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While essentially heteronormative, the world of Her’s male protagonist, Theodore Twombly, is complicated by the operating systems, sexual surrogates, blind dates, images, and phone sex aficionados he attempts to be intimate with, to which can be added his estranged wife and the romcom ideal in plain sight, Amy. This chapter explores Theodore’s interactions with seven of the film’s women: his wife, Catherine; ‘Samantha’; ‘SexyKitten’; Amy; his blind date; Samantha’s surrogate, Isabella; and a sexy pregnant TV star he glimpses briefly on a screen, and then incorporates into a phone sex session that turns from fantasy to horror. It investigates the complicated relationship between intimacy and authenticity in a future we are already beginning to inhabit.

An English computer whizz invented the twenty-first century. This, of course, is a fantastic claim, but Tim Berners-Lee rightly gets credited for inventing the World Wide Web, which became operational in the 1990s, and which quickly began to shape the way people around the globe learn, communicate, trade, debate, are manipulated, scrutinised and entertained, fall in and out of love, reinvent their identities, engage in politics, and indulge their fantasies and sexual desires. Such a state of affairs might have seemed impossible, or indeed unthinkable, for much of the twentieth century, the stuff of science fiction, although another Englishman had proposed something similar in the late 1930s.

Alwyn Turner’s compendious study, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (2013), ends after 574 richly observed pages seemingly contradicting its title. Turner writes of John Major and Tony Blair, that ‘both had sought to create a classless society, both had failed, with wealth inequality increasing and social mobility decreasing, and both found themselves ill at ease with the kind of classless culture that emerged instead’ (574). Turner adds that Major and Blair (and before them, Margaret Thatcher) had aimed to refashion Britain as a meritocracy, where ability was more pertinent and consequential than family background and traditional networks of social power.

Historian David Cannadine claimed in 2004 that the Britain of the late 1990s and early 2000s was interested in history to an unprecedented level. Cannadine judged that this interest was widely dispersed ‘among publishers, in the newspapers, on radio and in film, and (especially) on television; and from the general public who, it seemed, could not get enough of it’. Translating this interest to ‘the market-oriented language of our day, it looked as though more history was being produced and consumed than ever before’ (quoted in Korte and Pirker 2011: 11). Yet history itself was not the only growth area, literary historian Jerome de Groot noting in 2010 that ‘at present the Historical Novel is in robust health, critically, formally and economically’.

Assassination is a hyperbolic way of describing the toppling of political leaders in a parliamentary democracy. Perversely, through the 1990s, the person in Britain most vulnerable to actual assassination was a writer: Salman Rushdie. His novel The Satanic Verses had been published in 1988 to critical acclaim (winning the Whitbread Best Novel prize) and almost instant attack from sections of the Muslim community in Britain and beyond. The Satanic Verses was banned in India and South Africa, and burned publicly in Bradford in the late 1980s. Some Muslims regarded the book as a slur on Mohammed specifically and on their religion more generally. Because Islam is a global religion, the fury unleashed spread around the Muslim world, culminating in Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwah, or formal opinion, in February 1989, calling on devout Muslims to kill Rushdie.

The nineties was a decade in thrall to the tremendous cultural and commercial attractions of celebrity. If, in hindsight, the seventies seem forever marked by memories of the Winter of Discontent, and the eighties by the dominating presence of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the signature cultural moment of the nineties was the extravagant national response to the unexpected death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Diana embodied the glamour, beauty and charisma associated with celebrity, and enjoyed the capacity to furnish people with dreams that took them outside their workaday existence. Diana’s alluring public persona was founded on the fabricated fairy tale princess narrative constructed for her by the Royal Family, a compliant and sometimes complicit media, and by herself. The truth was murkier and far more complex.

Placing literary creativity within a changing cultural and political context that saw the end of Margaret Thatcher and rise of New Labour, this book offers fresh interpretations of mainstream and marginal works from all parts of Britain. Based on a framework of thematically-structured accounts, the individual chapters cover national identity, ethnicity, sexuality, class, celebrity culture, history and fantasy in literature from Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England. It offers its readers a comprehensive view of the changing and challenging literary landscape in this period, critically examining the fiction, poetry and drama as well as representative films, art and music. Placed within the broader context of a transformative political and cultural environment that included Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, Damian Hirst and Princess Diana, the book captures the energetic and sometimes provocative experimentation that typified the final decade of the twentieth century.

The lyrics from Blur’s ‘Girls and Boys’ advertise a simultaneously troubling, ambiguous and celebratory reading of love and sexuality in the nineties. The clip that accompanied the song revels in the festive and (apart from two ambiguous shaven headed figures tongue kissing) the heterosexual, mostly featuring partying British teenagers and twenty-somethings. The words that precede those quoted above – ‘Streets like a jungle / So call the police / Following the herd / Down to Greece / On holiday’ – explain the paranoia somewhat, while presenting a garish snapshot of the slightly mindless hedonism of British youth. The words immediately following those quoted above – ‘Always should be someone you really love’ – sanction sexual freedom, while requiring some level of emotional responsibility. The playful and slightly risqué ambiguity of girls who are boys who like girls to be boys also reflects the increasing acceptance of diverse sexualities.

The previous chapter suggested that the United Kingdom was less united, and perhaps less of a kingdom, in 1999 than 1990, partly the result of the redistribution of political power via the different acts of devolution that opened up new forms of self-determination to the constituent nations of Britain. That chapter also argued that these political and bureaucratic changes reflected complex and often subtle changes in the ways that Britons understood themselves as Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and English. These developments were not solely the product of the decade, but were accelerated by some of the cultural energies and arguments that came to the fore in the 1990s.

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. From Thomas More’s Utopia to recent novels and films such as Dave Eggers’ The Circle and Spike Jonze’s Her, Imagining Surveillance traces the long history of surveillance in imaginative texts well before and after George Orwell’s iconic Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book argues that creative texts have long offered subtle, complex and provocative readings of surveillance that investigate the human dimension of this fast-developing, at times invisible, and undoubtedly transformative element of twenty-first century life. Novels and films supply scenarios and narratives that prompt readers and viewers to consider the personal, ethical, social and political questions proliferating surveillance raises. With chapters on the relationships between surveillance and visibility, spaces, identities, technologies, and the shape of things to come, Imagining Surveillance establishes itself at the leading edge of the emerging cultural studies of surveillance.

This chapter argues for the importance of literature and film in understanding the human dimension of surveillance. It recognises that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is the ‘go-to’ text when surveillance is discussed in the pubic arena, but it argues that, in a world of computer surveillance and Big Data, we need to move beyond Orwell if we are understand surveillance and respond imaginatively to it. It makes the case that the utopian genre has long presented a rich and provocative set of texts that encourage us to think imaginatively about surveillance. It also registers how surveillance scholars have often utilised such texts for illustrative purposes without fully exploring the rich generic links the current book analyses at length and in depth.

The association of surveillance with technology is longstanding and profound. In the contemporary world, the computer has supplemented the camera and the mobile phone. This chapter deals with relationships between types of technology and types of surveillance, recognising that in the world of Big Data information becomes a central monitoring source. Much computer surveillance is invisible to those under scrutiny, done at light speed, and potentially global in its reach. Repeated technological advances determine that surveillance endlessly morphs into new and unexpected directions, without due consideration of the personal, ethical and social consequences. This chapter also investigates texts that deal with the failure of technology, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, as well as the ways in which new technology can call into question the purpose and consequences of surveillance, as in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly.

If surveillance involves the monitoring of people, it necessarily requires monitoring the spaces and places people inhabit. Utopian texts have the root word ‘topos’ (or place) encoded in their genetic DNA. And because utopias inevitably provoke comparisons between the spaces that people inhabit and those projected in utopian novels and films, the genre is ideally situated to investigate surveillance systems. Many utopias incorporate good (eutopian) and bad (dystopian) spaces within them, the borders between theses zones being key pinch points for monitoring, and with it inclusion and exclusion. So, the chapter looks at the ways in which borders between spaces and worlds are critical to surveillance in films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, as well as novels such Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. The chapter also considers the ways in which degraded, dystopian spaces are prone to surveillance in order to separate them from eutopian spaces, a trope seen in Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 and Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men. The chapter also ventures in cyberspace, evaluating the ways in which virtual spaces are monitored in William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

This chapter is devoted to George Orwell’s compelling and still-influential masterpiece of dystopian surveillance. It deals with Nineteen Eighty-Four’s dominant and unique place in the public imagination, while considering how surveillance theorists have dealt with the novel. It also traces connections between Nineteen Eighty-Four and previous utopias, showing how Orwell’s ideas were in different ways influenced by writers such as H.G. Wells, Jack London, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Aldous Huxley. The chapter then presents a reading of the novel that stresses new ways of interpreting the treatment of surveillance, emphasising the limitations of monitoring in the novel: how the proles, who make up 85% of the population, are largely left alone, and how the countryside is a space seemingly surveillance-free. It also examines the distinct characters of Winston Smith and Julia, noting that, despite having lived under Party control all her life, when Winston meets Julia she is already consciously resistant to the putatively totalitarian ideology. The chapter also addresses the surprising extent and nature of resistance that Winston puts up, even in a world terrorised and warped by the Thought Police, telescreens, Newspeak, the Party, and Big Brother. Despite its efforts, the Party never really gets ‘inside’ Winston’s head in the sense of knowing his thoughts, reducing him to a compliant shell at the end of the narrative a hollow victory that marks the failure of Oceania’s surveillance regime.

The next four chapters critically consider key aspects of surveillance represented in literature and film after Nineteen Eighty-Four. Given that surveillance by definition involves seeing things, chapter 4 deals with the question of visibility and the ways in which forms of scrutinising operate and are resisted. An important aspect of this chapter is the possibility of being invisible to surveillance technologies, systems and processes, and about the potential for consciously not seeing, something China Miéville in his speculative novel The City & The City labels making ‘unvisible’. The possibility of not being seen underscores the point Gary T. Marx makes: that all surveillance systems have blindspots or weaknesses that can be exploited. This chapter explores then the various driving forces behind surveillance in different projected works and worlds, foregrounding the ways in which characters manoeuvre successfully or unsuccessfully in these environments. It looks at forms of gendered monitoring (exemplified in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale), surveillance as visual entertainment in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, and visualising future crimes in Steven Spielberg’s film of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report.

This chapter deals with of recent novels and films that project forward into the near future, suggesting where surveillance might be heading. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, surveillance is figured into a future world of interplanetary environmentalism, in protecting planets and helping to monitor the ‘rewilding’ of an environmentally devastated Earth. Neill Blomkamp’s film Elysium fashions another Earth under environmental stress, patrolled by stringent surveillance operatives and systems that also screen the put-upon inhabitants from the eponymous eutopian space station literally and metaphorically above them. The film concentrates on the utopian urges of that population in their endeavour to overcome oppressive monitoring and receive medical treatment reserved for those on Elysium. Dave Eggers conjures up an apparently eutopian hi-tech company, The Circle, in his novel of the same name, representing how new technologies manipulate data and images for economic, social and political control. Spike Jonze’s film Her explores the relationship between surveillance and intimacy through the interaction between a human and an operating system. As with Eggers’ The Circle, Her investigates how data confuses definitions of identities as it allows for the fusion of surveillance and intimacy. These novels and films suggest some of the ways in which new forms of surveillance promise or threaten to fashion the worlds of the future. As with all such texts, they suggest options and present narratives and characters that enable readers and viewers to think and act so that the future approximates the eutopian rather than the dystopian.

This chapter surveys the history of the emerging academic subfield of surveillance studies, noting key developments in surveillance theory that start with the invocation of Nineteen Eighty-Four and George Orwell by James Rule. Surveillance theory moves, in the 1970s and 1980s toward the rich and generative work of Michel Foucault, and his revision of Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the ‘panopticon’, and then beyond Foucault into new territory. The chapters argues that an often-neglected link between these ideas is that of the utopian genre, which provides a challenging and illuminating set of texts through which to explore some of these notions. The chapter shows how these texts have been used, or might be used profitably to explore concepts raised by such foundational surveillance studies scholars as Gary T. Marx and David Lyon. It shows that more recent and important scholarship by, amongst others, Kevin Haggerty and Zygmunt Bauman, continues to invoke (even if negatively) utopian texts, suggesting the challenge and enlightenment such works still offer to surveillance studies more generally.