock Holmes story and the first chapter of the novel by Saramago. Therefore, it is possible that the effects of the fictional narrative experience are somewhat underestimated, since the experience of a complete story or novel may be different than reading a single chapter. First, if empathy is positively related to experience with reading fictional narratives, as previously suggested [6] , [7] , then it can be expected that longer exposure to a novel will have stronger effects than reading a single chapter. Furthermore, readers of a fictional narrative can identify with the main characters [12] , [14] , and such identification and sympathizing with the main characters can be expected to be stronger as the reader becomes more familiar with them, in other words, when one reads more of a novel. Thus, the effects of fictional narrative experiences may be stronger as one has more prolonged exposures. However, it might be also the case that because participants in the control condition read multiple stories, even though they had more opportunities to become transported, these opportunities were less expanded than in the fiction condition. Future research should therefore include more similar stories to ascertain the effects of fiction and non-fiction. For instance, nonfictional reports could be constructed which are equivalent to fictional stories, such that more specific evidence can be gathered concerning the impact of fiction reading on outcomes.

A limitation to the beneficial effects of fictional narrative experiences on perceived empathy could be that there are ceiling effects regarding increases of empathy following a fictional narrative experience. That is, although we have shown that empathy increases over the course of one week when one becomes transported into a narrative, it might be the case that the potential effects become smaller for avid readers or for highly empathic people. The sample of the current study consisted mainly of younger randomly selected students, who may therefore be more likely to be influenced by fictional narratives, than groups of highly experienced readers or a selection of highly empathic people. However, whether this line of thought is actually true remains an empirical question. In contrast, low transportation may lead to disengagement from a text. When readers have to read a text, they may feel less empathy with other people when they cannot identify with the characters in the text, and they may experience feelings of rejection, disgust, and disengagement. Hence, their empathic skills may decrease when they disengage.

A related question pertains to what happens during the week that is between reading a text and increase in empathy. Future research should investigate how the process evolves over time, so that better knowledge is gained as to what exactly happens over time when people have read and are transported into fictional stories.

An interesting avenue for further research is to investigate other outcomes of fictional narrative experiences. Next to affecting empathic skills of the reader, fictional narrative experiences may also influence creativity [17] , psychological detachment and recovery from work. Because fictional narrative experience is closely linked towards imaginative processing, readers of fiction learn to develop imagination in alternative worlds, through transportation in narratives. Subsequently, people develop broader action repertoires, causing them to be more creative in finding solutions for complex problems [17] . Moreover, through fiction experience, people take the opportunity to relax and unwind from work through which they can recover from their work. In contrast, non-fiction reading might be associated with alternative consequences than empathy. For instance, reading about events that have taken place in reality may create feelings of guilt and obligation [39] . Future research should investigate these alternative outcomes as well.

Another area for future research is to investigate the differential roles of transportation processes in determining outcomes. In the current study, we have proposed that emotional transportation will influence the extent to which people’s empathy is changed over time. Because fiction experiences are inherently emotional in nature [2] , it is the emotional engagement in the story and the characters in the story that cause people to identify and sympathize with others. However, if people just want to know how a story ends and how a mystery is solved, and hence are only cognitively transported without being emotionally involved [12] other outcomes may be expected, such as enhanced problem solving skills. Hence, depending on the outcome of fictional narrative experiences, the type of transportation (i.e., emotional or cognitive) may matter highly in predicting the outcomes.

A related area is the increasingly blurred distinction between fiction and non-fiction. In the current study, we used for the control condition articles from a newspaper, belonging in the nonfiction category or logico-scientific thinking [16] . Recently, however, an increasing number of books are published that are based on actual events, but yet are written in ways very similar to fictional novels, such that they may be very narrative in nature, in which the author in detail describes how events affected people’s thinking and emotions (a genre claimed to have started with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood ). Hence, the fictional nature of these types of stories (i.e., the author stresses believability of the story, and the narrative primarily aims at eliciting emotions in the reader), may constitute a fictional narrative experience for an individual, and hence effects may occur in line with the transportation framework [17] . Therefore, the fictional boundaries of non-fictional stories become broader, offering the potential experiences of fictional narratives, including the effects attributed to such experiences.

Finally, in the current study we have used self-reports to measure participants’ empathic skills. Therefore, we relied on how people assess how empathic they are. Although for future research it is recommended to obtain multiple perspectives on the outcomes under study (e.g., peer-ratings of empathy or actual empathic behavior), for the current study it was deemed appropriate to use self-reports, because we were mainly interested in individual change in empathy as well as the moderating role of transportation. As previous research has shown, common method bias is less likely to affect moderated hypotheses [61] .

The current study investigated how fictional narrative experience relates to empathic skills over time. Through two experiments, it was shown that transportation into fictional narratives influence empathy over time; a lack of transportation is related to lower empathy, while a high level of transportation might be related to higher empathy. The study shows that fictional narrative experiences have effects on people’s skills, such as empathy.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Rolf Bais, Sacha Rintjema and Marc Hagen for their assistance in collection of the data. Thanks to Richard Gerrig for his comments on a previous draft of the paper.

Funding Statement

No current external funding sources for this study. The study was completely covered by the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where the study was conducted. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Artificial intelligence in fiction: between narratives and metaphors

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• Published: 05 October 2021
• Volume 38 , pages 319–329, ( 2023 )

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• Isabella Hermann   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2226-8898 1  

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Science-fiction (SF) has become a reference point in the discourse on the ethics and risks surrounding artificial intelligence (AI). Thus, AI in SF—science-fictional AI—is considered part of a larger corpus of ‘AI narratives’ that are analysed as shaping the fears and hopes of the technology. SF, however, is not a foresight or technology assessment, but tells dramas for a human audience. To make the drama work, AI is often portrayed as human-like or autonomous, regardless of the actual technological limitations. Taking science-fictional AI too literally, and even applying it to science communication, paints a distorted image of the technology's current potential and distracts from the real-world implications and risks of AI. These risks are not about humanoid robots or conscious machines, but about the scoring, nudging, discrimination, exploitation, and surveillance of humans by AI technologies through governments and corporations. AI in SF, on the other hand, is a trope as part of a genre-specific mega-text that is better understood as a dramatic means and metaphor to reflect on the human condition and socio-political issues beyond technology.

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1 Introduction: AI narratives and science-fictional AI

In 2018, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met the humanoid robot Sophia produced by Hanson Robotics for a conversation event; the year before Sophia became citizen of Saudi Arabia as the first robot being granted the right of citizenship of a country. Another year earlier, in 2016, the software Alpha Go beat the world champion Lee Sedol in the board game Go—20 years after Deep Blue won against the then world champion in chess Gary Kasparov in 1996/1997. The progress in the broad field of artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be catching up with many films of the science-fiction (SF) genre, in which we have been watching humanoid robots and powerful computers for decades. The fictional android Data from the Star Trek franchise, for example, is a valuable member of the Enterprise crew and earned ‘his’ right to personal freedom before a trial; in the same vein, the board computer HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey appears to have its own will and by playing chess with the human astronauts “depict[s] the future birth of a superior intelligent being” (Bory 2019 : 628)—nowadays, this certainly applies to a software mastering the much more complicated game Go. It is, therefore, not surprising that SF has become a reference point not only in the media, but also for humanities scholars and social scientists on the ethics, opportunities, and risks around AI.

There are two ways to look at SF featuring AI, which I call science-fictional AI: First, it can be viewed as being a substantial part of a larger corpus of AI narratives. Narratives in general are cultural artefacts of various kinds that tell stories, which convey particular points of view or sets of values (Bal 2009 ). The term AI narratives applies to narratives featuring intelligent machines (The Royal Society 2018 : 5), they can be analysed as a reflection of our hopes and fears towards these technologies and thus may shape the development of AI by influencing developers, public acceptance, and policy makers (Cave et al. 2020 ; Cave and Dihal 2019 : 74). In this sense, AI narratives are understood as a serious representation of the potential of real AI and its possible consequences—like foresight or technology assessment. However, science-fictional AI—like the genre of SF in general—is not only about the hopes and fears of the particular technology, but about human dramas for a human audience and readership. From this perspective, it is not AI per se that inspires dramatic stories, but—quite the other way round—the desire to tell dramatic stories requires certain types of AI, for example humanoid robots or almighty systems. Thus, second, science-fictional AI is not necessarily about the technology but can be a metaphor for other social issues.

This second perspective is relevant, because if it is the case that AI narratives exert influence on AI research, public uptake and political regulation then taking AI in fictional stories too literally can be misleading, because it paints a distorted image of the present potential and functionality of the technology. The UK House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence writes in its report AI in the UK: ready, willing, able? (House of Lords 2018 : 22):

The representation of artificial intelligence in popular culture is light-years away from the often more complex and mundane reality. Based on representations in popular culture and the media, the non-specialist would be forgiven for picturing AI as a humanoid robot (with or without murderous intentions), or at the very least a highly intelligent, disembodied voice able to assist seamlessly with a range of tasks. […] this is not a true reflection of its present capability, and grappling with the pervasive yet often opaque nature of artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly necessary for an informed society.

In popular SF, precisely for the sake of dramatic storytelling, AI is often anthropomorphized and given human or even superhuman qualities that exceed the actual capabilities of the technology and can even become magical (Hermann 2020 ). Footnote 1 Unlike Data from Star Trek , for example, who possesses agency, the actions of Sophia are limited and scripted (Estrada 2018 ). And in contrast to HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey , which is presented as a faultless assistant, if not even a conscious being, Alpha Go —not to mention Deep Blue —is a specialised, albeit highly complex, computer programme (Silver et al. 2016 ) that has nothing of what we would call personal interests or affects, let alone consciousness. Taking science-fictional AI that can develop a will of its own for real obscures the fact that machines do not have intentions and reinforces existing misperceptions about the agency or autonomy of AI that are prevalent in the media discourse (Leufer 2020 ). Rather than AI being autonomous, everyone engaged in an AI undertaking is part of the AI-system, which includes, in addition to researchers, “those who set up the institutional arrangements in which AI systems operate, and those who fill roles in those arrangements by monitoring, maintaining, and intervening in AI systems” (Johnson and Verdicchio 2017 : 577). Ignoring all of these actors leads to a "sociotechnical blindness" that allows for the belief “that AI systems got to be the way they are without human intervention […] which facilitates futuristic thinking that is misleading” (ibid.: 587).

Hence, sociotechnical blindness obscures the fact that AI systems follow human interests and are embedded in social power structures set up by humans. This is problematic both in terms of a competent and realistic assessment of the opportunities, such as optimizing processes, and the challenges associated with the technology, such as algorithmic biases. Science-fictional AI can serve as techno-scientific inspiration and techno-philosophical thought experiment but taken as foresight or technology assessment it rather distracts from the chances and risks around AI in the real world (Giuliano 2020 : 1019). However, SF serves as a distorting mirror and metaphor to reflect on the human condition and socio-political issues in relation to and beyond technology. In this way, Data stands for what it means to be accepted as an equal human being (Barrett and Barrett 2001 : 87), not for robots becoming human. And among these lines, HAL 9000 “can be seen as a metaphor for those organizations and societies that cannot admit their flaws, and instead revert to the ‘human error’ explanation for what may be weak signals of systemic problems” (Shorrock 2013 ). Footnote 2 Thus, even though SF unfolds against the background of technological development, the genre tells stories about current and timeless social issues, which do not necessarily have to do with technology, but find their expression through it.

In this article, I offer alternative interpretations of science-fictional AI, moving away from literal readings towards understanding it as dramatic means and metaphor. In the following Sect. 2, I provide an overview of dramatic and metaphorical readings of AI as a trope and mega-text of science fiction, before discussing modern SF films featuring AI in more detail in Sect. 3. The focus is on films because not only do they visualize AI, but we can also assume that AIs from science-fiction films are generally known to a broader global audience than AIs from literature which is relevant for the argument of this article. Footnote 3 Next, a brief excursus in Sect. 4 critically explores the use of the science-fictional AI trope in science communication films. I conclude with further real-world issues concerning AI and a note not to confuse science fiction with reality in other areas as well such as climate change, space travel, or mega/smart cities. This article contributes to a more nuanced reading of AI in SF, in order not to be distracted from serious socio-political issues regarding AI in the real world, but also not to miss the metaphorical richness of the SF genre when it comes to robots and machines.

2 AI as a mega-text and trope in science-fiction films

SF as a genre emerged in the era of modernity with its social upheavals and belief in technological progress. Basically, SF tells stories about and through fictional technology, but within the prevailing paradigm of scientific thought. Thus, the departure point of SF is a fictional but scientifically explainable novelty, a “novum” (Suvin 1979 ), which establishes a new world different from the one we know. The scientific foundation, however, does not imply that the novum must be able to truly exist in the real world, but that it is cognitively imaginable within the story world (Roberts 2010 : 31, 32). In this way, the novum enables “what if”-questions to speculate about the present and alternative futures in various, but cognitively plausible constellations (Mehnert 2019 ). In SF, the novum of AI has become a common trope, which is generally understood as a theme or device that is used in a figurative sense, but it can also be overused and become a stereotype or cliché (Merriam-Webster 2021 ). The different nova and tropes of SF—including also for example space ships or futuristic cities—form part of the SF mega-text, which is composed of the intertextual references and relations of all SF works over time, and understood by the inducted creators and recipients of SF—the “native speakers”—in the “full semiotic density of a given text, most of which will overflow or escape the ‘realistically’-sanctioned definitions of the words in the fiction […]” (Broderick 2017 : 147). Under the AI trope, I subsume intelligent computer systems, smart machines as well as humanoid robots, in accordance with today’s use of AI in the public discourse as well as both in the SF genre itself and in the field of AI narratives research. Footnote 4 Generally, against the backdrop of the mega-text, AI and robots can be analysed in two ways, as dramatic means and as metaphor.

2.1 Dramatic means

SF, like any other genre, with its many formats including literature, comics, games, or movies, conveys dramatic stories that people can identify with. To fulfil its role in a narration, science-fictional AI often possesses qualities that go beyond real-world technological capabilities of a technical artefact operated by algorithms. One can roughly distinguish between two basic storylines in films: AI with a body trying or simulating to be more human, and AI at the level of computer systems that yearn to rule over humans/humanity (Irsigler and Orth 2018 ). Footnote 5 Apparently, AI in the form of a robot is often embodied by real human actors, because—independent of the production budget—if the plot dictates that a humanoid robot should be indistinguishable from real humans, the robot must consequently be played or voiced by a human actor to make the illusion perfect. Examples include next to the aforementioned android Data , Andrew from Bicentennial Man , the robot boy David from A.I ., the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica , the Hosts in Westworld , the Hubots in Real Humans , the Synths in Humans , the Replicants (even though not AI in the strict sense) and the virtual girlfriend/hologram Joi in Blade Runner 2049 as well as the operating system Samantha from Her ; all are played and/or voiced by real people and undergo human dramas (The Royal Society 2018 : 8).

A broadly discussed female film robot—or fembot—of recent years is the character Ava from Ex Machina . In the film, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur/programmer Nathan develops his latest version of a humanoid robot named Ava and brings in his rather shy employee Caleb to test how human-like ‘she’ is with a “reversed Turing test”. Ava makes Caleb fall in love with ‘her’ and in the end fools both men and escapes. The difficult balance of the film is that “[…] the audience has to understand she’s a robot, but for the movie to work that idea then needs to fall away, in the same way it does for Caleb” (Bishop 2015 ). Therefore, Ava was not meant to look like other film robots before her, such as metal (Metropolis’ Maschinenmaria), gold (Star Wars’ C-3PO), or white plastic (Björk’s music video All is full of Love) (Murphy 2015 ), but attractive, sleek, and vulnerable. And obviously, Ava was played by a human actress, who with the help of visual effects looked plausibly robot-like enough to fulfil the artistic and narrative necessities of the plot—not to serve as a sample for actual tech development.

Visual effects have always defined SF’s search for wonder (Pierson 2002 ). Against this background, science-fictional AI is not primarily about how realistically science and technology are portrayed in the films, but rather about "cinematic science", i.e., the technical achievement required to make the fictional images in the films look real (Telotte 1995 : 8). This does not only apply to Ava looking “mechanically plausible” (Murphy 2015 ), but also for example to the ground-breaking visual effects of the machines in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the Matrix franchise, or the completely animated robot Sonny in I, Robot , which was of course not state of the art in robotics of that time, but in CGI. Stories of conflict, if not epic wars between humans and machines, with their stunning images of devastation surely fulfil the audience’s expectation of watching SF blockbusters on the big screen. SF films “have consistently linked science and technology to the disastrous” (Telotte 1995 : 3), dealing “with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess” (Sontag 1965 : 44).

AI in films often serves plots of machines becoming human-like and/or a conflict of humans versus machines. Science-fictional AI is a dramatic element that makes a perfect antagonist, enemy, victim or even hero, because it can be fully adjusted to the necessities of the story. Footnote 6 But to fulfil that role, it often has capabilities that are way beyond actual technology—be it natural movement, sentience, or consciousness. If science-fictional AI is taken seriously as a representation of real-world AI, it provides a wrong impression of what AI can and should do now and in future.

2.2 Metaphorical means

Nevertheless, even though the scientific and technological progress is plausibilised within the story, what makes the SF genre most interesting is not the novum per se, but the social aspects that are told through it, the “fabulations of social worlds, both utopic and dystopic” as Sheila Jasanoff ( 2015 : 1) puts it. The fact that machines are part of our everyday lives might complicate the metaphorical alterity, however, “there can be little doubt that this [alterity] is precisely the space occupied by the machine in the SF text” (Roberts 2010 : 146). AI tropes analysed in a figurative sense serve as a magnifying glass for the human condition in its philosophical, cultural, psychological state, as well as current socio-political problematics (Hermann 2018 ).

On a basic level, SF films contain the fundamental motif of the human desire to create a living, intelligent or conscious creature of our own, independent of the real technical possibilities. In this sense, AI technology and especially robots in SF films resemble “a fundamental and unresolved anxiety that has always followed from our simultaneously creative and created natures […]—for it seems our nature to desire, Faust-like, a knowledge or power that, in other times, belonged to the gods" (Telotte 1995 : 10–11). Thus, the robot, according to Adam Roberts ( 2010 : 161), “is that place in an SF text where technological and human are most directly blended” [hence] “the dramatisation of the alterity of the machine, the paranoid sense of the inorganic come to life”.

We find this motif throughout human cultural history from antique myths over the Jewish legend of the Golem to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . The longing for creation is connected with the anxiety that the creature will grow over our heads that we will lose control and finally be dominated by it (Schelde 1993 ). This primeval desire and fear, which Isaac Asimov fittingly called the “Frankenstein complex”, has become a basic feature of twentieth and twenty-first century AI fiction (The Royal Society 2018 : 8). Specifically, humanoid AI and robots tend to be a projection canvas for the “Other” (Meinecke and Voss 2018 : 208) as a reflection on our humanity and humanness (Telotte 1995 : 3). Most often, these creatures want to be accepted as full humans, which makes them placeholders for marginalized or mistreated people missing equal human rights or status; they can be enemies, slaves, servants, and sex objects. The Replicants , for example, show us the consequences of a dehumanized hypercapitalism, the Hosts live through “escape and self-discovery” (The Royal Society 2018 : 8), the Cylons stand for the values of a critical humanism, according to which our humanity only reveals itself in dealing with the other and deviant (Jackson 2013 ). By that, the depiction of the humanoid AI also implies a critical cinematic discussion of humans themselves becoming more and more artificial in a technicised world:

Although the robot has, of course, given us a vehicle for exploring issues of gender, race, and a variety of forms of Otherness, and increasingly for asking questions about the very nature and meaning of life, this image of an artificial being, most commonly anthropomorphic in form, also invariably implicates the cinema’s own and quite fundamental artificing of the human (Telotte 2016 : 3)

When it comes to stories of powerful and omnipotent AI systems exercising total control over humans/humanity, they show the fear of impotence and helplessness of the individual in the face of superordinate structures. They reflect the dangers of dictatorship, anti-democratic societies, and suppression of freedom of choice, oftentimes working with historic references to colonialism and totalitarian regimes. Examples of that are Terminator ’s Skynet , the system Colossus in The Forbin Project , the threat assessment system Control in Star Trek: Discovery , the rule of the machines with their head Deus Ex Machina in the Matrix franchise, VIKI in I, Robot or Indra in the new series remake of Brave New World.

3 What AI tropes tell us

Apparently, what happens in SF stories is not necessarily what the story is about. In what follows, I will examine the dramatic and metaphorical means of AI representations primarily in the modern SF-films A.I. from 2001, I, Robot from 2004 and Ex Machina from 2015. Furthermore, science-fictional AI as humanoid robots or conscious machines distracts from current risks of AI in the real world and may rather be interpreted as a reflection of societal issues beyond technology. The films were selected for three reasons: First, because films in general, unlike literature, make AI visible; second, these films were international blockbusters, so we can assume that they are known to a wider audience than, for example, books that address AI; and third, because these films have also been analysed in the context of AI narratives (Cave and Dihal 2019 ).

3.1 Ex machina , Her , sexism, and manipulation

To return to Ex Machina : The way Nathan has developed Ava 's human-like AI appears quite plausible from a real-world perspective, namely by feeding it all available data from human interaction through his dominant company Bluebook, a counterpart to Facebook or Google. The basic plot idea that an AI trained with large sets of human social interaction data might result in an AI manipulating humans, can indeed be a relevant issue (Harari 2017 : 382–397). Nevertheless, whereas Murray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College, who was consulted by film director Alex Garland, finds it a great film because people after seeing it could “[…] spend the rest of the evening arguing with each other about whether the AI is or isn’t conscious” (Lamb 2015 ), I argue that such discussions are interesting philosophical thought experiments, but they do not help us to grasp where actual risks concerning AI are. These risks are not about the possibility that a fully autonomous/conscious human-like robot or software program eventually will manipulate us for its own will, but that software and algorithms we don’t even see manipulate us in the political and commercial interests of other people.

Even more, Ex Machina gives a wrong impression of what AI can do and how science works. How Ava ’s positronic shimmering blue “brain” functions and how it could be that her face looks human, and she moves naturally is implausible, if not pure magic (Maynard 2018 : 158). That Nathan, portrayed as quasi alchemist, has developed his different fembots in secrecy all by himself in a stylish, clean lab in the middle of natural wilderness is also not believable. What the film does tell us about technology, however, is a general critique of irresponsible science and innovation (Maynard 2018 : 162; Bilton 2015 ). In that sense, Ex Machina is another variation of the hundreds of years old “Frankenstein complex” and Nathan is virtually a textbook example of the type of God-like mad scientist (TV tropes 2021 ), whose creation gets out of his control. Tech journalist Martin Robbins ( 2016 ) describes him as follows.

And so Nathan becomes a kind of three-part study of ego. He represents the male ego-driven culture of the tech world. He represents the film's buy-in to the idea that great egos drive great scientific advances. And the decay of his character shows what happens when an ego faces the reality of its own extinction.

The quote already leads beyond the anxiety that technology might escape our control to a related problematic addressed in Ex Machina and other films, namely toxic masculinity, male hubris, and sexism in the tech world implying male fears concerning powerful women (Belton and Devlin 2020 ). Technology is not neutral but mirrors existing sexism in all stages—from the design to development to application. As a result, for example, real world digital assistants such as Alexa, Siri or Cortana are feminized—in line with the operating system Samantha from Her or the virtual assistant/girlfriend Joi from Blade Runner 2049 — to gratify the expectations of the developers and users (Adams 2019 : 574–575; Alexander 2016 ; Schwär and Moynihan 2020 ). Even though these issues have been widely discussed in academia and the media, and awareness of the issue has grown, it is still an example of existing sexism being inscribed in factual and fictional technology. Footnote 7 Films take this to extremes using fictitious technology—which is embodied by real women actors like in the case of the fembot Ava . Thus, the film shows a very old motif: women being designed and created by men to fulfill their pleasure, as we already know it, for example, from the ancient myth of Pygmalion, whose beloved statue came to life to serve him as a good wife.

There is agreement among many critics and researchers that Ex Machina starts as a story about objectification and suppression of women (and not robots). Footnote 8 However, on the question how the story develops, interpretations vary substantially. In a negative way, Ava is seen as a representation of the value of women in films in general “when the only female lead in your movie is one whose function is to turn the male lead on while being in a position to be turned off” (Watercutter 2015 ); thus, even though Ava would be the smartest character in the film, in the end we are left with the message that the best way for intelligent women to get what they want is to act as a manipulative “femme fatale” (ibid.). According to this view, the film does not criticize sexism in social life, in the film industry or in the tech world, but rather strengthens it. On the other side, the portrayal of gender in the film can also be seen as “bracingly modern and even poignant” exactly because it is a reflection that “Ava is born into a literally patriarchal system that measures her worth based on how men respond to her” (Buchanan 2015 ). In that way, robots have often been a way to critically question how much of gender is “literally constructed” and “to interrogate the formation of gender roles” (Telotte 2016 : 91) whereas “Ava’s demonstrated capabilities certainly present her as a kind of iconic representation of the power and emergence of women in contemporary culture […]” (ibid.). As stories of liberation and emancipation, speaking for Ex Machina and Her , “[b]oth of these films end with the female AI outsmarting her would-be lovers, owners and builders, leaving the men baffled and the viewer with a sense of doom” (Alexander 2016 ) creating the “new heroines: totally hot, bracingly cold, powerfully sovereign—and posthuman” (Dargis 2015 ).

Whichever way the films are interpreted, neither Ex Machina nor Her address pressing challenges around the future of AI, but serve as projection canvasses for questions around gender and sexism of our present, that find their expression through fictitious technology.

3.2 A.I ., I, robot , robot rights, and inequality

Another example is Steven Spielberg's A.I. , set in the twenty-second century, when various artificially intelligent, human-like robots called Mechas are built. They first lack emotions (or cannot simulate them), but there is a new model that looks like a human child and after being “imprinted” feels and needs love. A couple receives such a robot boy— David —because their real son suffers from a rare disease and is put into a coma. However, when the son is surprisingly cured, things get difficult with David and he is set out. He experiences various adventures on his Pinocchio -like quest for the Blue Fairy to win back the love of his human mother. He succeeds two thousand years in the future, when humans are extinct and the now highly developed, transcendent Mechas make David ’s wish come true by creating a simulation of his mother, who loves him for one wonderful day—after which they both fall asleep forever.

The film has been analysed as easing the way for possible robot rights in the future (Chu 2010 : 214–244). Of course, one is supposed to feel pity for David , who is played by a real child actor and is apparently no different in appearance from the other human boys. But still, the interpretation that we need to protect robots from suffering and mistreatment is primarily a distraction from enforcing human rights and guaranteeing social welfare to humans (Bryson 2010 ). This can lead to such an absurd situation that a robot like Sophia seems to have more "rights" as a citizen of Saudi Arabia than Saudi women. Anthropomorphizing machines can lead to a misguided image of what the current risks around AI are: The pressing question is not if robots—in film or reality—should be guaranteed rights, but how to handle machines that believably simulate emotions and thus manipulate people in the interests of other people. After all, building machines in the image of humans does not come naturally, but is a decision made my entrepreneurs and developers to achieve certain economic or other goals.

Even more, anthropomorphizing machines distracts from the often precarious working conditions of real people mostly situated in the Global South, who provide the data for AI systems by doing online tasks on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk or content moderation for social platforms, leaving the clickworkers suffering psychological damage from the violent and abusive material they have to watch (Mühlhoff 2020 ). Against this backdrop, a debate about ascribing robots certain "rights" comparable to human rights can be criticized as a rather elitist demand, which Birhane and van Dijk ( 2020 : 1) put this way:

Once we see robots as mediators of human being, we can understand how the ‘robot rights’ debate is focused on first world problems, at the expense of urgent ethical concerns, such as machine bias, machine elicited human labour exploitation, and erosion of privacy all impacting society’s least privileged individuals. We conclude that, if human being is our starting point and human welfare is the primary concern, the negative impacts emerging from machinic systems, as well as the lack of taking responsibility by people designing, selling and deploying such machines, remains the most pressing ethical discussion in AI.

Nevertheless, the film examines our relationship to technology and reminds us to handle what we create responsibly. But since the Mechas neither outsmart nor threaten us, it is not a narrative of the Frankenstein complex, but rather of how we as humans fail at our own humanness. The film shows in one scene how discarded robots are tortured by humans in a setting that resembles a Roman colosseum. The robots serve as placeholder for all kinds of cruelties that humans commit against each other. The human flaws are overcome by the Mechas, who have become new creatures of higher ethics saving David from the primal human fear of abandonment, which is a recurring theme in Spielberg's work (Newton 2016 ). As a modern form of Pinocchio , the film is in the tradition of nineteenth century melodramatic tales in which the "epic hero" has to endure great suffering to be redeemed in the end, making the film a story of suffering and resurrection tackling human issues rather than a realistic and serious assessment of the status of robots (Nida-Rümelin and Weidenfeld 2018 : 31).

Moreover, the film I, Robot , set in a future of 2035 in which robots serve humans in all aspects of life, is also—rather than a plea for equal rights for robots—a reflection on human enslavement, oppression, and inequality in a profit-driven economic system. With the topic of robots as slaves, I, Robot adds another perspective of a critical analysis of “race” and technology, as the new NS-5 service robot series in the film, including the “unique” robot Sonny , is coloured white, which can be interpreted as a reference to being White. Footnote 9 In a positive way, I, Robot can be read as a "Post-White Imaginary" as “[k]ey moments of the film […] may be read as a parable of white antiracism, driven by an impulse of reconciliation between a ‘unique’ white robot and a black detective” (Brayton 2008 : 72). The fact that AI and robots are very often embodied by White people and shown in white colour makes science fiction also an example to critically think about the “Whiteness” of AI in general, reflecting the White milieus from which these artefacts come (Cave and Dihal 2020 ). However, it can be argued that rather than showing machines imagined as white to allow “for a full erasure of people of colour from the White utopian imaginary” (ibid.: 685), particularly films and series quite bluntly show the marginalization and exclusion of people of colour in the film business. But they also reflect the changing paradigms concerning diversity when the humanoid robots in the newer series Westworld , Real Humans and Humans Footnote 10 are played by actors of diverse ethnic backgrounds and skin colours. Footnote 11 It seems that whether an AI system is played or voiced by diverse actors says more about social progress in terms of diversity in the film industry, less so when it comes to technology.

I, Robot also features an AI-system called VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence), which is the central computer system of U.S. Robotics, the company that produces the service robots. VIKI has evolved and reprogrammed the new NS-5 series via an uplink network to control humanity and sacrifice part of it for the greater good of the entire human race. The logic behind this is a reinterpretation of Isaac Asimov's "Zeroth Law of Robotics" which states: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” (Singer 2009 ). According to VIKI , humanity cannot be trusted with its own survival because “[…] despite our best efforts, your countries wage wars, you toxify your Earth and pursue ever more imaginative means of self-destruction. You cannot be trusted with your own survival” (IMDb 2021 )—so the consequence is to take control of humanity and sacrifice parts of it if necessary. In this way, VIKI in the film is a critique of excessive utilitarian thinking regardless of individual fates (Grau 2006 ). Such stories can serve as thought experiments to address philosophical problems, but using them as examples of what to consider when building ethical machines is problematic: On the one hand, because the zeroth law as well as the first, second, and third laws Footnote 12 are narrative devices invented by Asimov to create interesting stories and plot twists precisely because the laws of robotics don't work; and on the other hand, because “[t]he bigger issue, though, when it comes to robots and ethics is not whether we can use something like Asimov’s laws to make machines that are moral […] Rather, we need to start wrestling with the ethics of the people behind the machines” (Singer 2009 ).

Hence, the relevant problematics regarding AI are not autonomous science-fictional machines claiming or deserving human rights or engaging in human–machine conflict, but the effects that AI-systems have right now on socio-political fault lines between humans.

4 Excursus: AI, SF and science communication

SF applies the trope of AI with different meanings, ideas, and attitudes, using a fictional approach toward technology to tell stories of the human condition, primeval desires and fears as well as social issues, or reflect current trends of society. Science communication, on the other hand, is intended to inform about the facts of science-related topics. Therefore, it can be problematic when science communication resorts to typical SF tropes in order to educate or raise awareness about critical aspects, because without familiarity of the SF mega-text, science-fictional AI used in current science communication runs the risk of only conveying clichés about conscious and autonomous AI. To illustrate the point, let me present two examples. Footnote 13

The science communication documentary film Ghost in the Machine (Singler 2019 )—the last of a four-part short film series called Rise of the Machines—made together by the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, aims to inform about the concept of consciousness and discusses whether machines could become conscious. While the film features a variety of researchers and experts in interview situations, there is also a fictional storyline about a research facility where an embodied AI has been developed and is now being tested for consciousness, emotions, and its will to survive. The embodied AI is played by a real human child actor, mimics emotions and tries to fool the lead researcher to let it out of its cage. A review describes the piece as rather inconsistent concluding: “All in all, Ghost in the Machine dishes up a serviceable appetizer but for the main course be sure to leave room for Ex Machina.” (Seth 2019 ). Indeed, one can strongly suspect that the fictional sequences in the form of a dialogue between the researcher and the "AI child" were inspired by the successful predecessor. The problem with this is that while Ex Machina by definition uses fictional technology to tell a thrilling and dramatic story, Ghost in the Machine uses the science-fictional AI trope to make a statement about science. Obviously, Ava is played by a real actress, because Ex Machina is a dramatic story about and for humans, but what is gained in a science communication film when the AI is played by a real human child trying to break out of the research facility? After all, the portrayal of AI as a child with a mind of its own obscures the fact that AI systems are technological artefacts created by humans.

Another example is a short film called The Intelligence Explosion (Susman 2017 ), "a superintelligence sci-fi" by Guardian Original Drama. However, as part of The Guardian Brain Waves—"a series exploring the science and emotions of our daily lives"—the piece is actually marketed as science communication that "raises important questions about the ethics of artificial intelligence," namely, "How do you stop a robot from becoming evil?" (Hern 2017 ). Again, the "AI" named Günther is played by a real human actor with some robotic features. While a company representative, a programmer, and an ethicist discuss whether it is possible to program an AI with ethical safeguards against turning evil towards humanity, Günther becomes superintelligent and, like Samantha in Her , transcends to a higher structure. AI is being presented as uncontrollable by humans feeding into discourses of AI supremacy and Singularity (Kurzweil 2005 ).

These two films build on typical SF tropes that a human-looking autonomous AI will develop a mind of its own and could become dangerous to humanity in the future, instead of addressing the risks of AI applications in the here and now. While current SF films certainly address technological trends, the tropes are hard to reconcile with genuine forms of science communication. Apparently, these films reinforce AI clichés rather than fulfilling the goal of informing about science-based issued at stake.

5 Conclusion and outlook

Currently, with the rapid progress in the field of AI, it seems as if the SF genre with its stories about intelligent machines is being caught up with the present. Thus, SF analysed as a part of an AI narratives frame is supposed to reflect the hopes and fears of the technology and thus treated as a type of foresight or technology assessment. Against this background it is claimed that because of their importance "narratives about intelligent machines should broadly reflect the actual state and possibilities of the technology” (Cave and Dihal 2019 : 74). Whereas this should be the case for science-communication, it is not for AI in SF. While Darko Suvin acknowledges that using SF as futurological foresight can be a legitimate secondary function that the genre can bear.

[…] any oblivion of its strict secondariness may lead to confusion and indeed danger. Ontologically, art is not pragmatic truth nor fiction fact. To expect from SF more than a stimulus for independent thinking, more than a system of stylized narrative devices understandable only in their mutual relationships within a fictional whole and not as isolated realities, leads insensibly to critical demand for and of scientific accuracy in the extrapolated realia (Suvin 1972 : 379).

What Suvin indirectly refers to as the first function is in fact the SF mega-text as a way to engage in questions beyond technology—which to be understood, requires familiarity with the clusters of available meanings and the themes raised (Blackford 2017 :73,192) or simply being a “native speaker” (Broderick 2017 : 147). The mega-text of AI tropes and icons can thus be interpreted as dramatic and metaphorical means to address questions about the socio-political issues, the human condition, and philosophical questions in general.

Interpreting science-fictional AI too literally as serious representation of the technology can have the following implications: First, taking fictitious humanoid robots and autonomous machines in SF for real disregards of the technical limitation of AI, obscures the chances and risks already at stake and might mislead the public as well as policy makers. The chances of AI are manifold, for example optimization and improvement on a global scale in areas such as health, agriculture, infrastructure or environmental protection, which can contribute to the achievement of many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (but can also impede some of them) (Vinuesa et al. 2020 ). Here, however, it is important to see that optimization and improvement through AI cannot be a simple technical solution to a problem but is a social negotiation of goals set by humans (Mason 2019 : 152–160). Moreover, the fact that AI is built by humans and trained with human-defined and human-collected data can lead to various kinds of biases in AI systems that entrench asymmetric power structures, for example discrimination against women, institutional racism, or degradation of poor and marginalized people. It is worrying how AI tools are being used for scoring, nudging, and monitoring people by governments and corporations—whether in the US, China, Europe or elsewhere (Chiusi 2020 ; Eubanks 2017 ; Liang et al. 2018 ; Nemitz 2018 ; O'Neil 2017 ; Sowa 2017 ; Zuboff 2018 ). Exactly because the design, development and application of technology are never neutral, we need human interaction in the form of ethics, norms, standards, and regulation.

Second, demanding scientific and technological accuracy from SF would imply an impoverishment of the many metaphorical meanings of the genre and the artistic freedom as well as assign a responsibility to the authors and creators of SF that lies in the hands of politicians, scientists, and science communicators. Not only with regards to AI, also—because of the fast pace of technological advances in general—in other fields the genre of SF and its tropes get blended in different forms with the real world, most notably when it comes to climate change, space exploration or mega/smart cities. It is important to note that scholars working with SF in all these different fields understand that the genre is primarily about stories and metaphors, not about real science and technology.

Availability of data and material

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There are, of course, other examples of AI in SF that are not portrayed as human-like or superhuman, but what is referred to here as “popular SF” is mainstream and commercially successful SF—mostly films and series – known to a wider range of people who are not necessarily genuine SF fans. For example, in a representative survey in 2019, the German Informatics Society asked Germans to name the ten best-known and the ten most influential science fiction AIs. Coming out on top in both categories were the Terminator, R2D2 from Star Wars, KITT from Night Rider, Data, Agent Smith from Matrix; and Sonny from I, Robot—all of them either humanoid, human-like with human traits, or endowed with superhuman abilities and/or consciousness (GI 2019 ).

In this sense, not only can AI be interpreted as systemic, flawed structures detached from humans, but conversely, opaque, and unaccountable systems can be interpreted as black-box AI systems, such as the bureaucratic judicial apparatus in Franz Kafka's Der Process (The Trial) (Hermann 2021 ).

For the same reasons of global prominence of the films and the AI depicted, also mainly AI representations from western culture were used.

It can be criticized that AI and robots are confused, since in the media as well as other reporting and communications AI-software applications are illustrated as quite unrealistic humanoid robots, which is deceptive as to what AI is and is not capable of. There exist projects collecting these misleading illustrations like https://www.aimyths.org or https://notmyrobot.home.blog/ .

There are of course more depictions of AI in science-fiction that do not fit in this frame, for example the service robots Dewey, Huey and Louie in Silent Running, Wall-E from the same film, and TARS and CASE from Interstellar, or the digital pets in Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects, the Daemon in Daniel Suarez’s book of the same name, and Clara in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Clara and the Sun—just to give a few random examples. However, the focus of the article is deliberately on these two most popular forms of science-fictional AI.

Film director Willi Kubica explained in a 2019 panel discussion on AI and SF at the British Embassy in Berlin, Germany, the use of AI in films as follows: "When you think of AI as a learning and adapting character in a film—it is the perfect thing to have for a story. Because your character should always learn something on its journey” (Kubica 2019 ).

Another obvious example is an internal recruiting tool of Amazon that learned, based on data from the past, that men were the optimal candidates for tech jobs at Amazon—"a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry" (Dastin 2018 ).

In the humanities, there is a large body of research dealing with sex, love relationships and robots, e.g. Levy ( 2008 ), Sullins ( 2012 ), Devlin ( 2018 ) or Wennerscheid ( 2019 ), which is beyond the scope of this article.

White in capital letters is meant to indicate social situatedness; thus, it does not so much describe a person's skin color or other phenotypic characteristics, but rather means social positioning in a racially structured society.

The British series Humans (2015–2018) is based on the Swedish original Äkta människor – Real Humans (2012–2014).

This inclusive process is very evident in the Star Trek franchise, where over the years to the present we have seen, for example, a female captain (Star Trek: Voyager), a Black commander/captain (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), and a Black female protagonist, a gay couple as leading roles and a transgender person (Star Trek: Discovery) (Krishna 2020 ).

Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics go as follows: First Law—A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; Second Law—A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; Third Law—A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law (Singer 2009 ).

Please note that these two examples are not defined by the author as science communication but are themselves marketed us such to inform the broader public.

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Writing Nonfiction Books: 21 Nonfiction Writing Research Techniques

By: Author Paul Jenkins

Posted on August 2, 2022

Categories Documentary , Education , Publishing , Storytelling , Technology , Writing

If you’re writing a nonfiction book, gathering information is one of the most important things you’ll need to do. This process can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. This blog post will discuss research techniques to help you collect the information you need for your book. We’ll also talk about how to stay organized and avoid getting overwhelmed during the research process. Let’s get started!

Determine Your Nonfiction Genre

As a nonfiction writer, it’s essential to understand the genre in which you intend to write and publish because this will often significantly influence the approach to your research that you will adopt.

Some types of nonfiction are:

• Creative nonfiction
• Academic writing
• Literary nonfiction
• Personal essay
• Narrative nonfiction
• Literary journalism

Start by Defining Your Topic

When starting a nonfiction book, it’s essential first to define your topic and why it matters. This will help you focus your research and ensure you’re gathering relevant information for your book. Additionally, defining your topic will help you create a roadmap for your book and give you a better idea of the overall structure.

When defining your topic, it’s essential to be as specific as possible. This will help you stay focused and avoid getting sidetracked while researching. It’s also essential to ensure your topic is interesting and relevant to your audience. If you can’t explain why your topic matters, your readers won’t be interested either.

It can be helpful to develop a thesis statement or question you want to answer through your research.

Once you’ve defined your topic, it’s time to start doing research. This can be daunting, but many techniques can make it easier – you’ll find a list below. I suggest you start with a list of several primary research questions you wish to answer.

Keep in mind when doing research that as you gather the information, you understand the topic better and get ideas for further research.

Do Some Preliminary Research

When writing a nonfiction book, it’s essential to do preliminary research to gather information and get an idea of what you want to say. This research can help you get a better understanding of your topic and help you plan out your book.

The first step in preliminary research is to develop a research question. Your research question should be specific and focused and guide your research process. Once you have a research question, you can begin to gather information.

Once you’ve gathered all this information, it’s crucial to analyze it and synthesize it into a cohesive whole. This will help you develop a strong argument for your book. Preliminary research is an essential part of writing any nonfiction book. It will help you gather the information you need to write a well-informed book that will inform and engage your readers.

There are many different research techniques that you can use, and each one has its advantages. You’ll find a comprehensive list below.

There are several approaches you can use to conduct preliminary research:

• Start by reading books and articles on your topic. This will give you a broad overview of your subject.
• Identify key sources of information on your topic. These sources might include academic journals, government reports, or trade publications.
• Explore different ways to collect information. This could include conducting interviews, surveys, or focus groups.
• Create a timeline for your research project. This will help you stay on track and ensure you don’t miss any critical deadlines.

One of the most important things to keep in mind when researching is that it’s essential to be selective. You don’t want to overload yourself with information, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the topic. Instead, try to focus on the key points you want to cover and gather information.

Use Primary Sources

When researching a nonfiction book, it’s important to use primary sources whenever possible. Primary sources are first-hand accounts of an event or experience, often offering a much more accurate picture of what happened than second-hand accounts or memoirs.

Primary sources can be found in various formats, including interviews, letters, diaries, transcripts, and recordings. They can help give you an idea of the context surrounding the event or experience you’re writing about and provide you with first-hand accounts of what happened.

Using primary sources can be especially helpful when you’re trying to verify historical events. You can build a more accurate picture of what happened by verifying events with multiple primary sources. This is important because it ensures your book is accurate and provides your readers with reliable information.

Another reason to use primary sources is that they can provide new information. When reading a history book, likely, the author has already compiled and analyzed all of the available information on a subject. However, looking at documents from the period you are researching, you may find information that has not been previously published. This can give you a complete picture of what happened during that time.

Another benefit of using primary sources is that they help you connect with your audience. When readers can connect with the people featured in your book, they are more likely to engage with your work. Primary sources provide a personal connection to the people and events you’re writing about, which can make your book more relatable and exciting to read.

Approaches to Organize Your Information

One of the most critical steps in writing a nonfiction book is organizing your information. This involves creating a system for gathering and sorting your research material. There are several ways to do this, and the research method you choose will depend on the type of book you’re writing and the amount of information you have.

• One common way to organize information is by topic. You can create a file or folder for each topic and then subdivide those topics into smaller categories. This approach can be helpful if you want to ensure that all of your information is organized logically. It also makes it easy to find specific information when you need it.
• Another way to organize information is by source. If you’re writing a book that includes research from multiple sources, it can be helpful to organize your material by source. This will make tracking down the original sources easier if you need to verify something.
• Time-based organization is another way to organize information. When you organize your information by time, you group all the information related to a specific time period. This can be helpful because it makes it easy for readers to understand how events progressed over time. It can also help you to see any changes or trends that might have occurred over time.
• Location-based organization is another way to organize information. When you organize your information by location, you group all the information related to a specific place. This can be helpful because it makes it easy for readers to understand how events unfolded in a specific location. It can also help you to see any patterns or connections that might exist between different locations.
• You can also organize information by audience. You can group all the information according to who will be reading it. This type of organization can be helpful if you want to target a specific group of people with your book.

Whatever method you choose, it’s essential to be consistent with it. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a lot of disorganized material that will be difficult to work with.

Tools to Organize Your Information

Many tools can help you organize the information you collect for your book. The most important thing is to find a system that works for you and to stick with it. Some of the most common tools include:

Note Taking Software

This software can help you keep track of your research notes and the sources you used to gather that information. I’m a fan of Roam Research as a way to create, collate, link, and exploit large amounts of notes. This software can help you keep track of your research notes and the sources you used to gather that information. Depending on how far down the idea development process I find myself, I sometimes go direct to my mind mapping app, TheBrain (see below). I’m keeping a close eye on the upcoming app Scrintal.

Bibliographic Management Software

This software can help you keep track of the books, articles, and other sources you used in your research. It can also help you create citations for your work. I use the free app Calibre to store and organize the metadata for all my books and research papers. I use Hook Pro to create the link if I need to link across from an entry in the Calibre database. If citing a work in a paper or text, I use Bookends to generate a formatted citation (it can also search the Google Books, Google Scholar, Pubmed, etc. databases).

Mind Mapping Tools

Mind mapping tools can help you visually organize your research notes and ideas. In my personal experience, this technique can be helpful when trying to see connections between ideas. My favorite desktop app for developing ideas, and documenting the essential stuff upon which I stumble, is TheBrain. When allowing my mind to roam in a creative environment, I use Noda VR, which allows me to build mind maps in virtual 3D space (and then export them via CSV to bring into TheBrain).

Project Management Tools

Project management tools can help you keep track of all the different aspects of your book project, from researching to writing to publishing. In the past, I used professional-grade project management apps such as Merlin for Mac. These days, I try to keep things very simple and use Google Calendar, Things (for To Dos), and TheBrain to create a conceptual overview of a project.

File Management Tools

File management tools can help you organize all the files related to your book project, including notes, images, and audio files. When I need to dump a bunch of stuff into one place and use AI to help me make sense of it, I turn to DEVONthink. Its ability to spot serendipitous connections is excellent.

Online Bookmarking Services

Online bookmarking services can help you store links to websites and articles related to your book project. This can make it easy to access these resources when you need them. I keep the list of links in a Thought in TheBrain – because this is the principal place I develop projects. The individual URL’s can be attached to the individual Thought, meaning that one can directly view and navigate the web page or site in the mind map’s Notes and Inspector window. If I need a specific reference, I create it with Hook Pro and add it wherever needed. For a rapid search, analysis, and cross-correlations, I use DEVONAgent and DEVONthink in tandem: DEVONAgent grabs all the Google searches, which then syncs over to DEVONthink to start running Boolean or Advanced Boolean searches.

When using any of these tools, create a system that works for you and is easy to follow. Label folders and files, create categories for your notes, and use consistent formatting for citations and references. If possible, try to use a tool that is compatible with other software programs so that you can easily move information back and forth between them.

21 Research Methods to Consider When Writing Your Nonfiction Book

• Interview experts in your field
• Look for online resources – I use Infranodus to spot conceptual connections and identify valuable resources
• Check the library catalog
• Use internet forums and discussion group
• Conduct a literature review, using literary journals as an index – I find that Scholarcy is hugely helpful to fillet the essence of books and papers prior to further reading
• Survey your target audience
• Use social media platforms to collect data
• Collect data from surveys and questionnaires – including focus groups or interviews with key stakeholders
• Collect data from case studies and anecdotal evidence
• Analyze relevant statistics and data sets
• Review industry reports and white papers
• Read trade magazines and journals
• Scan conference proceedings and academic papers
• Watch webinars and listen to podcasts
• Consult expert databases such as Google Scholar or LexisNexis Academic
• Check the reference sections of books and articles for more sources of information
• Use subject directories such as Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ Open Directory Project
• Surf the internet using specific websites created for researchers, such as EBSCOhost’s Research Databases or the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Library website
• Attend professional conferences related to your topic
• Search for old newspapers and magazines online
• Use oral history collections to collect information from interviewees

How to Research a Nonfiction Book: 5 Tips for Writers

That you’ve landed here tells me you have a message you want to share in a book.

You’re eager to start writing, but you first need to conduct some research.

Problem is, you’re not sure how to research for a nonfiction book .

You may even wonder whether research is all that important.

You may be an excellent writer, but even a small factual mistake can cost you the credibility of your readers.

Over the last half-century, I’ve written over 200 books, 21 of them New York Times bestsellers. So I ought to be able to write a book on my area of expertise — writing and publishing — based on my experience alone, right?

I wouldn’t dare write such a book without carefully researching every detail. Because if I get one fact wrong, my credibility goes out the window. And I’d have only my own laziness to blame.

Thorough research can set your book — your message — apart from the competition.

As you research, carefully determine:

• How much detail should go into your book
• Whether even if it’s interesting, is it relevant?
• To remain objective and not skew the results to favor your opinions
• To use research as seasoning rather than the main course (your message)

As you weave in your findings, always think reader-first. This is the golden rule of writing.

Your job is to communicate so compellingly that readers are captivated from the get-go. This is as important to how-to manuals and self-help books as it is to a memoir .

• 5 Tips for Researching Your Nonfiction Book

1. Start With an Outline

While the half or so population of novelists who call themselves Pantsers (like me), who write by the seat of their pants as a process of discovery, can get away without an outline, such is not true of nonfiction authors.

There is no substitute for an outline if you’re writing nonfiction .

Once you’ve determined what you’d like to say and to whom you want to say it, it’s time to start building your outline.

Not only do agents and acquisitions editors require this, but also you can’t draft a proposal without an outline.

Plus, an outline will keep you on track when the writing gets tough. Best of all, it can serve as your research guide to keep you focused on finding what you really need for your project.

That said, don’t become a slave to your outline. If in the process of writing you find you need the flexibility to add or subtract something from your manuscript, adjust your outline to accommodate it.

The key, again, is reader-first, and that means the best final product you can create .

Read my blog post How to Outline a Nonfiction Book in 5 Steps for a more in depth look at the outlining process.

2. Employ a Story Structure

Yes, even for nonfiction, and not only for memoirs or biographies.

I recommend the novel structure below for fiction, but — believe it or not — with only slight adaptations, roughly the same structure can turn mediocre nonfiction to something special.

While in a novel (and in biographical nonfiction), the main character experiences all these steps, they can also apply to self-help and how-to books.

Just be sure to sequence your points and evidence to promise a significant payoff, then be sure to deliver.

You or your subject becomes the main character in a memoir or a biography. Craft a sequence of life events the way a novelist would, and your true story can read like fiction.

Even a straightforward how-to or self-help book can follow this structure as you make promises early, triggering readers to anticipate fresh ideas, secrets, inside information — things you pay off in the end.

While you may not have as much action or dialogue or character development as your novelist counterpart, your crises and tension can come from showing where people have failed before and how you’re going to ensure your readers will succeed.

You might even make a how-to project look impossible until you pay off that setup with your unique solution.

Once you’ve mapped out your story structure, determine:

• What parts of my book need more evidence?
• Would another point of view lend credibility?
• What experts do I need to interview?

3. Research Your Genre

I say often that writers are readers.

Good writers are good readers.

Great writers are great readers.

Learn the conventions and expectations of your genre by reading as many books as you can get your hands on. That means dozens and dozens to learn what works, what doesn’t, and how to make your nonfiction book the best it can be.

4. Use the Right Research Tools

Don’t limit yourself to a single research source. Instead, consult a range of sources.

For a memoir or biography, brush up on the geography and time period of where your story took place. Don’t depend on your memory alone, because if you get a detail wrong, some readers are sure to know.

So, what sources?

There’s no substitute for an in-person interview with an expert. People love to talk about their work, and about themselves.

How do you land an appointment with an expert? Just ask. You’d be surprised how accessible and helpful most people are.

Be respectful of their time, and of course, promise to credit them on your Acknowledgments page.

Before you meet, learn as much as you can about them online so you don’t waste their time asking questions you could’ve easily answered another way.

Ask deep, fresh, personal questions unique to your subject. Plan ahead, but also allow the conversation to unfold naturally as you listen and respond with additional questions.

Most importantly, record every interview and transcribe it — or have it transcribed — for easy reference as you write.

World Almanacs

Online versions save you time and include just about anything you would need: facts, data, government information, and more. Some are free, some require a subscription. Try the free version first to be sure you’ll benefit from this source.

On WorldAtlas.com , you’ll find nearly limitless information about any continent, country, region, city, town, or village.

Names, time zones, monetary units, weather patterns, tourism info, data on natural resources, and even facts you wouldn’t have thought to search for.

I get ideas when I’m digging here, for both my novels and my nonfiction books.

Encyclopedias

If you don’t own a set, you can access one at a library or online . Encyclopedia Britannica has just about anything you’d need.

Here, you can learn a ton about people, places, addictions, hobbies, neuroses — you name it. (Just be careful to avoid getting drawn into clickbait videos.)

Search Engines

Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and the like have become the most powerful book research tools of all — the internet has revolutionized my research.

Type in any number of research terms and you’ll find literally (and I don’t say that lightly) millions of resources.

That gives you plenty of opportunity to confirm and corroborate anything you find by comparing it to at least 2 or 3 additional sources.

The Merriam Webster online thesaurus is great, because it’s lightning fast. You couldn’t turn the pages of a hard copy as quickly as you can get where you need to onscreen.

One caution: Never let it be obvious you’ve consulted a thesaurus. Too many writers use them to search for an exotic word to spice up their prose.

Don’t. Rather, look for that normal word that was on the tip of your tongue. Just say what you need to say.

Use powerful nouns and verbs, not fancy adjectives and adverbs.

Wolfram Alpha

View this website as the genius librarian who can immediately answer almost any question.

Google Scholar

This website offers high quality, in depth academic information that far exceeds any regular search engine.

Library of Congress

A rich source of American history that allows you to view photos, other media, and ask a librarian for help if necessary.

Your Local Library

The convenience of the internet has caused too many to abandon their local library. But that’s a mistake. Many local libraries offer all sorts of hands-on tools to enhance your research effort.

Evaluating your sources

When researching your nonfiction book, be aware that not all sources are equal, especially online.

Bias and misinformation run rampant, making it hard to distinguish between fact and misinformation.

Simply Googling your topic can lead to an array of conflicting sources with varying messages.

Be judicious by comparing with other sources what you’ve gleaned so you can determine the most prevalent and plausible result.

Primary vs. secondary sources

First-hand accounts from witnesses to or participants in an event or with full knowledge of an area of discipline are ideal. Live or online interviews, autobiographies, diaries, original documents, data reports, video/photographs/audio, etc., are best as primary sources 

Secondary sources are comprised of interpretations of, commentary on, or conjecture related to primary sources. Examples: books, analysis of data, scholarly articles, and documentaries.

Source Evaluation Checklist 

1. How new is the information?

Relevancy is important.

If your research results in contradictory information because some sources are old, it might make sense to cite both the old and the new in your book to show how things have evolved. But also be careful not to assume the latest information is more reliable. If it’s merely trendy, it might soon become obsolete.

2. Who’s the intended audience?

Consider the intended audience of the source itself. 

Is the material meant to educate? Entertain? Is it an overview or is it someone’s thesis?

3. Is the source really an expert?

What do their reputation and credentials say about them? How long have they studied their discipline? Do other experts back their views?

4. Can you verify the source?

Trustworthy sources don’t exist in vacuums.

Do your due diligence to be sure your source is generally accepted and trusted. Are they associated with a well-known institution or are they board-certified in their area of expertise? Are they quoted by fellow experts?

5. Who published the source?

Take into consideration any bias on the part of the source that may affect their trustworthiness.

In the 1950s, before it was widely accepted that smoking was harmful, tobacco companies funded research to counter mounting scientific evidence that cigarettes were linked to serious health problems.

So look beyond the author of your source and investigate who funded and published it.

The bias may not be as obvious as misrepresenting the health effects of tobacco, but it will affect the credibility of the information.

5. Avoid Procrastination: Set a Deadline

At first glance, researching for your nonfiction book may sound like homework, but it can be fun. So fun it can be addicting — the more we learn, the more we tend to want to know.

Many writers use research as an excuse to procrastinate from writing.

To avoid this, set a firm deadline for your research, and get to your writing. If you need further research, you can always take a break and conduct it.

• Time to Get Started

There’s no substitute for meticulous research and the richness it lends to your nonfiction writing. The trust it builds with readers alone is worth the effort.

Start with your outline, and before you know it, you’ll be immersed in research and ready to begin writing.

I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

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Annie Jacobsen: 'What if we had a nuclear war?’

The author and Pulitzer prize finalist, who has written the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club, Nuclear War: A scenario, on the "shocking truths" about a nuclear attack

By Annie Jacobsen

12 April 2024

The Titan nuclear missile in the silo in Arizona, US

Michael Dunning/Getty Images

Not long after the last world war, the historian William L. Shirer had this to say about the next world war. It “will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquers and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.”

As an investigative journalist, I write about war, weapons, national security and government secrets. I’ve previously written six books about US military and intelligence programmes – at the CIA, The Pentagon, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency– all designed to prevent, or deter, nuclear world war III . In the course of my work, countless people in the upper echelons of US government have told me, proudly, that they’ve dedicated their lives to making sure the US never has a nuclear war. But what if it did?

“Every capability in the [Department of Defense] is underpinned by the fact that strategic deterrence will hold,” US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which is responsible for nuclear deterrence, insists publicly. Until the autumn of 2022, this promise was pinned on STRATCOM’s public Twitter feed. But to a private audience at Sandia National Laboratories later that same year, STRATCOM’s Thomas Bussiere admitted the existential danger inherent to deterrence. “Everything unravels itself if those things are not true.”

If deterrence fails – what exactly would that unravelling look like? To write Nuclear War: A scenario , I put this question to scores of former nuclear command and control authorities. To the military and civilian experts who’ve built the weapon systems, been privy to the response plans and been responsible for advising the US president on nuclear counterstrike decisions should they have to be made. What I learned terrified me. Here are just a few of the shocking truths about nuclear war.

The US maintains a nuclear launch policy called Launch on Warning. This means that if a military satellite indicates the nation is under nuclear attack and a second early-warning radar confirms that information, the president launches nuclear missiles in response. Former secretary of defense William Perry told me: “Once we are warned of a nuclear attack, we prepare to launch. This is policy. We do not wait.”

The US president has sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. He asks permission of no one. Not the secretary of defense, not the chairman of the joint chief of staff, not the US Congress. “The authority is inherent in his role as commander in chief,” the Congressional Research Service confirms. The president “does not need the concurrence of either his [or her] military advisors or the US Congress to order the launch of nuclear weapons”.

When the president learns he must respond to a nuclear attack, he has just 6 minutes to do so. Six minutes is an irrational amount of time to “decide whether to release Armageddon”, President Ronald Reagan lamented in his memoirs. “Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope… How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?” And yet, the president must respond. This is because it takes roughly just 30 minutes for an intercontinental ballistic missile to get from a launch pad in Russia, North Korea or China to any city in the US, and vice versa. Nuclear-armed submarines can cut that launch-to-target time to 10 minutes, or less.

Today, there are nine nuclear powers, with a combined total of more than 12,500 nuclear weapons ready to be used. The US and Russia each have some 1700 nuclear weapons deployed – weapons that can be launched in seconds or minutes after their respective president gives the command. This is what Shirer meant when he said: “Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it.”

Nuclear war is the only scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end civilisation in a matter of hours. The soot from burning cities and forests will blot out the sun and cause nuclear winter. Agriculture will fail. Some 5 billion people will die. In the words of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, “the survivors will envy the dead”.

I wrote Nuclear War: A scenario to demonstrate – in appalling, minute-by-minute detail – just how horrifying a nuclear war would be. “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” UN secretary-general António Guterres warned the world in 2022. “This is madness. We must reverse course.”

Nuclear War: A Scenario   by Annie Jacobsen, published by Torva (£20.00), is available now. It is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club: sign up  here  to read along with our members

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9 Must-Read Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books Releasing in April 2024

Add these to your wish-list for spring..

If you’re looking for something new to read this spring, these brand-new and upcoming sci-fi and fantasy books offer many amazing worlds to delve into. While many prominent authors have novels being published this month—like Ann Leckie, Leigh Bardugo, and Edward Ashton—several new novelists are also debuting with some excellent SFF books to consider.

For sci-fi fans, we've found novels exploring dystopian worlds, rogue AI, generation ships, and imaginative parallel universes. And, for anyone looking for that next fantasy adventure, we've tracked down novels that traverse unknown ocean depths, Chinese mythology, and 16th-century Spain. In summary, we've tried to include something for every reader in this month's sci-fi and fantasy book roundup. Which ones are you looking forward to reading? Here are the best sci-fi fantasy books to consider in April 2024.

Mal Goes to War by Edward Ashton

Much like Ashton’s first novel— Mickey7 , which has a film adaptation releasing in 2025 — Mal Goes to War is a dark sci-fi comedy that places a sardonic narrator in a dangerous future setting. While similar in tone, the two have very different settings. Mal is an independent AI living in infospace watching serial dramas while a war rages between the augmented Federals and the ‘pure’ Humanists. Mal fully intends to ignore the war and the humans scurrying outside infospace.

Unfortunately, the war finds him. When the Humanists cut off infospace, Mal is left adrift. He finds a new host in a deceased augmented human. For some reason, the young child he discovers beside the dead human seems somewhat disturbed by his animation of the corpse’s body. On his journey to find a new home, he befriends several humans, making him realize that he does care about what happens in the war. If you enjoyed Mickey7 and The Murderbot Diaries , you will likely enjoy Ashton’s latest. It’s brilliantly narrated on audio if you’re an audiobook listener.

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

Bardugo is a queen of engrossing page-turners regardless of length. Her newest novel is no exception. This dark and steamy standalone historical fantasy is set in 16th-century Spain during the height of the Inquisition. Luzia is a Jewish scullion who can do small acts of magic by singing Ladino refrains. She keeps both her magic and her heritage a secret, knowing that if anyone discovered either, she would be turned over to the Inquisition.

When her mistress catches her doing a small act of magic, she forces Luzia to perform magic tricks at dinner parties. Secretly, Luzia enjoys the attention and craves more. A wealthy and ambitious nobleman soon discovers her and wants her to compete to be the king’s magical champion. In his employ is the mysterious and sinister Guillén Santangel, a cursed immortal who makes Luzia feel like she’s flying. Bardugo’s latest is a lovely and magical ode to marginalized and diaspora cultures during the Spanish Inquisition.

Ghost Station by S.A. Barnes

Barnes’ debut novel, Dead Silence , was a nail-biting space horror, and her second space horror, Ghost Station , is, dare I say, even better than her first. Dr. Ophelia Bray is a psychologist better known for her ridiculously wealthy family than her work. She has tried to separate herself as much as possible from her problematic family, but their legacy seems to follow her wherever she goes.

She specializes in treating people with ERS—a space-based mental health condition that often leads to violence, both self-inflicted and towards other crew members. After a crew member dies, she joins a deep-space mission to explore an abandoned planet. The crew immediately begins harassing Ophelia, but she’s determined to do her job well. On the planet, however, everything goes wrong. This nuanced, character-driven space horror with intense plotting is a fantastic addition to the genre, and could be perfect for fans of Dead Space, Alien, or Event Horizon.

Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie

Ann Leckie is well-known to SFF readers for her award-winning Imperial Radch series. This is her first short story collection, though many of these stories have been previously published in short story markets. It’s divided into three sections.

The first section occurs in primarily unspecified worlds, the second in the Imperial Radch universe, and the third in the same world as her standalone fantasy novel, The Raven Tower . It’s an imaginative and often experimentative collection with coming-of-age stories for a lonely spawn, dinosaurs fleeing meteors by escaping into space, espionage and extreme religious piety in Radch, schemes between gods, and so much more. Often, science fiction authors excel at short stories, and Leckie is no exception.

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

Samatar taps into her experience as a professor in this thought-provoking dystopian novella deeply entrenched in university academic politics and carceral control. Set on a mining spaceship that’s part of a fleet of generation ships, it rotates between two characters.

The boy is one of the Chained who lives as a captive deep below the ship. He’s haunted by dreams of drowned people and makes art depicting his inner thoughts and dreams. A prophet speaks to him of the practice, a sort of philosophical meditation, and the boy tries to follow it by devoting himself to his art.

While the other is a woman, a professor of older knowledge working on a paper about play among children who wear blue bracelets around their ankles, like her, that can be controlled by the elite. She initiates a scholarship to allow one of the Chained to attend the university, and the boy is chosen as its recipient. This is a unique and sometimes opaque read, at turns disturbing and profound. Samatar deftly manages to pack a lot into only a slim page count.

A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall

Cathrall’s debut is a lovely epistolary cozy fantasy for fans of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries and Legends & Lattes . In a world mostly covered by water, people live on small islands where scholars study the sea. E., who has OCD, lives in the only underwater house—the Deep Houseëwhich her eccentric (and deceased) scholar mother designed.

After a strange marine animal appears outside the house, she writes to Scholar Henerey, a renowned marine naturalist, in hopes he can shed light on the nature of the animal. The two start a delightful exchange of letters, eventually leading to deeper feelings. Soon, E. becomes riveted by a new mystery, a strange structure that suddenly appears outside her home. The frame story happens one year after these events. E.’s younger sister, Scholar Sophy, is mourning E.’s presumed death and begins a correspondence with Henerey’s brother, Navigator Vyerin. They begin a project of exchanging letters, diaries, and other written materials to explain the year E. and Henerey spent in correspondence. It’s a delicious slow-burn fantasy and the first book in a series.

Song of the Six Realms by Judy I. Lin

YA fantasy readers will adore this beautifully written standalone based on Chinese mythology. After being accused of treason, Xue’s family was put to death, and their name was eradicated. An orphan, her uncle raised her before turning her over to the House of Flowing Water, where she’s learned to entertain and perfected her musical skill at the qin.

She’s an unparalleled musician, and after her first public performance, a stranger asks for a private audience with her. He offers to become her patron, and she accepts, hoping to earn her freedom. He turns out to be the Duke of Dreams, and his derelict mansion hides secrets that could put Xue’s life at risk.

Ocean's Godori by Elaine U. Cho

This entertaining found-family sci-fi is like K-drama meets The Expanse . Korea’s military space force, the Alliance, dominates the galaxy. Ocean Yoon is a down-on-her-luck pilot aboard the Ohneulis. She and the crew are currently attending a gala in Seoul, but Ocean skips the gala to instead go shopping with Teo, the son of a wealthy Korean family.

Meanwhile, Haven replaces a crew member aboard the Ohneulis and becomes their medic, though the crew distrusts him for being part of a religious community called the Death’s Hand. Cho rotates between these three perspectives as the ragtag crew navigates adventures, politics, and romance. It ends on a cliffhanger, so hopefully, book two will be released soon!

In Universes by Emet North

North’s debut novel is an inventive, mind-bending literary science fiction that delves into mental health, queerness, Judaism, love, and more as it explores parallel universes. Raffi is an assistant in a NASA lab studying dark matter and feels wildly out of their depth.

They struggle to make meaningful connections as they grapple with depression, but the one bright spot in their life is Britt, a sculptor who grew up in the same town as Raffi. Each chapter imagines a different universe with Raffi and Britt, each universe growing more and more chaotic and surreal as the novel progresses. Despite the wildness of each chapter, this slim novel is a wonderfully immersive and vivid read.

Margaret Kingsbury is a freelance writer, editor, and all-around book nerd based in Nashville, TN. Her pieces on books and reading have appeared in Book Riot, BuzzFeed News, School Library Journal, StarTrek.com, Parents, and more. Follow her on Instagram @BabyLibrarians and Twitter and Bluesky @AReaderlyMom.

IGN Recommends

The Best Sci-Fi Books of 2024 (So Far)

Posted: March 6, 2024 | Last updated: March 11, 2024

The opening page of Malka Older’s new book says simply, “There are other ways to live.” That idea carries through so many of this year’s best science fiction books, which are full of questions about how we might live differently with each other, on our troubled planet or in the furthest reaches of space. Science fiction, as Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, is not predictive but descriptive, and what contemporary science fiction authors are so often describing is a world that seems to be less and less built for humans to thrive in it. We are still close enough to 2020 that we’re reading books that have their roots in that particularly tumultuous year—roots that dig deep into surveillance , capitalism , protest , inequity , and failures to learn from the past.

But there are other worlds, other ways to thrive—and other ways to replicate humanity’s worst failings, too. This year’s best books don’t shy away from who we’ve been, and who we are, but they also brim with a fierce curiosity about who we might become. As Martin MacInnes writes in the glorious In Ascension , “The original science-fiction story—the impossible adventure full of wonder and awe—was merely the existence of the species, all the movements she and her sister and their family and every other living person had shared.”

Below, listed in publication order, are our favorite science fiction books of the year (so far). Watch this space for updates; we’ll continue adding to our list as the year unfolds.

1) Your Utopia, by Bora Chung (translated by Anton Hur)

Bora Chung’s impressive second collection sets its tone with its title: if a utopia is yours, can it be shared? Can it be anyone else’s? There’s a melancholy and a wryness to these stories, in which lonely people (or other beings) try to connect, or protect, or simply survive. In “The End of the Voyage,” the urge to consume dooms humanity. In “A Song for Sleep,” an AI elevator does its best to care for a resident of its building. The elevator seems kind, but its knowledge of the building’s inhabitants is due to an alarming level of surveillance. Through the prism of her singular imagination, Chung looks sharply at the ways the world we’ve made doesn’t suit us: corporate greed is a frequent enemy, whether it’s focused on controlling the natural world (“Seed”) or extending its own existence (“The Center for Immortality Research”). These are stories to sit with, to read one at a time and savor.

2) The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, by Malka Older

The second volume in Malka Older’s utterly delightful Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti series finds Mossa searching for a missing student—a case that expands to include over a dozen missing people. The mystery is satisfying, but the heart of this story is the tentative and endearing relationship between Mossa and the academic Pleiti, the Watson to Mossa’s Holmes, who narrates the bulk of their tale. Older packs a ton into barely 200 pages: academic wrangling, space libertarians, the state of the distant and troubled Earth, a visit to the moon of Io, a trip on Giant’s fascinating railcars, and so much more. This is distinctly a cozy mystery, but also a space opera in miniature. Part of what Older so beautifully illustrates is the way humanity might bring its history and culture—food, tea, language, rituals, fears—into the alien landscapes of space. You can read this one without reading the first book, The Mimicking of Known Successes , but why deprive yourself?

3) In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes

MacInnes’s third novel—longlisted for last year’s Booker Prize—is simply like nothing else I’ve ever read. In Ascension centers on Leigh, a marine biologist who spent a troubled childhood in Rotterdam before venturing far from home: to a distant island, to the depths of the ocean, to the Mojave Desert, and eventually to the stars. But that sounds so simple, and this book is expansively, engrossingly complex, meticulously observed and quietly moving. As Leigh’s work turns confidential and mysterious, involving strange phenomena that connect to her deep-sea adventure, MacInnes details her focus on algae with the same care and consideration that he uses to depict her relationship with her mother, her sister, her colleagues, and her world. This isn’t a book that offers anything approaching a tidy resolution. What it offers instead is the texture of an entire life, reflected and refracted by the lives around it. It’s as immersive and astonishing as the deep-sea dive Leigh takes, a journey through a familiar world made freshly, improbably new.

4) Those Beyond the Wall, by Micaiah Johnson

If this were a ranking of the most memorable characters of the year, Scales would be at the top. A mechanic by assignment but a killer by skill, she’s one of many lieutenants to the Emperor of Ashtown, a desert community that exists outside the walls of privileged Wiley City. Ashtown is not an easy place to live, even when you’re the Emperor’s favorite. But when mangled bodies start appearing, no one is safe, and it will take the combined efforts of Scales, her least-favorite colleague, a disgraced scientist, the Emperor, and a worldwalker to save them—all of them. Johnson’s second book, a standalone set in the same world as her The Space Between Worlds , is fueled by the rage that comes from love. When you love a people, love a place, and that people and place are treated as lesser and disposable, rage is inevitable. (As Johnson writes in the author’s note, “Rage is a beacon calling out to others.”) Complicated, deadly, and absolutely full of secrets, Scales is one hell of a narrator, and her sharp, distinctive voice propels this story though desert, city, multiverse, and her own hidden history. Those Beyond the Wall is a novel about holding tight to community in the face of devastation, and it is a triumph.

5) The Siege of Burning Grass, by Premee Mohamed

The latest work from the astonishingly prolific Mohamed (who has three books out this year alone) is a visceral yet intimate story about violence, nationalism, and war. Injured, captured, and tortured by his own side in an endless conflict, the famous pacifist Alefret is sent on a mission to infiltrate an enemy city. With him is Qhudur, a fanatic who will do anything for victory. Mohamed’s bio-technical setting is vivid and unusual—trained medical wasps, floating cities, and lightspiders dot these pages—but the heart of her story is Alefret’s moral struggle. Would killing Qhudur, an act of violence, lead to peace? When does violence become a habit that a country cannot break? How can a person hold tight to their ideals even amid suffering? How can stories and myths help sustain us? But The Siege of Burning Grass isn’t just a thoughtful consideration of war and pacifism; it’s also a feat of worldbuilding, moral complexity, and taut, precisely paced storytelling. After this, I’m ready to hunt down everything else Mohamed has ever written.

6) These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, by Izzy Wasserstein

In post-climate disaster America, in what’s left of Kansas City, a woman named Dora investigates a death in the anarchist commune to which she once belonged. She’s certain her ex didn’t overdose, but finding out what really happened isn’t going to be easy. Wasserstein excels at the near-future details of her SF-techno-mystery, but she shines even more when it comes to the unexpected connection between Dora and the person sent to kill her—a person who is wearing her pre-transition face. These Fragile Graces is at once a stylish noir and an exploration of identity, gender, selfhood, control, consent, and intimacy. Wasserstein more than pulls it off—everything here feels lived-in and real, from the details of the commune’s processes to the corporate powers that treat people as disposable or replaceable. Dora’s distinctive, terse voice is one I keep hearing in my head, long after the last page. Maybe, if we’re lucky, she’ll find more mysteries to solve.

7) Floating Hotel, by Grace Curtis

In her second novel, Curtis makes an impeccable balancing act look easy. Floating Hotel is, on the surface, a cozy sort of tale about the staff at the titular spaceship, the Grand Abeona Hotel, which endlessly traverses the same route, catering to wealthy people among the stars. Young, miserable Carl stows away on the hotel as a kid; decades later, he’s risen to the post of manager, now a gentle charmer with a soothing word for everyone. When a peculiar academic conference converges with the search for the Lamplighter (a seditious, anti-Empire figure whose broadsides appear between chapters), the fate of the hotel—and its endearing staff—is called into question. But Curtis doesn’t let the spies, codes, and mysteries take over the story; there’s still time for illicit movie nights and anxious musical performances. Floating Hotel is rich with kindness, with big-hearted characters from every corner of the ship, but it also has teeth, a working-class sensibility, and a rebellious heart. This one is a treat.

8) Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead

“Generation ship novel in verse” is a series of words I had never considered until I read Oliver K. Langmead’s ambitious and immersive Calypso . While the engineers slept, the crew of the Calypso experienced a schism. When Rochelle—whose role is to question Sigmund, the expedition’s leader—wakes, nothing is as she expects, and nothing goes as planned. Four narrators tell the tale: Rochelle, a woman of faith; Catherine, a biologist; the Herald, who relates the ship’s history; and Sigmund, whose narrative is largely set in his own past. Their voices take different shapes; the Herald’s words are squared off, blocky and challenging, while Catherine’s words bend and twist, branching outward more dramatically as she gets closer to the culmination of her role. In a stunning central chapter that’s part body horror and part triumphant act of creation, Catherine transforms, filling a planet with myriad forms of life. Outside of that section, Langmead’s verse creates a sense of spareness, of space unfilled, that echoes the loneliness Rochelle feels. Like so many generation ship stories, this is an elegantly told meditation on how we can’t leave ourselves behind. Any new world will be seeded with what we know, what we’ve learned, who we are, for better or for worse.

9) Lake of Souls, by Ann Leckie

This complete collection of Leckie’s short fiction contains both science fiction and fantasy stories, but the SF stories make up a full half of the book—and are unmissable. They range from flash fiction to a creation myth from the world of the Imperial Radch to “The Justified,” a haunting story about power, mortality, and choice. The title novelette follows a sentient crustacean—called a “lobster dog” by the anthropologist who crash-lands on its planet—as it leaves home, looking for answers about its world and existence. (I would read an entire novel about the lobster dogs, or about the bird-people who transmit their histories through songs.) Every one of these stories is masterfully told, but the standout is “She Commands Me and I Obey,” which depicts a moment of political turmoil through the eyes of a young monk watching a momentous sports game. Tense, affecting, and layered, it’s a perfect example of Leckie’s gift for knowing exactly the right perspective from which to tell her stories. A child, an elder, a guard on a ship’s journey through troubled space: it is a gift to spend time with these characters.

10) The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain, by Sofia Samatar

Samatar’s latest is a breathtaking novella that resonates like a new myth made of familiar materials. Deep in the bowels of a spaceship, a boy is imprisoned, linked to others by the chain around his ankle. A professor who wears a lighter anklet works to free him, to elevate him to the level of a student, to give him an opportunity. Neither of them have names; nor do the guards, nor the prophet who encourages the boy’s art. They are individuals, but also archetypes, strong and aching, as they move through Samatar’s critical look at labor, exploitation, community, hierarchy, revolution, and worn-out narratives about acceptance and tolerance that do not allow space for real freedom. This story has its roots in academia, but it’s about any organization built to sustain itself at the expense of those who toil within it. Samatar’s gorgeous prose rings clear as a bell. There are no easy answers here, only a sense of possibility, of— as she puts it —“an invitation to exist in the cracks.''

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Nasa’s new lightweight sailor , enabling future solar sails.

Sailing through space might sound like something out of science fiction, but the concept is no longer limited to books or the big screen. In April, a next-generation solar sail technology – known as the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System – will launch aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in Māhia, New Zealand. The technology could advance future space travel and expand our understanding of our Sun and solar system.  

Solar sails use the pressure of sunlight for propulsion, angling toward or away from the Sun so that photons bounce off the reflective sail to push a spacecraft. This eliminates heavy propulsion systems and could enable longer duration and lower-cost missions. Although mass is reduced, solar sails have been limited by the material and structure of the booms, which act much like a sailboat’s mast. But NASA is about to change the sailing game for the future.  

The Advanced Composite Solar Sail System demonstration uses a twelve-unit (12U) CubeSat built by NanoAvionics to test a new composite boom made from flexible polymer and carbon fiber materials that are stiffer and lighter than previous boom designs. The mission’s primary objective is to successfully demonstrate new boom deployment, but once deployed, the team also hopes to prove the sail’s performance.  

Like a sailboat turning to capture the wind, the solar sail can adjust its orbit by angling its sail. After evaluating the boom deployment, the mission will test a series of maneuvers to change the spacecraft’s orbit and gather data for potential future missions with even larger sails.

“Booms have tended to be either heavy and metallic or made of lightweight composite with a bulky design – neither of which work well for today’s small spacecraft. Solar sails need very large, stable, and lightweight booms that can fold down compactly,” said Keats Wilkie, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “This sail’s booms are tube-shaped and can be squashed flat and rolled like a tape measure into a small package while offering all the advantages of composite materials, like less bending and flexing during temperature changes.”

After reaching its Sun-synchronous orbit, about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) above Earth, the spacecraft will begin unrolling its composite booms, which span the diagonals of the polymer sail. After approximately 25 minutes the solar sail will fully deploy, measuring about 860 square feet (80 square meters) – about the size of six parking spots. Spacecraft-mounted cameras will capture the sail’s big moment, monitoring its shape and symmetry during deployment.

With its large sail, the spacecraft may be visible from Earth if the lighting conditions are just right. Once fully expanded and at the proper orientation, the sail’s reflective material will be as bright as Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

“Seven meters of the deployable booms can roll up into a shape that fits in your hand,” said Alan Rhodes, the mission’s lead systems engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “The hope is that the new technologies verified on this spacecraft will inspire others to use them in ways we haven’t even considered.”

Through NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program , successful deployment and operation of the solar sail’s lightweight composite booms will prove the capability and open the door to larger scale missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. 

This boom design could potentially support future solar sails as large as 5,400 square feet (500 square meters), about the size of a basketball court, and technology resulting from the mission’s success could support sails of up to 21,500 square feet (2,000 square meters) – about half a soccer field. 

“The Sun will continue burning for billions of years, so we have a limitless source of propulsion. Instead of launching massive fuel tanks for future missions, we can launch larger sails that use “fuel” already available,” said Rhodes. “We will demonstrate a system that uses this abundant resource to take those next giant steps in exploration and science.”  

Because the sails use the power of the Sun, they can provide constant thrust to support missions that require unique vantage points, such as those that seek to understand our Sun and its impact on Earth. Solar sails have long been a desired capability for missions that could carry early warning systems for monitoring solar weather. Solar storms and coronal mass ejections can cause considerable damage on Earth, overloading power grids, disrupting radio communications, and affecting aircraft and spacecraft. 

Composite booms might also have a future beyond solar sailing: the lightweight design and compact packing system could make them the perfect material for constructing habitats on the Moon and Mars, acting as framing structures for buildings or compact antenna poles to create a communications relay for astronauts exploring the lunar surface. 

“This technology sparks the imagination, reimagining the whole idea of sailing and applying it to space travel,” said Rudy Aquilina, project manager of the solar sail mission at NASA Ames. “Demonstrating the abilities of solar sails and lightweight, composite booms is the next step in using this technology to inspire future missions.” 

NASA Ames manages the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System project and designed and built the onboard camera diagnostic system. NASA Langley designed and built the deployable composite booms and solar sail system. NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology (SST) program office based at NASA Ames and led by the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), funds and manages the mission. NASA STMD’s Game Changing Development program developed the deployable composite boom technology. Rocket Lab USA, Inc of Long Beach, California is providing launch services. NanoAvionics is providing the spacecraft bus.   

Related Terms

Ames Research Center

• Langley Research Center
• Small Spacecraft Technology Program

Space Technology Mission Directorate

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