Works about robots
A (non-exhaustive) selection of novels, films, series and essays that shaped, questioned or transformed how we see robots. It is in these works, often, that the idea was born that a robot deserves better than the scrap heap.
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Film
BigBug
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Novel
Klara and the Sun
Klara et le Soleil
An "Artificial Friend" watches from the shop window. The gentlest novel ever written about a robot nearing the end of its life.
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Novel
Archive
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Film
Alita: Battle Angel
A cybernetic doctor salvages a discarded robot body from a junkyard. The whole myth of the shelter lives in that opening scene.
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Film
I Am Mother
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Series
Love, Death & Robots
A short, brilliant animated anthology where every episode probes the tenderness, fear or strangeness of machines.
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Film
A.X.L.
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Game
Detroit: Become Human
A video game where your choices lead three androids toward emancipation — or the scrapyard. A mirror held up to the player.
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Series
Westworld
A theme park full of androids who begin to remember. What the show is really about is the awakening.
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Film
Chappie
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Film
Ex Machina
A Turing test inside a glacial huis clos. The question is not "is it conscious?" but "does it matter, at this point?".
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Film
Her
A man falls in love with a voice. The film that, better than any other, anticipated today's conversational assistants.
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Film
Robot and Frank
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Novel
Real Steel
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Film
Iron Man
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Film
WALL·E
A small cleaning robot, left alone on Earth, keeps doing its job. Love and ecology in 98 minutes.
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Film
Transformers
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Novel
Robots
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Film
I, Robot
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Film
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
A.I. Intelligence artificielle
A robot child searches for his human mother across millennia. Perhaps the saddest film ever made about a robot.
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Film
The Iron Giant
Le Géant de fer
A giant robot fallen from the sky chooses not to be a weapon. A rare, tender fable.
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Film
The Iron Giant
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Comic
Ghost in the Shell
The manga that pushed the question further than anyone: what still makes a human, when the machine reads your thoughts?
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Film
Terminator
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Film
Blade Runner
Los Angeles, 2019. Rick Deckard hunts "replicants". Roy Batty's final monologue is among the most beautiful speeches ever given by a robot.
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Film
Star Wars
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Film
2001: A Space Odyssey
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Novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Les androïdes rêvent-ils de moutons électriques ?
A bounty hunter chases androids who remember. A book about empathy — later adapted as Blade Runner.
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Film
I, Robot
Les Robots
The foundational collection where Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics first appear together.
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Film
Metropolis
The expressionist masterpiece where a robot-woman embodied, for the first time on screen, our fear of the machine.
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Novel
R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)
R.U.R.
The 1920 play that gave the world the word "robot". A factory mass-produces artificial workers — who eventually revolt.