This course will explore the production and portrayal of social robots in the cultural imagination in conjunction with literary and religious myths of creation. While the course looks back to the history of AI and early literary accounts of robots in the 1960s, it concentrates on modes of production and on works written in or after the 1990s when western society experienced "the development of a fully networked life." The course will explore the ethical and aesthetic questions raised by the intersection between the production and the imaginative portrayals of transhuman relationships. Questions to be considered in interpreting developments in AI and in reading literature about social robots in light of the religious and classical myths-include: how is creation figured? What or who is created and why? Who plays God? Who serves as Eve/Adam? Who is cast as Satan? What is the locus of the Garden? What constitutes power/knowledge? And, finally, how does a particular treatment of the social robot potentially alter our understanding of the foundational imaginative intertexts and, by extension, notions of divinity, humanity, gender, animality, and relations of kinship and care.