VERY interesting article about drones in literature. Featured are several novels, one is written by Richard A. Clarke, the former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism for the United States. Another one is I Am the Beggar of the World a collection of landays, folk poetry sung among Pashtun women along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

thenation.com: "I Am the Beggar of the World is a universe away from Sting of the Drone, despite the fact that both have armed drones and the “war on terror” at their core. It’s not just that Clarke is vastly different from the female singers of landays, which belong to a distinctly foreign literary tradition, or that he has very different goals (one of which, presumably, is to sell books). Drones are two separate objects in the American versus the Afghan imagination. In the United States, drones are all too often a metaphor, the indirectness made more profound by the literal distance between a vehicle and its pilot. Drones symbolize a lot but seem to do very little. However, the same drone in Afghanistan exists as a fact of life, one that embodies real tragedy. There, a drone is a drone."

Read the full feature at www.thenation.com

» More on landays at poetryfoundation.org » The Secret Lives of Afghanistan’s Female Poets