A monster for our time?
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Welcome back folks, and hallo new readers!
It’s been A Month so far, and this first of two September newsletters is a little late. Over the past few weeks I’ve been working to get ahead of Halloween season by pitching some essay ideas to magazines for publication this fall. Suddenly, the pitches started landing - and now I have to finish writing the things.
Two deadlines fell on Monday. Earlier today I submitted revised versions of three of them. And I did an interview for the fourth today as well. In some ways it’s turning into the September of dreams for a historian of monsters.
One of the essays I edited earlier today is out already! Access it for free here: “Resistance is Futile”: Why Star Trek: TNG’s Borg Collective is the Perfect Monster for Our Time, in Reactor Magazine, the delightful online science fiction, fantasy and popular culture magazine and community site.
I don’t have the words for how foundational Star Trek: TNG and Star Trek: DS9 are for how I exist in the world. Perhaps this essay, published on the 35th anniversary of the second episode, goes a little way towards explaining it. The crew of the Enterprise meet the scariest possible aliens: a hybrid cyborg species called the Borg Collective.
Never watched Star Trek: The Next Generation? Never fear; this essay will (I think) still be comprehensible and thought-provoking. It contains dashes of literature, psychology, and current affairs. Perhaps it will even tempt you to try the show! The episodes I discuss are Season 3, episode 26 and Season 4, episode 1.
Unconvinced? If you’re a Renaissance scholar or a literature or theatre person, know that the great Shakespearean actor Sir Patrick Stewart is in these episodes in his prime - charcoal body suit and everything.
Worried that you won’t be able to just drop into the series? There’s precisely one fact to learn before you start ‘The Best of Both Worlds’: Captain Picard’s nickname for his first officer, Commander Riker, is “Number One.”
If I’ve warmed you up enough that you’re considering watching an episode for context before watching the Borg double episode, you might try the prequel in the previous series, where the crew of the Enterprise first meet the Borg: Season 2, episode 16, “Q Who?”
I’ve wanted to write about this double episode forever - it makes a brief appearance in Humans: A Monstrous History). But my angle for this essay came about by chance. Earlier this summer I was interviewed for a magazine (more when the feature is at the printers and thus Really Happening). One of the questions the journalist asked me was, “What makes a perfect monster?”
This grew in my brain into the essay in Reactor. I’d be curious to know what you think! In addition to the comments feature for my newsletter (scroll to the bottom; it will take you to the online archive), there’s one for Reactor (the comments feature is active if you create a free account).
For the past few years, “pitch and write essays for Halloween” has been a regular to-do list item. But I never managed to land anything: each of the summers of 2022-2024 were “finish a draft of the book” summers and there was little bandwidth for pitching. Each of those Septembers I sent off book drafts 1, 2, and then 3. I did pitch a few things in the summer of 2024 but they didn’t land. Here’s hoping that this season of lining things up is a sign that I’m getting the hang of this pitching thing.
Podcasts
To hear me talking about those Star Trek episodes, check out the 5AM StoryTalk podcast here (preview), or sign up for a free trial via Apple podcasts to inhale the whole thing (here). I was delighted when screenwriter Cole Haddon agreed that “The Best of Both Worlds” would be a fabulous artwork to talk about for his “talk about a piece of screen art that’s important to you” interview.
Since time is curved, a podcast episode that came out the other day transported me to my spring book tour. Here I am in an actual recording studio at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia with host Alexis Pedrick:
Our conversation, recorded for the Distillations podcast, is here.
With Guillermo del Toro’s remake of Frankenstein coming out on Netflix in a few weeks (it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last month), monsters in movies have been on my mind. I had a ball chatting about them with award-winning novelist Beth Barany on the How To Write The Future podcast, a delightful series about writing science fiction and fantasy and creative practice more generally. The episode will come out in a few weeks, but if you subscribe to the podcast now (it’s free) you’ll learn about it the moment it drops.
An escapist novel recommendation - and a not-so-escapist one
I started reading a bunch of novels this summer (more on these in a future newsletter) and actually finished one of them: Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Seventh Veil of Salome, a thriller about a Mexican debut actress in Hollywood in the 1950s. It’s set as the McCarthy witch hunts begin and lead to crackdowns on creatives. Told from the perspective of a half-dozen ambitious actors and hustlers of varying levels of skill, dedication, and honesty - and from the perspective of ancient figures like Salome - it’s a fun, captivating read that reminded me that the lives and careers of artist types have always been volatile.
The other day I was listening to a delightful episode of the Waterstones book podcast - a conversation between fantasy-and-other-things novelists R. F. Kuang and Samantha Shannon. I was excited and tickled to learn that R. F. Kuang’s new book, Katabasis, is a dark academia novel in which two graduate students go … to hell to rescue their advisor. One of the essays I’m currently researching is about an extraordinary Renaissance painting of hell. Stay tuned! I wonder whether I can work the novel into my essay….
Upcoming events
Sat Oct 18, 9-11am ET / 2-4pm UK. Monster Lab - online; get tickets here.
In case you missed it
I wrote an op-ed for the LA Times earlier this summer: “Why monstrify? Look at who benefits when few are considered fully human.”
For another conversation about monsters and the history of science, check out my interview on the HPS Podcast. More podcast and video recordings are on my website at this link.
For a written interview with me on the making of Humans: A Monstrous History, conducted by the medievalists and public historians David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele, check out their newsletter here.
Would you like to read a few more excerpts from Humans: A Monstrous History? The ones published in online magazines and blogs are at this link.
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies),
and LinkedIn (@surekhadavies-53711753/)