Science Fiction and Nanoscience

The range of nanotechnology's use in science fiction can be illustrated by four different categories: material, instrumental, gooey, and sentient. Uses of nanotechnology can be traced back to Richard Feynman's famous talk in 1959, “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” which is often cited as a convenient point of origin for nanoscience as a whole, as Feynman imagined the feasibility and power of manipulating matter on the molecular scale.

Feynman's imaginative speculation was substantially anticipated three years earlier by Arthur C. Clarke's short story “The Next Tenants,” which described the use of very tiny machines, “micromanipulators,” able to dissect individual cells and create new materials. Science fiction writers and scientists alike have enthusiastically embraced the idea of nanoengineering materials with amazing properties, so much so that the science sometimes reads like science fiction, and vice versa. Clarke's scientific vision of space elevators in 1978 in Fountains of Paradise depends upon the invention of super-strong materials; and with the discovery of carbon nanotubes in 1991, that project is now being actively pursued by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and others. By 1992, Kim Stanley Robinson had already used carbon nanotubes to build a space elevator on Mars—in Red Mars, the first novel in his Mars trilogy. Indeed, nanomaterials are so pervasive in science fiction that creators of any future society without them are usually compelled to explain their absence, as Gardner Dazois and Jack Dunn have noted.

The instrumental use of nanotechnology is at the heart of Neal Stephenson's remarkable novel, The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995). Nanoengineering powers the interactive book that provides an astonishing education for Stephenson's heroine; it drives the Matter Compilers that provide food, water, blankets, clothes, everything; it allows a suspect to be tortured horribly without experiencing any physical damage whatsoever; and much else. Like Greg Bear's Queen of Angels (1990), or David Marusek's “We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy” (1995), to take only two of many examples, Stephenson's book richly imagines a society shaped by the instrumental use of nanoscience. In this kind of story, nanotechnology is an extension of the human body, providing impossibly small fingers, eyes, ears, and noses to perform our bidding. But in another sort of story, nanotechnology serves its own purposes.

Greg Bear's Blood Music, for instance, was first published in 1983, three years prior to Erik Drexler's Engines of Creation, the controversial work that would popularize the term nanotechnology and the concepts of molecular engineering and self-replicating nanoassemblers. Drex-ler's foresight certainly influenced science fiction writers and scientists as well, launching what Colin Milburn has called a “nanovision” of the future, in which nature, culture, and humanity itself are dramatically transformed—perhaps to the point at which a break from the past occurs, and subsequent events beyond this singularity (to use Verner Vinge's term) are beyond our control and even imagining. Drexler's vision of nanotechnology's dramatic effects was largely utopian to be sure, but he also assessed the dangers of such machines, including the possibility that they might malfunction and run out of control, even perhaps (in a worst-case scenario) converting everything into what Drexler famously called a “Grey Goo.”

...