Hallo friends,

HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY was published one year ago today! It’s now available (to order or on the shelves) anywhere books are sold, in hardback, ebook and audiobook formats in English, in Chinese (traditional characters; available everywhere except mainland China), and, from March 17th, paperback.

Thank you for being part of this journey! I’m so grateful to everyone who helped get this book out into the world, and to everyone who bought or recommended it, read it, wrote reviews, shared my newsletters or social media posts, and told their friends, colleagues, family, students, teachers, librarians, and booksellers about it….

Getting a book into the hands of people who want or need it doesn’t just take the proverbial village. It takes a galaxy of stars shining in their corners of the universe, enlightening everyone around them. Thank you!

On this day, profound thoughts appear not to be manifesting on the page even though I’m sitting here waving my fingers on the keyboard, waiting for Stephen King’s cigar-chomping muse:

There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labour, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.¹

What have I learned over the last year about being an author? Mostly, I suppose, the common sense things we all sort of know but sometimes forget to put into practice: eat well, sleep, exercise, limit doomscrolling, and don’t grieve over the things that were never in your control in the first place.

The University of California Press staff were wonderful to work with. They pulled out all the stops to edit, produce, and promote this book, and for that I shall always be grateful (I’m now crying on camera at a virtual Writers’ Hour hosted by the London Writers’ Salon; oh hell, the hour is nearly up which means silent writing morphs into conversation; where are my tissues before we’re all looking at one another again?).

My first book (the academic book that began as my PhD dissertation, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters) did amazingly well for its genre in terms of sales, number and mood of reviews, and critical acclaim (prizes!). As I kept reminding myself, the only place to go from there was down. Nothing makes a second book - the difficult second album - harder to write or more difficult to recognize as a success (it’s in my little hands: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!) than hitting it out of the park with the first book.

I tried not to expect things that I couldn’t make happen myself (like getting reviewed in newspapers) but it’s still hard not to wonder whether, with a differently shaped task list over the years - years! - running up to publication I could have served the book better.

The underpinning of social justice  and building a better future in Humans - the Trojan horse pulled along by Star Trek, Muppets, and weird and wonderful stuff people thought in the distant past - is so important that it behooved me to sound-bite it well enough to give it the best chance in the world. 

In my more self-destructive moments I wonder: Did I work hard enough on the right things?

My answer has to be: well, how do I know that a differently-shaped to-do list wouldn’t have led to less, not more, success? In the absence of a time machine, the only way forward is to back away from the “what-if” vortex and attend to the now. And once a book is in the world, it will continue to work its magic for as long as humans and readers of human languages exist in the world. The show isn’t over until the universe hits maximum entropy (once a theoretical physicist, always a theoretical physicist, apparently).

I guess this is a good moment for a roundup of some of the book-related spinoff writing that you may have missed; a sample of podcast episodes; and photos of fave moments from the year.

The year in a few photos

Rather than making this email ridiculously long I’m going to restrict myself to a handful of photos here. For more photos, my book tour newsletters start with the March 26, 2025 issue and are in my archive.

Tip for author/speaker types: write it onto your talk printouts to ask friends/hosts to take photographs! Sometimes I forgot entirely.

(If you’d like a blow-by-blow account of the months after the book came out, you might head to Feb 4^th 2025 in my newsletter archive and read forwards [navigation buttons are at the bottom of that page.])

Words out this year

In case you missed them, my writing on monster-related themes this past year included an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times connecting extrajudicial deportations to a longer history of monstrification; an essay in the SFF magazine Reactor on how the Borg Collective of Star Trek: The Next Generation is the perfect monster for our time; and a meditation in Contingent Magazine through both of my books, on how an archive can make a monster of a historian (text and audio narrated by me). The full list of things I’ve written is on my website.

Podcasts

I did so many interviews! An especially fun one, which exists as a YouTube show and in podcast form, is the live history-meets-science-meets-weird-stuff show I did for the Peculiar Book Club. If there’s anything about Humans: A Monstrous History that you liked, then this is the book club show for you.

If you’re interested in the early modern period, my conversation with Suzannah Lipscombe on Not Just the Tudors or with Barbara Bogaev on the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast might be the place to start.

For current affairs junkies, I was the Halloween guest on the Prospect Magazine podcast, and for a more philosophical take on history and politics check out my convos with Sophie McBain on Intelligence Squared, Miranda Melcher on the New Books Network or Cara Santa Maria on Talk Nerdy.

If you’re a pop culture person, I chatted with James Herbert about Monsters, Inc and my book on Historians At The Movies and Cole Haddon about Star Trek:TNG on 5AM StoryTalk.

If you’re interested in research and writing craft and habits, I had a great convo with Kate Carpenter on Drafting the Past.

Historians of science may like to check in on my chat with Thomas Spiteri on the HPS Podcast.

For a free-wheeling and fun convo that went from very silly to very serious, check out 2 Complicated 4 History, with Lynn Price Robbins and Isaac S. Loftus.

The full list of shows to date is here.

Next live event

For now, I’m looking ahead to my next public event - the Linnean Society, London on Thursday 5th March - and beavering away at the coalface of a new book idea and some possible essays.

To be continued!

Yours with monstrous affection,

Surekha