PRAISE FOR HERE ME MONSTERS
‘King make[s] news out of culture, and without trivialising the second thing in favour of the first.’ Clive James, critic
‘Endlessly fascinating. An extraordinary inquiry into the hidden ways in which technology shapes and reshapes human being and our world, by one of our most stylish and elegant writers.’ Guy Rundle, journalist and critic
‘Like a cave-diver, Richard King steadily explores his way through the chambers of consequence that lie beneath, around, above and within our relationship with technology. Some are easily illuminated; others keep their shadows, but King sounds out the dimensions, the contours and the crags of this world in which human and machine are together becoming more and more submersed in unknown waters. Concerned and sceptical but not unjust, King surveys both the big innovations and the philosophical legacies of this tech age, somehow finding space for meditations on humanity, an astute grasp of upcoming invention, and the posing of fierce, urgent questions. It is, he says, “humanity’s ability to ask what is suitable – what is good, what is bad, what is progress, what is regress – that separates it from other species.” In this excellent, very readable, and laudably ambitious work, Richard King takes nothing for granted, but gives us a portrait of a species in the act of utterly changing itself, a terrible beauty being born.’ Kate Holden, journalist and author of the Walkley Award–winning The Winter Road
‘Technologies like artificial intelligence are changing our world. But all too often, technology is seen as destiny. Here Be Monsters is an important and engaging look at how these tools are using us, and how we must act to regain our essential humanity.’ Toby Walsh, chief scientist at UNSW AI Institute and the author of Machines Behaving Badly
‘Here Be Monsters asks us to resist the urge to damage our very nature to accommodate technology’s unchallenged march.’ Geordie Williamson, The Australian
‘Here Be Monsters is an intelligent and thoughtful meditation on the relationship between technology and humanity. Pulling together tech criticism, literary theory and history, King has created a text that is bigger than the sum of its parts. This thoroughly enjoyable text gives the reader the confidence to commit to a bold ambition for a more democratic technological future.’ Lizzie O’Shea, lawyer, activist and author of Future Histories and Empowering Women
Can technology save the planet? A new cohort of ‘ecomodernists’ insists that geoengineering, genetic technologies, nanotech and AI can solve our environmental crisis. But how would the world, and humanity, be transformed by bending nature to our will?
Almost a century ago, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World imagined a society founded on a radical idea. Using eugenics and powerful pharmaceuticals, its rulers would engineer humans to fit the society they wanted to see, rather than build a society based on the needs of humans. The result was a rational and efficient system. And the crushing of the human spirit.
Today, faced with an environmental crisis, our economic and political leaders are responding in the spirit of Huxley’s rulers. Rather than building societies that respect the natural world, they are developing the means to remake nature itself. Yet channelling the same instrumental thinking that caused this crisis will only deepen it. We must examine that future, to challenge its assumptions and propose alternatives, predicated on a different vision of nature and humans’ place within it. From the nuclear industry’s careless mining of uranium, through to the centuries-old traditions of some of the world’s first peoples, history is layered with insights into how humans have treated the natural world, and how this can guide us forward.
Inscribed in the ecological crisis is a mandate for a radical rethink. Cogent, insightful and bold, Brave New Wild rises to that challenge. It will make you think about the planet, and our existence on it, in a new way.
