Technology has served a recurrent role as a utopian imaginary for speculative fiction writers and consumers. As a utopian promise, technology appears to provide individuals, communities, and whole societies with the means to overcome nature – whether it is base human natures, relationships with one’s environment, or the perceived limitations of one’s body. This chapter focuses on two similar technological fantasies, James Cameron’s Terminator films and Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. In both series, central figures – namely the T-800 played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Murderbot – approximate being human but are limited by their technological being. Yet, in being not-fully-human, they expose how technology always serves as a false utopian promise: there is no way out of our humanness through technology. In this way, technological fantasies serve as a form of horror, at once tempting readers with possibilities, but revealing those possibilities to be empty – or malignant.

A long tradition of pandemic – or plague – literature, dating back at least as far as classical Greece, has used catastrophic communicable disease as a backdrop to explore the human condition: what it means to live in a community of other humans, and, as awareness of the crises of environmental devastation and climate change grows, on a planet with other living organisms. In different ways, and with differing resolutions, twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of pandemic fiction show how pandemics stem not only from human practices, but also from the values, beliefs, and stories about the past – the histories – in which they are rooted. Whether dystopic or utopic, apocalyptic or contained, literary pandemics warn that in order to change the way humans collectively inhabit the world, we need to change the dominant stories we tell about it.

John Herschel grew up in a world of intense scientific activity. From an early age, he was surrounded by examples of science in action. His education was supplemented at every stage to ensure exposure to and training in the highest, most up-to-date mathematics. At the same time, John also experienced an indirectly political upbringing, one that showed him not only a changing world but also the power of education to challenge and change tradition. The politics he witnessed growing up illustrated dramatic transformations taking place in England and abroad. Family friends were caught up in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In England, family holidays and changing consumer tastes evidenced the effects of England’s industrial revolution. In adulthood, these two strands – the scientific and the political – influenced his outlook and choices. He chose friends at university, such as Charles Babbage (1791–1871) and George Peacock (1791–1858), who wanted to change the world through mathematics. He attempted to earn a living from natural philosophy rather than train for the church or fall back on family wealth after graduation as his father wished. He chose to marry an evangelical free thinker, keen to use knowledge and religion to improve the lives of others. He chose to never completely pursue science in isolation but instead advise governments both in South Africa and in England on using science to improve education and society. He chose to train his children to be both scientifically curious and socially minded. These choices shaped Herschel’s life.

Ever since its publication in 1830–31, John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy has been recognized as epoch-making and canonical. It is rather surprising, therefore, that to date there exists little to no consensus on any aspect of the book, not even on what it is really about. This chapter provides a brief overview of the available literature on Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse. In doing so, it attempts to both improve upon and go beyond current Herschel scholarship.

Despite John Herschel’s extensive work in the fields of chemistry, optics, geology, mineralogy, and the philosophy of science, it was primarily as an astronomer that he was recognized during his lifetime and remembered after his death. Herschel’s astronomical endeavors can be summarized as establishing and extending the astronomical projects of his father William Herschel (1738–1822) and his aunt Caroline Herschel (1750–1848). By establishing, Herschel brought an observational and mathematical rigor to his father’s observations that transformed them from the results of an individual with unique instrumentation to data useful and accessible to the wider astronomical community. By extending, Herschel continued the observational program of his father and aunt, revisiting his father’s observations, updating his catalogs of double stars, nebulae, and star clusters, and extending the Herschelian project to the skies of the southern hemisphere. Yet the observational aims and methods of William and Caroline Herschel were markedly different from the astronomy being pursued by most other astronomers during their lifetimes. To understand John Herschel’s long astronomical career and influence, an overview of the scope and aims of the dominant form of astronomy during this period is needed that can provide the background to the work of his father and aunt and the context of his own.

John Herschel’s destiny lay in science. Ahead was a career of creation in astronomy, botany, chemistry, geography, meteorology, photography, and much else. Not least would be the attention he paid to mathematics. His royal road to becoming a leader in Victorian science was paved by William and Caroline Herschel, his celebrated father and aunt, both of whom were acknowledged authorities in astronomy. William, a German émigré to England, held the position of ‘King’s Astronomer’ and in this role established a rapport with George III, an amateur astronomer himself. William gained wider recognition as the discoverer of ‘The Georgian’ (known later as the planet Uranus) and Caroline as the discoverer of comets.

As early as 1826, John Herschel wrote, “astronomers are seldom draftsmen, and have hitherto … contented themselves with very general and hasty sketches.”1 This was more than a passing complaint with past depictions of astronomical objects. It was an exhortation to a generation of astronomers to begin taking draftsmanship seriously. With its increasing focus on the physical features of astronomical bodies like the Sun, the planets, comets, and the Moon, as well as the intricate physical complexities of the Milky Way, celestial nebulae, and clusters of stars, the astronomy of the nineteenth century demanded a new and systematic focus on draftsmanship as a means of observation. In this way, astronomy was very much in line with other observational sciences of the period like geology and minerology, botany and zoology, archaeology and ethnography, all of which required, alongside detailed descriptions, more exact pictures of their respective subject matter.2 As the act of drawing became embedded into routine scientific recordkeeping practices, it also became closely tied to what counted as proper scientific observation. Herschel was not just in tune with these important developments, he exemplified them in his own observational performances. This is evinced by his exquisite skills and techniques in drawing in the service of science and, above all, astronomy. Herschel’s observational practices were embodied in a set of visualizing instruments, techniques, and materials. What follows is a survey of some of these practices as they range over a lifetime of carefully observing and drawing many sorts of phenomena.

The Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, which Herschel published in Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia series in 1830, can be a difficult book to interpret.1 As commentators have emphasized, its content and the circumstances of its publication indicate it is perhaps better understood not (or at least, not merely) as a technical treatise on scientific inference and methodology but rather in the tradition of “conduct manuals,” a popular genre that offered readers insight into how they might elevate and refine their character.2 The Preliminary Discourse invokes not just prescriptions for scientific practice but also the epistemic and personal virtues of a good scientist and even (perhaps especially) the merits of careful observation and the study of science for the layman.3 Science, Herschel writes, is exceptional in “filling us, as from an inward spring, with a sense of nobleness and power which enables us to rise superior to” the circumstances of our lives.4 The Preliminary Discourse was printed and bound inexpensively, widely sold, and frequently reprinted.5 Given its history, it seems likely that philosophers of science have been too quick in reading this work primarily through the lens of its contributions to the epistemology of science.

John Herschel was a political radical in the utilitarian mould but no social leveller. Indeed, he was highly ambivalent over the notion of ‘democracy’ and feared it could unleash the tyranny of the masses. Rather, like his one-time close friend Charles Babbage, he was a rational materialist reformer with little sympathy for old state props such as the Church of England and the prevailing curriculum of the elite Anglican universities. This periodically put him at logger heads with contemporary Cambridge and Oxford taught men. (Herschel had graduated from Cambridge as senior wrangler in 1813 and Babbage was awarded a Cambridge degree with no examination in 1814.)