Drone

Readers interested in technology and/or warfare will very much enjoy reading Drone... Adam Rothstein did an admirable job, writing about every aspect of drones in detailed and organized fashion... [T]hose keenly interested in the subject will gobble this up. -- George Erdosh San Francisco Book Review [Rothstein's] book is a rich collection of vignettes about how to imagine and comprehend the drone ... [Drone] really excels in tackling the multiple meanings, symbols, and narratives attached to drones, all of which provide a bird's eye view (drone's eye view?) of the terrain of contemporary debate ... for those beginning a research project, or just the curious, this small book packs a big punch. -- Ian G. R. Shaw, University of Glasgow Antipode Adam Rothstein's Drone presents this iconic figure of contemporary warfare-the disconcertingly alluring autonomous airborne machine-through the lens of a different kind of history. Privacy and tracking algorithms run side by side with the ethics of self-guided munitions, activist political programs butt heads with emerging corporate business strategies, and all of it is tied back to the earliest experiments in driverless vehicles, quaint ancestors of today's over-mythologized UAVs. In the end, Rothstein's book is an exploration of technical agency: Where did drones come from-and what do they want? Geoff Manaugh, Editor of Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions and Author of the website BLDGBLOG This lucid, visionary work is as close as one can get to science fiction without the baggage of science and/or fiction. Adam Rothstein's Drone will be a wonderful cultural artifact in twenty years. It will be like a broken pomegranate of contemporary speculations and anxieties. Bruce Sterling, Author of The Zenith Angle and Professor of Internet Studies and Science Fiction at the European Graduate School, Switzerland Portland writer and artist Adam Rothstein's contribution to Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series digs into the history and meaning of autonomous aircraft-the ways they work, the tasks they perform, where they come from, and how the way we talk about them reflects the priorities and anxieties of our age. -- Ben Waterhouse Oregon Humanities