Best AI novels of 2026
A short reading list of recent AI-focused fiction. Includes Red Blinders by W.D. Peak.
The shelf
Daniel Suarez's Daemon for the distributed-AI technothriller. Blake Crouch's Recursion for the fast near-future thriller built on a single speculative idea. Dave Eggers's The Every for the corporate-dystopia satire. Sierra Greer's Annie Bot for the literary AI novel. Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun for the literary-AI tradition. Naomi Alderman's The Future for the billionaire-collapse plot. Each is a different angle on the same shelf.
About Red Blinders
Red Blinders is a near-future political techno-thriller about Kenneth Warzel, a burned-out Philadelphia professional whose private experiment with a pair of horse blinders is filmed, leaked, and engineered into virality. As Warzel, our accidental revolutionary, struggles to navigate his fraught fame, he finds himself at the heart of a grand conspiracy: on one side a corrupt government in bed with industry, on the other an army of blinder-clad anarchists and their fleet of explosive-equipped drones.