Surveillance and Drone Form in the Small Drone Age

Abstract

In “Drone Form,” Nathan Hensley (2016) examined how drone thrillers about the so-called Global War on Terror use third-person limited points of view and spatial caesuras to give shape to the drone war: “The conceptual novelty of the subject,” he writes, “generates difficulties for the perspectival regime of narrative fiction.” This paper considers how drone form is taking shape in the small drone age of accessible civilian drone technology. After surveying the legacy of modernist aerial aesthetics and narrative “views from above,” I turn to Eleanor Catton’s eco-gothic, psychological thriller Birnam Wood (2024) to chart how contemporary “air-mindedness” (Bowen, 1932) departs from a reliance on narrative fiction’s “perspectival regime” altogether. Where free indirect discourse might capture some of the frictions of surveillance in the modernist age, Timothy Bewes' more recent theorization of the "free indirect" as the "thought" of the novel captures how current drone form, like that in Catton, expresses the logic and banalization of unmanned surveillance against the structural backdrop of Big Tech authoritarianism and the climate crisis.

Bio

Beryl Pong is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, where she directs the Centre for Drones and Culture. She holds affiliated positions with the Faculty of English and with Trinity College at Cambridge, and with the National University of Singapore. She is the author of British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration (Oxford University Press, 2020) and the co-editor of Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology (Open Humanities Press, 2024).