Infoporn: 100 Years of Sci-Fi, Explored

AI Researcher Bethanie Maples has been reading science fiction since she was given a copy of Dune at 10 years old. Still, two decades and nearly 1,000 books later, the self-described sci-fi fanatic struggles to find books that delve into her most niche interests, like the link between AI and transhumanism. So last year, while working at Stanford's Human Computer Interaction lab, she teamed up with data scientists Eric Berlow and Srini Kadamati to create a book recommendation tool based on more than 100 salient sci-fi themes, from hyperspace to magical feminism. Using data scraping, network analysis, and machine learning, the resulting Science Fiction Concept Corpus includes more than 2,600 books written since 1900. We made our own voyage into Maples' sci-fi universe.