Robots, androids, cyborgs, sentient computers, and other products endowed with human-like intelligence have crowded and still crowd popular culture. The advent of a new digital understanding, achieved by the development of forms of artificial intelligence, has rapidly transformed human society, becoming an increasingly widespread everyday presence. Popular culture has always played a key role in helping people understand these and other complex situations: it provides tools for resistance, as even the darkest narrative can invoke awareness, mobilization, challenge to the status quo, and imagination of a utopian future. Therein, the posthuman represents a dream and a nightmare, a possibility of progress and a sentence, a medium of freedom or an act of exploitation. It embodies both an otherness to be embraced and an enemy to be feared.

How do novels, short stories, films, television series, comic books, video games, and other hybrid narrative forms depict the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence and what solutions do they propose in this regard? How do the concepts of posthuman and transhuman shape culture and the collective imagination? How have speculative fiction, science fiction, and fantasy changed during and after the advent of machines and algorithms in our everyday lives and what impact have they generated on the world around us? These are just some of the questions addressed in the essays in this special issue of Futuri, based on the international conference Electridreams.