The modern conceptualization of AI existential risk comes largely from Vernor Vinge, in particular his essay "The Coming Technological Singularity" but it is also a central theme in most of his works, especially the Zones of Thought series.
I'm terms of skynet I think you'd be referring to the third one? But that one is about drone strikes, and that's what we do today without AGI - we send out invincible killer robots to go wipe out villages from above because all males above the age of 16 are enemy combatants. The end of the movie could just as easily have been that they find a person behind the skynet controls killing everyone
Your comment makes sense if you intend "rise of AGI" as just growth. But then why should it be a concern?
Ellison's analysis of his own work is pretty well known and while not specifically about AGI is definitely about technology misuse, so you win there.
Moreover, I don't think you are correct, even in the literary sense, when saying, for example, what Neuromancer is about. I don't really care what an author says it's about, most artists are channeling something unconscious and often have very little conscious understanding of what their work is actually about. I've read plenty of Gibson books. The guy is an absolute luddite, and writes on a typewriter. He is terrified of how dangerous and dehumanizing technology is, and all of his books are "about" an all-consuming fear of technology and the changes it causes.
For someone who doesn't care what Gibson thinks of his own artistic works you sure do have a strong opinion on Gibson's artistic work.
Nobody would say "transformers are about the dangers of aliens turning into vehicles" but people would say it is "about aliens that can turn into vehicles." They might also say something like it's "about the the struggle to live day to day without being sure if everyday things are truly as they seem" - if that's were what it's about- I'm not actually familiar with transformers.
As an academic and a human (both!) I think it is important to remember how to keep the jargon from whatever you study distinct in your mind from common usage, so you can still communicate with people that didn't study whatever you studied.
I think this guy's ideas of what literary analysis is and is not are pretty idiosyncratic, to be honest.
The Turing Option (Harry Harrison, Marvin Minsky). I can't stress strongly enough, do not read this book. It's terrible. But it does exist.
You want to tell me the theme of that thread is human identity? It's our responsiblity to our creations. It's what does it mean to be sentient? It's the ethics of using a self-aware AI as a tool. (Amongst many other things).
Either way, we're way off course from "it was a great fear of scifi that AGI would become a risk" to "a book with AGI as the vessel for metaphor about humanity exists".