Expanding on common perceptions of the drone as a tool of war and surveillance, this book argues that they are also instruments for creative activity, entertainment, and innovative education and public safety.

The drone is an object of contradiction: at once a weapon of war and a medium of wonder. Often linked to destruction and death, the drone also sparks creativity and enhances education.

Encouraging us to think critically about the drone, the book traces its emergence in twenty-first-century warfare and examines its entanglement with surveillance culture, biopolitics, and artificial intelligence, as well as its representations in literature and the arts. Drones are instruments of power and tools of possibility—the book challenges us to see them as both.

Drones are reshaping how we understand war and peace, distance and time, privacy and surveillance, power and accountability, democracy and governance. This book invites readers to use the drone as a lens on our evolving human condition.