The strength of this edited volume, which grew out of a series of interdisciplinary workshops organized by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and the Royal Society of London, lies in its comprehensiveness. The book's twenty contributors, representing a wide range of disciplines, mostly in the humanities, consider an impressive spectrum of technologies and time periods. Part 1 ("Antiquity to Modernity") covers clockwork, self-regulated automata, and early robots in Europe from Ancient Greece to the industrial revolutions of [End Page 223] the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part 2 ("Modern and Contemporary") focuses on the electronic computer systems, including neural-net machine learning, that came to be known as "artificial intelligence" in the United States and Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The variety of narratives is equally impressive. Part 1 deals with a wide range of texts, from Homeric epics to books on natural magic and experimental science in the Renaissance and early modern period, and from Victorian fiction to Karel Čapek's classic play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered in 1921. Part 2, organized by themes, focuses on the rise of modern science fiction in books, films, and television, often contrasting that with futuristic predictions, both utopian and critical, made by AI practitioners.