January 30, 2005
Bloom by Wil McCarthy
In the year 2000, Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, famed techno-guru and recent media hound aired publicly his prediction that the new century will have to deal with the dangers and benefits of nanotechnology as the last century had to deal with nuclear fission. He must have finally caught up with his sf reading list, since this particular area of scientific research has fueled famous disasters in hard-sf stories since the 60s. Novels like "The Invincible" by Stanislaw Lem, for example, prefigures this notion of microscopic automatons acting on simple rules which combine to form complex forms of emergent behaviour (usually deadly to humans).
For Lem, this was an oppurtunity to tear down human hubris towards scientific understanding, but since that novel appeared the mathematical understanding of cellular automata has grown so much that it is a ripe time to explore these issues again. Wil McCarthy's "Bloom" is an excellent hard-sf treatment of nanotechnology, chaos, cellular automata and emergent behaviour.
The story deals with the sudden explosion of nanotech entities called mycora in the near future, the exponential self-replication of this fungus forces the evacuation of the entire inner solar system by humans to the moons of Jupiter and the asteroid belt where it is too cold for the mycora to take hold.
The plot follows the usual hard-sf disaster/adventure story arc, but for once the ending in this type of a novel is not intellectually bankrupt. The ideas used in this book are informed by a lot of science that has explored these technological issues. The post-human societies are well-realized and Wil McCarthy pays close attention to the engineering of human habitats in strange places.
You will need a German-English dictionary to understand the recurrent use of German words in this book. For example, rather than use the word reporter, Wil McCarthy uses the word berichter and some of the nanotech beings are termed `schlädlings'. It was serendipitous that I happened to read this novel on a flight over to Germany.
Some interactive java programs that might be interesting after reading this book are: Exploring emergence using the Game of Life, Avida and Tierra are computational environments for exploring artificial life.
Related to: "The Invincible" by Stanislaw Lem and "Permutation City" by Greg Egan.
%T Bloom %A Wil McCarthy %I Del Rey %D 1998 %G ISBN: 034542654 (pb) %P 303 %K science-fiction
Date written: 2000/08/15
Posted by anoop at January 30, 2005 07:09 PM