If you squeeze the trigger of a Kalashnikov a bullet is kicked up the barrel by an archaic chemical explosion that would have been quite familiar to Oliver Cromwell or General Custer.

The gun, antique, yet contemporary, still dominates the world. Political and international structures and consumer culture have been moulded by research that firearms have provoked; the new science of Galileo and Newton owed much to the Renaissance study of ballistics as well as more recent mass production and artificial intelligence. This book follows the history of the gun from the first cannons, to modern gunnery, to Star Wars and the yet to be realised electrical futures of rays and beams.