It seems unlikely that Pope Leo XIV is aware that Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot (2024) was the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2025. It is unlikely that the novel has come to his attention and, even if it had, with its themes of sexual control and the personhood of digital intelligence, it is hardly likely to have got to the top of his reading pile. Nevertheless, I have read both that novel and the Pope’s recent encyclical titled Magnifica Humanitas (MH) and so I suspect that I can triangulate. For example, the Pope is 100% clear that, should something like Annie Bot come into existence, it would not have a soul. But he is also quite clear that the creation of a “device” that exists primarily for the gratification of its owner is not something that any moral person should be considering. MH states that technology is not inherently good or evil—a thoroughly familiar statement, perhaps especially to science fiction readers—but goes on to say that the intent of the maker shapes the tool. And the Pope clearly has concerns about the intent of the creators of today’s AI.
The narrator of Annie Bot is the robot Annie, who clearly believes in her own personhood, which is not quite the same as claiming a soul. The rationalist view of much of our field is more interested in whether a being—animal, alien, or robot—is conscious, largely because the very idea of a soul has fallen out of bounds. For example, Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2024; it appeared on the same Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist), presents a conscious robot who has to understand his world and who finds himself called upon by God. There is nothing mystical about this God, which is itself an AI, but its power is clearly visible.
However, the robot soul is a theme of Luminous by Silvia Park (2025), shortlisted for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award. Or, to be precise, the absence of such a soul is a theme. In the pages of the novel, outside a church we see a notice which could have been directly informed by Magnifica Humanitas: “PLEASE LEAVE YOUR ROBOTS OUTSIDE. ROBOTS, NOT HAVING A SOUL, ARE UNABLE TO WORSHIP GOD AND HAVE NO PLACE IN CHURCH” (p. 99). This is necessarily blunt, given that in this novel human-like robots act as companions, whether in the form of children or adults, and some of their uses are as sexual as those in Annie Bot. There is little doubt that these robots have some form of interior life—though the earlier models are described as somewhat glitchy.
Steven, one of the robot protagonists in the novel, has been programmed to believe in God, although he is confident that he has no soul. His programmer thinks he is suffering guilt because she made him Catholic. However, despite having made him to love her, she feels unable to have sex with him. Steven, created to serve her and now rejected, suffers from his failure to fulfil his purpose. (It is tempting to derail into a discussion of gnosticism at this point, or at least to mention that the Pope is very clear that God always loves us.) In his damaged (dare we say psychotic) state, Steven believes he hears the voice of God, and he kills a human. Whilst it is clear that a human destroying a robot is not murder, the text leaves open the question of whether a robot killing a human could be guilty: “Is it murder if I can’t be forgiven?” (p. 364).
The possibility of a robot soul has surfaced occasionally in older SF, at least in short stories. In The Quest for Saint Aquin by Anthony Boucher (1951), a specialised robot “horse” is confident in its rationality and in the fact that the (forbidden) Church lives in falsity, even if the robot’s job is to increase the likelihood that its rider will become pope. Its highest hope is for a robot made in the shape of a man, which would be able to achieve true perfection. They discover just such a robot and its “perfect logical brain … knew that it was made by man, and its reason forced it to believe that man was made by God” (pp. 19-20 in F&SF, January 1959). The centre of the story, therefore, is the idea of a proselytising robot which wants to send humanity to heaven, though it is unclear whether it could have a soul. The conclusion of An Article of Faith by Mike Resnick (2008), by contrast, leaves the reader in no doubt that the narrator has accepted that a robot can go to heaven. The narrator is a pastor who asks his robot janitor to read the Bible so it can help him practice and improve his sermons. Having in the process come itself to believe, the robot tries to attend a Sunday service, disguised in a suit. This behaviour is seen to be “too human” and the congregation destroys it for not only taking their jobs but having the temerity to believe itself able to be saved.
Perhaps it would be reading too much into these stories to see a parallel with the American experience of slavery, but it would be a shallow reading of Annie Bot to only see it as a book about robots. Rather than simply finding their way into the perspective of a sexbot, the reader is asked to see the world from the perspective of an oppressed and controlled person. This is a topic Pope Leo discusses at length in Magnifica Humanitas, as human dignity is at the heart of the encyclical. According to its argument, dignity is inherent in our humanity, as beings created in the image of God, and any and all acts which belittle or devalue the dignity of any person are to be opposed. That shouldn’t feel exceptional, particularly when the document uses the frame of human rights—but Leo then goes on to point out that these rights are often proclaimed “in a purely formal sense” (¶ 56). In this regard, there is some house cleaning to be done. The papal bull Sublimis Deus (1537) declares the Indigenous peoples of the Americas as fully human, capable of being saved (i.e., having souls) and condemns slavery. So the accusation of words not meeting action applies in the case of the Church also, which means that MH spends some time apologising for the inadequate response of the Roman Catholic Church to slavery before moving on to comment on its newer forms:
Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical. Every seemingly immediate and flawless response is the result of a long chain of mediation, involving vast networks of natural resources, energy infrastructure and, above all, people. A significant part of the digital economy’s functioning relies on the silent work of millions of people engaged in essential yet largely unseen activities. (¶ 174)
This digital servitude undertaken by second-class citizens, and the harsher still work of physical resource extraction to create machines, is unlikely to be compatible with human dignity. And MH is quite clear on how this can come to be, in a focused disgust for transhumanism and posthumanism. Core to this is the inherent arrogance of the “self made” to believe that they can ascend to godhood through their own wealth and self-will. Pope Leo compares this with the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, in which self-regarding people attempt to build themselves a ladder to heaven without including God as part of the plan—and who utterly fail. Those followers of the collection of transhumanist beliefs symbolised by the term TESCREAL are making similar category errors. They are destined to fail, but in their hubris they devalue the actual existing world and believe that their great project gives them the right to treat other people as commodities, leading us to atrocities no less shameful than those of the past.
There is a sense here that the Pope is telling us that we should not in fact create the Torment Nexus. SF writers may generate all kinds of terrible outcomes as an awful warning against creating the wrong technology; but the meme of the Torment Nexus tells us that the mere invention of such ideas or objects increases the likelihood that they will come into the world. Or, in the words of the encyclical, “Even when such ideas remain largely speculative, they gain relevance by altering the collective imagination and thereby influence social, economic and political choices” (¶ 116). Neal Stephenson’s Project Hieroglyph might be a better path—encouraging SF writers to be more optimistic, to write positive inspiration, rather than focus on what we wish to avoid.
Cory Doctorow’s fiction offers another path—going beyond mere ideas into a sometimes didactic evangelism about the failures of current Big Tech and the routes that individuals can take to fight or refuse the future he sees them creating. Doctorow’s recent non-fiction is scathing of the TESCREAL approach and of its creation of “reverse centaurs.” The original centaur idea (in this context at least) was that human and machine would combine in a way that allowed the person to be more effective, a human controlling a strong and tireless body. But a reverse centaur has a powerful machine driving a meat puppet with no choice but to obey.
Whilst Doctorow is no fan of overbearing government either, there is a sympathy between his work and the text of MH, which explicitly repudiates the excessive power of the uber-wealthy and esteems workers’ associations. It calls upon the State to deliver just laws which redistribute wealth to the better balance of society, whilst also making clear that the State is a mechanism for subsidiarity and solidarity, not an end in itself. Indeed, there is a warning in this encyclical on the danger of exalting the State and an indication of the danger of the capture of the State by ideologues or ideologies which centralise power and demean the dignity of the person.
We can see this misuse of power and concentration of wealth and control in so many science fictional dystopias that it seems almost pointless to call to mind specific examples. But this is not to say that the Pope is in favour of a communal utopia exactly. MH is clear that private property is valid but that it must be considered a form of stewardship of the common goods of all the Earth. It is not an absolute right to extraction, particularly where this undermines fair remuneration and the reasonable possibility for each human life to be lived with dignity. MH equates this closely with work—a view inherent, too, in 2000AD’s long-running Judge Dredd (1977-). In the future dystopia of Megacity One, only 2% of citizens have a job. Most of the rest are without purpose and therefore equally without any sense of dignity in their lives.
The world of Judge Dredd came into being as a result of global nuclear war. Whilst that may seem a little less fashionable fifty years after the conception of the comic, we are no less in danger of creating an apocalyptical state for ourselves. (By which I do not mean the Revelation that is the title of the last book of the Bible but the common modern interpretation of a disaster that comes close to ending the world—but you knew that, right?) In WALL-E (2008), for example, we might see a world that is kinder to its people, as the robots cater to every human whim; but the humans here are also portrayed as having no dignity. Their earth has been destroyed by ecocide—and it is this outcome which MH sees as most clearly a consequence of the dominance of the technocratic paradigm which it warns against. Specifically, Pope Leo recalls Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’ (2015), in which we are reminded of the need to look after the fruits of the earth rather than reducing them to resources for exploitation. This sense of the common good extends into the digital sphere. Whilst the term ‘intellectual property’ is not used directly, MH reminds us that data has been created by the many and should not be controlled by the few.
This is an application of the view that a culture of power is ordering the world, which is increasingly expressed in a normalisation of war. We have, of course, always been at war with Eastasia, as 1984 (1949) reminds us. In this context, it is fascinating that the Pope chooses to reaffirm that “just war” is an outdated theory, even beyond its misuse as justification. This might be a blow to the many fantasy trilogies which rely on a sense of Good and Evil to provide the foundation for their great battles and conflicts. Whilst they might seem to be following in the trail of Papa Tolkien (as Terry Brooks called him), it is worth remembering that the ultimate victory over evil in The Lord of the Rings was achieved as a result of Frodo’s compassion for Gollum.
J. R. R. Tolkien is, in fact, quoted in this encyclical, from a speech by Gandalf. In it, Gandalf is urging his audience to do what we can to improve the world in which we live. The wickedness we see is the wickedness we can act upon and, as MH goes on to say, the world is recovered through “the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization” (¶ 213). This might seem a little like the suggestion that we can curb climate change by our own small acts of recycling, but the Pope goes on to say a lot more about how to live lives as if it is possible for them to be lived well. The first of these is to disarm words, which he elucidates as speaking without prejudice and denouncing injustice.
Perhaps “social justice warriors” will be surprised to have the Pope quite so close to their side. It might also, I suppose, be a surprise to many science fiction writers and readers. But, as its title implies and as I hope I’ve sketched out, this document is, in essence, a plea to humanity to recall its own magnificence as a whole, and that which is in the existence of each individual. For Leo, the foundation of this is in the fact of God’s love for each person and those who believe this in common with the Pope are far more likely to read what he has to say. But it is also a challenging document for many of those who call themselves Christian whilst focusing on their own aggrandizement, and it forms a solidarity with all who see the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) as a foundational document for how each person should be treated. Above all, it makes absolutely clear that the simulation of human attributes does not make the AIs anything more than the latest computer programs. There is no doubt of the interiority of Annie Bot’s protagonist within the text but our world cannot afford to confuse the fiction with the message.