Nanotech

 

Nanotech

edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

Ace Books

1999

 

 

I'm halfway through a short but emotionally intense literary novella and needed a little break before continuing. Nanotech, an anthology of scifi short stories that were originally published in the early 90s. In the introductory essay, editors Dann and Dozois credit the 1986 nonfiction book Engines of Creation with more or less single-handedly inspiring nanotech as a topic for science fiction. Writing in 1999, they also note that at some point, nanotech became a basically ubiquitous part of the consensus vision of the future. Very very small robots of the type imagined here do not exist yet (and might never) but I think they're still a common form of imaginary future-tech today.

I'd be curious to know what uses Engines of Creation proposed for nanoscale robotics. The most common use in this collection is medical technology. All but two stories think of nanotech primarily as something that goes inside of people to supplement our own biological processes, to keep us healthy and young in ways the unassisted could only dream of. In a couple stories, the nanobots are also capable of changing our minds, allowing people to voluntarily choose to make themselves feel emotions or believe truths, and to make themselves permanently incapable of not feeling or not believing those things afterward.

I think every story in this collection is pessimistic. (Ironic, since I turned to it for a bit of emotional relief.) The nanotech either doesn't work as intended in some dangerous way, or it does, but it's the intentions themselves that are bad.

The most famous works in the collection are Greg Bear's "Blood Music," where sentient medical nanos decide to convert their human hosts to unmoving tree-like creatures, and decide to spread to as many new hosts as possible, Greg Egan's "Axiomatic," where a man who wants revenge on the guy who killed his wife buys a nano drug that will allow him to stop believing in the sanctity of human life, with one expected and one surprise consequence, and Stephen Baxter's "The Logic Pool," where a scientist on a moon of Neptune programs nano computers to competitively evolve new theories of mathematics.

Baxter's story is unusual for being set in the far future, and for imagining nanobots mostly as a computing medium. The others are all set in the present day or near future.

In the worst story, Michael Flynn's "Remember'd Kisses," a man mourning his dead wife uses nanobots to biologically and psychologically overwrite a homeless woman's body and mind to turn her into a facsimile. (Seeing a pattern here?)
 

The last dead wife story, Kathleen Ann Goonan's "Sunflowers," follows a man whose wife died after ingesting terrorist nanos. They allowed her to more easily envision possible futures, and tempted her to keep on imagining to the point of self-destruction. The man voluntarily takes the same nano drug to understand why his wife chose to die. He's aided in getting through his initial trip by another woman who once took the same drug at a party, and by viewing Van Gogh's paintings with her. Because they've taken the drug, they'll both have to resist its temptation for the rest of their lives. Goonan seems to understand the almost gravitational pull that the idea of death can have on the mind of a depressed person, and that psychological realism strengthens her story. This actually seems a lot like Inception, just with a very different future tech at its center. Darryl Gregory has stories like "Damascus" and "Second Person, Present Tense" where people experience externally imposed psychological states, but he imagines prions and pharmaceuticals, not nano drugs, as the source of the ideas you can't un-think.

Ian McDonald, in a story that later grew into the novel Evolution's Shore, gives us the closest to a 'gray goo' scenario when alien nanos start xeno-morphing Africa into a copy of their native planet's environment. 'Gray goo' is the result of nanobots that disassemble everything they touch and turn them into more nanos, so this is close, but distinct. "Blood Music" is also a disaster, but the humans are getting remade into better hosts, not just into heaps of bots. "The Logic Pool" actually ends with a true gray goo event, but fortunately it's a small uninhabited Neptunian moon that gets eaten, rather than Earth.

The best story in the collection is the novella "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy" by David Marusek, someone I've never read or even heard of outside this collection. It's set a few hundred years in the future,  after present-day humanity discovers nanobots as a source of eternal youth and biological immortality. Because few people die, few are permitted to be born, so most people who are alive in this future were born before immortality was discovered, in our present day. There's a caveat here that there's a servant class of clones who apparently lack the full rights of personhood, including the right to immortality, and they are all much younger.

Marusek's world is permeated with nanobots, and besides the ones in our bodies, they're mostly hostile. All cities are domed to filter out the 'nasties' that fill the air and water of the outside world. A powerful organization simply called the Militia monitors for nasties that get inside the domes or inside human bodies, and protects the welfare of the collective at the violent expense of the infected individual.

"Out of Our Minds" follows a millionaire artist who falls in love with and marries a billionaire lawyer, just before the lawyer's star really starts rising when she gets involved with the government. The pair are even permitted to conceive a baby, which is why they're as happy as the title suggests. While telling their love story, Marusek shows us the world, and skillfully foreshadows just how badly someone can be ruined by a single rogue nano nastie, and by the Militia's predictable overreaction. While his wife is probably the real target, it's the poor artist who eventually succumbs to the doom we've feared was coming from the first page of the story. There's always someone jealous of another's good fortune, inevitable as the evil eye.

Marusek has the most complete vision of how nanotechnology might change the world on a societal scale. What will it look like when health, youth, and petty revenge are no longer restricted to a handful of mad scientists smuggling their latest discoveries out of the lab to use for personal reasons - when the changes are produced industrially, and affect everyone, everywhere? In this collection, really only Marusek has an answer. He's not looking at the very first moment of change, but at what comes after, when the transformation is complete.