How might we grasp the scope and variety of contemporary surveillance, its possibilities and threats? How have scholars addressed the topic? How has surveillance been understood in the past, and what can this awareness tell scholars and the public about the shape of things to come? Monitoring the Future addresses these questions by critically considering the utopian and dystopian literature and film that for decades has supplied provocative and illuminating depictions of surveillance, and responses to it. It goes beyond Orwell and Snowden to speculate on the shape of surveillance to come. Key Features:The first sustained account of the representation of surveillance in eutopian and dystopian literature and film * Charts surveillance's historical development and creative responses to that development * Provides a detailed critical account of the ways that surveillance studies has utilised utopias to formulate its ideas * Offers new readings of literary texts and films from More's Utopia through George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to Margaret Atwood' Oryx and Crake; and films from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Neil Blomkamp's Elysium and beyond.