The computer inspired a wave of post-war 'imaginary futures', from ecstatic fantasies of time and space travel to fears of mankind's extinction. Iain Boal brings three critical histories of modernity's futuramas back down to earth

II The revolution shall not be criticised?
In response to ISEA98 Micz Flor, organiser of Revolting temporary media laboratory, asks "why now, why revolution?" Is the current popularity of the term and its associated icons anything more than Middle Youth talking to itself in the latest of a long line of fashionable lingos?

IV Net.Politics Q&A

Francesca X visits London’s Defence Systems and Equipment International fair (DSEI), and discovers that under cover of a ‘meet and greet’ event, business is brisk

Hari Kunzru sees in recent aggressive Hindu spiritual nationalism clear parallels with the fascist movements of 1930s Europe. Here he examines the convergence of the mystical discourse of shakti with that of nuclear force

>> Illustrations from the Amar Chitra Katha series >Vishwamitra, Ganesha, Agastya and Karttikeya

JJ King sees a new kind of war, and a new kind of soldier, emerging from the ‘Shock and Awe’ of battlefield Iraq

Introduction

Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds
By Hari Kunzru

Signatures of the Apocalypse: The Politics of Surveillance in Contemporary India
By Shuddhabrata Sengupta

War and Peace
By Pauline van Mourik Broekman

Although it is on everyone’s lips, asymmetric warfare has yet to be understood. One description of the phenomenon that may be worth revisiting is the US military’s own. By CCRU

The landscape of contemporary war is that of a hurricane projecting and dispersing, dissipating and disintegrating through fusion and fission as it goes along. – P. Virilio

Microwave crowd-control weapons have a distinguished history in paranoid lore. Mike Holderness revisits some choice theories only to see one return in very real form

>> Photo - Air traffic controller on the USS Enterprise guide the strike aircraft in and out of Iraq, 28 Dec 1998

For a week in March the Mir crash-landing was a hot and reliable global news item. Finding himself in the Planned Target Zone, JJ King experienced how hot news feels when you’re standing under it.

Mir: a heavenly body falling to earth? The poetry of a Cold War science project returning home. Right?