Literary Poll: Nanotechnology in Fiction?

What about instances of fiction where concpets are introduced that would have been called "nanotechnology" if such a concept existed at the time.

If you wanted to stretch things a bit, could "Fantastic Voyage" fit the bill?

Under what you might call "bionanotechnology" you'll find Greg Bear's "Blood Music" - scientist modifies his own lymphocytes and injects himself with them when he is fired. The plot "evolves" from there.

Forgot this one - the Revelation Space trilogy and related books and stories by Alistair Reynolds. These include the "melding plague", a nanotech virus that doesn't recognize the difference between human and machine and attempts to "meld" tissue and implant at the cellular level.

"Blood Music", which I think is by Greg Bear, exists as both a short story and a novel, I believe. I've used the short story in sci-fi classes of mine to introduce the "grey goo" idea.

I seem to remember that Murder in the Solid State by Wil McCarthy was OK. It was a long time since I read it, but I remember that I liked it back in 1998 or so. Quote from Fantastic Fiction:

"Murder in the Solid State, the new McCarthy novel, is a hard-science, page-turning suspense novel of one man's battle to save his life, career and country in twenty-first century America. David Sanger is an ambitious young physicist. He is about to present a groundbreaking paper on nanotechnology at a conference in Baltimore. At the opening cocktail party, an elderly scientist, the grand old man of nanotechnology himself, Otto Vandegroot, takes offense at a sly insult and draws his hi-tech collapsible sword."

But then I read Fall of Sirius by the same author, and didn't like it at all. It has nanobots that are used as weapons: they just break down the enemies into molecules. But worse than that, the story revolves around the outdated idea of a certain quality that distinguishes humans from other sentient beings (making us better at survival).

I haven't read the Crichton (I'm not a big fan of his brand of Luddite fiction)

I have (I got this book as a Christmas gift two or three years ago), and I agree it's a poor choice. My beef with Crichton is not so much the Luddite aspect as the fact that on more than one occasion I have caught him overstating his case. It's one thing to read Luddite fiction from somebody who writes well and has done his homework, but Crichton frequently doesn't do his homework, and the writing isn't all that compelling either.

I can't help you with positive suggestions, since I'm not all that well read in this subgenre either.

Will McCArthy also wrote "Bloom", which is a bit wibbletech like, but makes some points regarding nanotech.
Charles Stross also uses nanotech, in his Eschaton novels, but it isn't the over the top magic kind of nanotech that is popular elsewhere.

William Gibson has included nanotechnology throughout his books. Just a touch in the earlier ones it becomes incrementally a more substantial player in his later works. Playing a substantial part in "Idoru" and a major role as background and supporting theme in "All Tomorrow's Parties".

I can't say that nanotechnology is portrayed very accurately, in the later work they play a role in a less materially deprived existence, and the effect is more surreal and fantastical than technical and circumscribed.

A lot of Greg Egan's work -- most notably _Quarantine_ involves a sort of nanotechnological neurobiology.

One of my all time favorites is Neal Stephensons' "Diamond Age".

My first thought was Greg Bear's Slant. It goes into some depth on the control and possibilities of 'military-grade' nano.

And there's a couple episodes of the recent incarnation of Doctor Who, specifically:
The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances (Technology is called "nanogenes")

almost, but not quite:

"Clade" by Mark Budz, 2003

Postsingular, by Rudy Rucker, uses the idea of nanotech extensively. It's a free download, under a CC license.

It's not the best sci-fi book I've read lately, but it's certainly not the worst either.

Looks like you're not suffering from a shortage of suggestions here, but Deception Well and Vast by Linda Nagata are both very good examples.

Scott MacKay has a really neat little book called Omnifix -- it's about an alien attack on Earth where nanogens rain down on the surface. #16 makes everyone over 30 die while #17 (which is only used on soldiers) slowly dissolves limbs killin g the victim. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but it is really well done.

If you want to extend it into TV and movies, the Stargate TV shows have a bad guy race called the Replicators, which are essentially nanites. They've also made appearances on Star Trek:TNG and Red Dwarf.

I'm not sure if it counts as nanotech - but how about the locaters from "A Deepness In the Sky"? Actually, I'm pretty sure it was small enough to count, and practical enough. He even describes the power source (low energy microwave pulses throughout their usage areas, as I recall - but it might have been something other than microwaves).

This list comes from Scientific American 2007- the article is titled "Shamans of Small" by Graham Collins. Some of these have just small sections with nano like approaches (Dune's is based on pick and place atomic scale construction) while for others nano is more central to the story. Of these, I have read Dune and Blood Music. Blood Music is one of the creepiest books I have ever read! I loved it!

QUEEN CITY JAZZ. Kathleen Ann Goonan. Tor, 1994.
CRESCENT CITY RHAPSODY. Kathleen Ann Goonan. Avon Eos, 2000.
FANTASTIC VOYAGE: MICROCOSM. Kevin J. Anderson. Onyx Books, 2001.
MICROCOSMIC GOD: THE COMPLETE STORIES OF THEODORE STURGEON, Vol. 2. Theodore Sturgeon.
Edited by Paul Williams. North Atlantic Books, 1995.
BLOOD MUSIC. Greg Bear. Arbor House, 1985.
DUNE. Frank Herbert. Chilton Books, 1965.
NANOWARE TIME. Ian Watson. Tor, 1991.
/ [SLANT]. Greg Bear. Tor, 1997.
THE DIAMOND AGE. Neal Stephenson. Bantam, 1995.
QUEEN OF ANGELS. Greg Bear. Warner Books, 1990.
YEAR'S BEST SF 12. Edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. Eos, 2007.

I would specifically suggest Greg Egan's Diaspora, in which nanotechnology is the method by which the uploading of human minds into advanced computer networks is accomplished.

There's also The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata.

maybe not fiction, but I hope you cover Buckminster Fuller, responsible for much of the groundwork that lead to nanotechnology, via his work on sphere packing etc. nano today does recognize his contributions in the form of names - buckyballs and buckytubes, which he predicted but ever saw.

The second book in the Altered Carbon trilogy includes nanotech as an unpredictable, evolving military weapon that responds and adapts to its enemies. While I didn't love the book compared to the original Altered Carbon, an excerpt of that section of the book might be useful.

Vinge's Zones in "A fire upon the deep" and "A deepness in the sky" are probably my favourite use of nanotech-related ideas in fiction.

Nanotechnology was cited in the recent Knight Rider reprise (NBC) as the technology behind new KITT's ability to withstand bullets and change physical appearance. If you do a google search on "nanotechnology reconfigurable structure" you can pull up some websites on how this could work. I'm not sure how deep they'll go into it within the TV series (if they relaunch the series) but one of the characters is supposed to be a prof at Stanford. It was one of the few positive references to science I've seen in popular media. Contrast to the new Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles version where the message is pretty much "technology bad" and "scientists/technologists clueless about the impact of their work"

The works of Stephen Piziks/Harper often deal with nanotech (In the Company of the Mind comes to mind immediately, as does his one Trek novel that I'm aware of). It tends to come up to some degree or other in all of his works.

Well, I saw him mentioned up there before, but William Gibson is worth a read, especially his first novel "neuromancer." The reason why I think he'd be a good one to bring up is because Gibson was really the first person in sci-fi who used an idea like machines so small they could travel in the body and regulate your body's chemistry to a really awesome end. He imagined that eventually the nanomachines most used would be ones that connected you to a fully three dimensional, full sensory use Internet, an idea he called Virtual Reality. He gets really in-depth with the technology aspect of his stories, which is one of the reasons why he's always been one of my favorites.

The computer game "Deus Ex". Contains an obscene amount of backround information about the principles behind nanotechnology although it's still a bit off the wall sometimes.

As noted in #4, 11, 19, Greg Bear has dug deep into the implications of Nanotechnology and, more generally (the Darwin's Radio series) molecular biology.

You might notice in:

The Forge of God - Page 251
by Greg Bear, 2001, 480 pages

"He shook hands as Sand introduced Jonathan V. Post, an acquaintance of Kemp's, dark and Levantine with a gray-shot curly beard..."

I'm in there, under my own name, because Earth is destroyed in 2 ways there -- one antineutronium, one nanoassemblers. Larry Niven et al came up with 1/2 of the antineutronium trick (they had mere neutronium, I plotted the antimatter/matter and spiralling trajectory); and I suggested the nanotech to make sure the earth unzipped correctly.

Hence my wife, Dr. Christine M. Carmichael is described, under her name in the novel, too...

I was not completely happy about the "gray-shot curly beard" as mine was jet black at the time.

"Just wait," said Greg Bear, wisely.

The son, Andrew, of me and Dr. Carmichael appears appears as "Andrew Cheetah" -- who loves to count -- in the sequel. Indeed he does -- and earned his double B.S. in Math and Computer Science by the age of eighteen.

But all the works of fiction suggested are good ones.

I admired Greg Bear for his groundbreaking "Blood Music" -- arguably the first great Nanotech fiction. He admired me for being one of the grandfathers of nanotechnology, Feynman having been the undisputed great-grandfather, and K. Eric Drexler, whose career I helped jump-star and promote, is the default Father.

I do somewhere have a digital form of the paper I gave on the true history of nanotechnology at the American Society for Engineering Education annual conference, or if I can find the CD-ROM or DVD they made of the proceedings...

Good luck to your enquiring reader on an exciting and important course!

And, as a soon-to-be parent, please allow me the kvelling about my progeny.

Stay away from the Crichton; I made the mistake of reading it, and it's technically absurd (though it could probably be made into a decent suspense/horror film, which I'm sure was Crichton's goal).

An excellent book involving nanotech that no one has mentioned is _Aristoi_ by Walter Jon Williams. There are a couple of howlers in it, but overall it stays within the physically-allowed. (I think WJW is one of the more underappreciated writers working in SF, BTW -- _Metropolitan_ and _City On Fire_ are exceptional, and he's consistently very good.)

Postsingular, by Rudy Rucker, uses the idea of nanotech extensively. It's a free download, under a CC license.

Note that this is an attempt at a HHGttG-style spoof of the implausibilties of the genre. Generally lively up to the trans-dimensional cuttlefish poachers, at that point Rucker seemed to run out of ideas.

I suspect that the cuttlefish-porn bit was a shout out to You-Know-Who.

Daniel Keys Moran makes some use of nanotech in his various books, notably _The Last Dancer_ and, IIRC, _The Long Run_. If memory serves, it's not necessarily a central theme, but it is of some importance.