Purpose of This Index
The Archive's collection contains 4,217 science fiction novels catalogued by standard bibliographic criteria: author, title, publication date, language, and edition. Many of these works engage with philosophical questions that transcend genre boundaries and often exceed the scope of conventional cataloguing systems. This index supplements the standard nomenclature by organizing holdings according to the epistemological and metaphysical questions they pose. The index is organized thematically and cross-referenced to the Archive's standard finding aids, the manifest wall, and the intake logbook.
Consciousness and Identity
Works that ask "What is a mind?" constitute one of the Archive's most densely populated thematic clusters. These novels examine the boundaries between human and artificial consciousness, explore the continuity of self across time and substrate, and interrogate the criteria by which consciousness is recognized.
Foundational holdings in this category include Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick, 1968), which poses the question of synthetic personhood through the figure of the android; Solaris (Lem, 1961), which frames consciousness as fundamentally alien and perhaps unknowable; Blindsight (Watts, 2006), which presents consciousness as a possible evolutionary liability; and The Three-Body Problem (Liu, 2008), which treats consciousness as one variable among many in a complex computational system. The Archive holds 47 distinct works directly addressing machine consciousness, and 82 addressing the persistence of identity across time or transfer. Cross-reference the Thinking Machine gallery for related holdings.
Free Will and Determinism
A substantial subset of the collection addresses temporal mechanics and the question of whether the future is fixed or contingent. These works explore prediction, prophecy, causality, and the logical paradoxes inherent to time travel and historical determinism.
Principal entries include Foundation (Asimov, 1951), which treats the future as partially predictable through psychohistory; Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut, 1969), which presents all moments in time as equally real and equally unchangeable; and The End of Eternity (Asimov, 1955), which constructs a narrative entirely around the manipulation of causal chains. The collection contains 124 works exploring time travel, temporal loops, or fixed timelines, and 67 works engaging explicitly with concepts of destiny, prophecy, or predetermined futures.
The Ethics of Creation
Works in this category center on the moral implications of creating sentient or quasi-sentient life, whether through biological engineering, artificial construction, or hybrid technologies. The philosophical weight falls on the question: does the ability to create entail a responsibility to the created?
Canonical texts include Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818)—the earliest work in the Archive proper—which establishes the creator's abandonment of his creation as the central ethical failure; Brave New World (Huxley, 1932), which examines creation through controlled reproduction and social engineering; and Oryx and Crake (Atwood, 2003), which extends creation ethics to engineered biological systems and environmental manipulation. The Archive contains 156 works addressing artificial intelligence creation, 89 addressing genetic or biological engineering, and 43 addressing the moral status of hybrid or created intelligences.
Epistemology—The Limits of Knowledge
This thematic cluster groups works that interrogate the limits, methods, and reliability of knowledge acquisition when dealing with phenomena that exceed human comprehension or resist rational categorization.
Key holdings include Solaris (Lem, 1961), which constructs an entire narrative around the human impossibility of understanding an alien intelligence; Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky & Strugatsky, 1972), which presents an incomprehensible alien presence that resists interpretation; and Blindsight (Watts, 2006), which questions whether consciousness itself is necessary for understanding the universe. The Archive holds 98 works addressing the unknowable, 67 addressing encounter with fundamentally alien intelligences or systems, and 54 addressing the inadequacy of human cognition for solving presented problems.
Political Philosophy
A large subset of the collection engages explicitly with questions of governance, social organization, power distribution, and the possibility of just or equitable political systems.
Foundational works include The Dispossessed (Le Guin, 1974), which constructs a direct comparison between anarchist and capitalist social organization; Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell, 1949), which examines totalitarian control and the manipulation of language and truth; and The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin, 1969), which explores political and social structures derived from non-binary biological sex. The collection contains 187 works addressing dystopian or authoritarian governance, 143 addressing alternative economic or social systems, and 76 explicitly engaging with anarchist, communist, or radically egalitarian frameworks.
The Nature of Personhood
Works in this category ask: what constitutes a person? The question encompasses artificial consciousness, alien intelligence, collective entities, and biological variations that exceed conventional human definition.
The Archive traces this inquiry from early works like Čapek's R.U.R. (1920)—which introduces the term "robot" and poses artificial personhood as a central question—through Dick's extensive exploration of synthetic personhood, to contemporary works exploring post-human or non-human consciousness. The collection holds 203 works directly addressing personhood or its denial to classes of conscious entities.
This index is maintained as a working document and is updated as new acquisitions are processed and integrated into the Archive's holdings. Researchers conducting thematic inquiries are encouraged to cross-reference entries against the standard catalogue, the manifest wall, and the intake logbook for complete information on specific titles and editions.