This book has had a complicated, cosmopolitan gestation. Its genesis was at the 2000 Critical Legal Studies Conference in Helsinki in Finland, where, as a young junior academic from a small Catholic law school in Fremantle, Western Australia, I presented some half-conceived ideas about 1950s American science fiction and international space law on a panel titled ‘Law and Popular Culture’ alongside William P. MacNeil. A slightly better thought-out iteration of that paper was eventually published by Law and Critique, and it gave impetus to two further papers on science fiction and the car, and the cloning narratives in Star Trek. However, my thematic exploration of law, technology, and science fiction would almost certainly have remained a passing distraction from what may be seen as the more serious scholarly tasks if it had not been for the opportunity to present on another ‘Law and Popular Culture’ panel at the 2006 Law and Society Association Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. By this stage, I was slightly less young and less junior, and due to serendipity found myself working alongside William MacNeil at Griffith Law School in Australia. For this panel, I wrote a paper that looked at the jurisprudential articulations of the technical in the fabulously reimagined Battlestar Galactica. The reception of this paper, the enthusiasm with which it was published by Law and Literature, the sheer personal joy at being able to be what Henry Jenkins has termed an ‘aca-fan’, and the understanding that I had hit on a rich insight concerning the essential relations between law, technology, and science fiction were revelatory. My doctorate – which until then was plodding along as a study of Australian responses to emergent technology over the twentieth century – morphed, under the supervision of MacNeil, into an examination of the science fictionality of law and technology scholarship. It is from that work that this book has mutated.

Ultimately, this book is a celebration of monsters. It is a monster of a book and its final message is for the monsters that have inherited the West to live well – to live as responsible for becoming – in their technical existence. Monsters, too, have complicated origins.