Princeton Public Library joins more than 200 Illinois libraries to continue season three of Illinois Libraries Present, a collaborative effort featuring virtual events with bestselling and award-winning authors and esteemed speakers. The season continues with the event Speculating About Our AI Future with Cory Doctorow, Ken Liu and Martha Wells, and will take place via Zoom at 7 PM on Thursday, Jan. 11. These three science fiction authors will discuss the promise, perils and possible impacts that artificial intelligence will have on our future. Register Here

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a Big Tech disassembly manual; Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller; Chokepoint Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the Little Brother series for young adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. He has won the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, as well as top genre honors in Japan, Spain, and France, among other places. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers play the role of wizards. His debut collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. He also wrote the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Ken worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Ken frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, history of technology, bookmaking, the mathematics of origami, and other subjects of his expertise. Ken is also the translator for Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds, Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide, as well as the editor of Invisible Planets and Broken Stars, anthologies of contemporary Chinese science fiction.

Martha Wells (marthawells.com) has been an SF/F writer since her first fantasy novel was published in 1993, and her work includes The Books of the Raksura series, the Ile-Rien series, and other fantasy novels, most recently Witch King (Tordotcom, 2023) and System Collapse, the newest in The Murderbot Diaries series. She has also written media tie-in fiction for Star Wars, Stargate: Atlantis, and Magic: the Gathering, as well as short fiction, YA novels, and non-fiction. She has won Nebula Awards, Hugo Awards, Locus Awards, and a Dragon Award, and her work has appeared on the Philip K. Dick Award ballot, the British Science Fiction Association Award ballot, the USA Today Bestseller List, the Sunday Times Bestseller List, and the New York Times Bestseller List. She is also a consulting producer on The Murderbot Diaries series for Apple TV+.