A history of how humans have created monsters out of one another—from our deepest fears—and what these monsters tell us about humanity’s present and future.

Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Dr. Surekha Davies argues that today’s urgent questions about human rights, labor, wealth, health, technology, and climate justice rest on a foundation of monsters: stories people tell about who counts as fully human, what counts as normal, and who gets cast as the monsters of the body politic. Everywhere from the sports world to policing, monster-making has shaped how we think about science, society, and humanity. We can’t fully understand the present or avoid making the same mistakes in the future without attending to the long history of monsters.
Davies reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein’s monster and E.T., this book shows how monster-making is about control: it defines who gets to count as normal.

In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, this book traces the long, volatile history of monster-making and charts a better path for the future. The result is a profound, effervescent, empowering retelling of the history of the world for anyone who wants to reverse rising inequality and polarization. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction
1 • On the Ecology of Monsters
2 • Human or Animal?
3 • Race-Nations
4 • Race-Nations II
5 • Gender, Sex, and Monstrous Births
6 • Monstrous Performance and Display
7 • Gods, Magic, and the Supernatural
8 • Machines
9 • Extraterrestrials
10 • Monstrofuturism
Epilogue

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Dr. Surekha Davies is a British author, speaker, and historian of science, art, and ideas. Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human, won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. She has written essays and reviews about the histories of biology, anthropology, and monsters in the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, and Aeon.

Hardcover, published in 2025, 336 pages.
Illustrations: 10 color plates, 40 b/w figures