Imagining Surveillance

Book excerpt: 'Imagining Surveillance' provides the first extensive and intensive study of surveillance as depicted and assessed in literature and film. Focusing on the utopian genre (which includes positive eutopias and negative dystopias), this book offers an in-depth account of how creative writers, filmmakers and thinkers have envisioned other worlds in which surveillance operates, for good and ill. It explores how surveillance scholars have utilized these fictional works in understanding the myriad implications of surveillance in the contemporary world.