The little things

Shortly after we first published an article on nanotechnology and the "gray goo problem" at FEED, I started to think that there was an interesting Armageddon/Deep Impact-style Hollywood script in the idea: instead of a giant meteor from outer space destroying the planet, you have the planet threatened by tiny machines the size of molecules. I'm sure many people had the same idea, particularly after Bill Joy wrote about "gray goo" in his widely-circulated Wired essay. For the past few years, I've toyed with the idea of how a script like that would work, and what's always interested me was the problem of trying to build an exciting cinematic experience when the villain was thousands of times smaller than a dust particle. It's like trying to film Jaws with a shark the size of a sea monkey.

So I was intrigued when I first heard that Michael Crichton's new book, Prey, revolved around runaway self-reproducing nanomachines. It occurred to me if anyone besides Richard Preston can turn an invisible (and somewhat esoteric) menace into something truly terrifying, it's Crichton. So I picked up a copy at the airport on the way down here (I've been in Florida for the past week with family) and tore through it in about 48 hours. A few observations follow, but no real spoilers...

The fascinating thing about Crichton's approach to the problem is that Prey turns out to be half a book about nanotechnology and half a book about emergence; the plot is filled with references to ant colonies and bottom-up organization, flocking and swarm behavior, genetic algorithms, etc. This was a striking thing to encounter, because I'd written an entire book about these things. (In fact, Prey contains about five or six factual anecdotes that I included in Emergence as well, like the story about Danny Hillis evolving a number-sorting application, or ant-mimicking software being used to organize phone networks.) I mention this not to imply at all that Crichton's stealing my material -- in fact, a number of the anecdotes were ones that I first encountered in other books, like Hillis' Pattern In The Stone, and Steven Levy's wonderful Artificial Life. I bring it up because here I'd spent the last three years or so thinking casually about how you'd build a nanotech plot, during which time I was also writing a book about emergent behavior, and it never really occurred to me that the two ideas could be productively combined. I guess that's why Michael Crichton's getting multi-million dollar advances, and I'm not.

That said, I found myself a little disappointed by the way Crichton dealt with the scale problems. The first two-thirds of the book does a nice job of making the nanotech a plausible villain (partially thanks to swarm behavior.) But in the last third, it's almost like he had a crisis of nerve, and felt the need to embody the threat, personify it. The result is a story about a killer swarm of atomic particles that suddenly shifts gears in the third-act and becomes a pretty sketchy vampire narrative. (The science really falls apart in this section as well.) I'd love to see a narrative where there are no human-sized villains -- just nano ones. It'd be hard to pull off, of course, but it would be much more true the material: a battle not between two different people or groups, but two different scales. Kind of like a summer blockbuster version of Powers of Ten.

Comments

[Scott Rosenberg]

I always thought Kurt Vonnegut wrote this story a long time ago. Isn't "Cat's Cradle's" ice-nine pretty much the prototype for Joy's "gray goo" and all other itty-bitty, unstoppable, planet-destroying gunk? OK, it's not nano-anything, it's a crystal. Still, close enough.

[Steven Johnson]

Interesting thought, Scott. I haven't read Cat's Cradle in almost twenty years, and pretty much have zero recollection of it, save the "see the cat? see the cradle?" line. Is it worth reading again?

[Ned Holbrook]

Another work involving nanotechnology is Greg Bear's "Blood Music," mentioned in the New Yorker review of "Prey." I haven't actually read it myself, but it sounds interesting.

[Matt]

Didn't Greg Bear use nano, or more specifically planet-devouring 'Von Neumann machines' in a previous novel to Blood Music...?

I think it was "Forge of God", which coincidentally has just got optioned by Warner Bros...
http://www.gregbear.com/A55885/Bear.nsf/Pages/300071

/matt

[Shawn]

I'm nearing the end of Prey; expect to finish it this evening. In my reading experience, this is a very admirable effort and the best I've experienced at tackling serious science in a way approachable to anyone willing to read and think hard about the subject matter.

My only real qualm with Prey is the character Jack. in contrast to his take-charge approach to the problem of the swarm, I found his dealing with his wife, Julia, in early chapters to be infuriatingly inconsistent with his profile.

But all-in-all, I enjoyed the book.

[Dixon]

Star Trek TNG also had a show on 'Nanites' - self-replicating nano-tech robots. The episode was called Evolution.

or Google it

Good old Data learned to communicate with them to keep them from eating the Enterprise's computer, as I recall.

[rik abel]

not that it is necessarily nano-tech per se, but Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, written in 1927-ish, features martians which are basically clouds of self-organising particles, so he was ahead of the curve.

There is also a short story by the excellent Greg Egan which features a 'gray goo' which devours all, but then cleverly mimics whatever it has devoured. I forget what it is called, but I think it is in the "Axiomatic' collection. Or maybe "Luminous" Anyway, they are both worth reading.

[Nicholas]

"Trillions" by Nicholas Fisk (1971) is a fantastic kids sci fi book about interlocking crystals that self-organize to build all kinds of structures...a kid tames them in the end.

[Eric]

Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" deals extensively with nano-trash (as well as many other eco-techno issues, urban wall technologies among them!)

[Scott Rosenberg]

I think I read "Cat's Cradle" back when you did, Steven, and remember not too much of it myself. But I do remember that Ice 9 was this sort of ultra-potent crystalline formation that, once let loose in the wild, essentially propagated itself through all existing H20 on the planet, solidifying it and destroying life. Or something like that. But wait -- why am I blathering here when Google no doubt has a more authoritative answer? (I think I'm roughly accurate anyway.)

[Paul Watson]

I can just imagine how Hollywood would realise a nano tech menace; A huge, sinuous, steely creature which is made up of billions of nano-machines all moving and undulating in sync. It would swell up from the ground like the Terminator robot from the mercury pools.

IOT they would ruin the whole idea of nano because punters would need to be pleased with something they could see.

Reading Emergence btw and it is fascinating stuff, keep it up! :)

[greg dot org]

On the other hand, it could also be quite compelling to show the *effects* of nano, which could be quite creepy/gruesome/chilling, depending on what they're affecting.

It could range from unexplained malfunction to accreting alteration/decay to an ebola-like crash, who knows (although that Dustin Hoffman ebola monkey movie DID suck...)

At some point in the Star Trek technoverse, the Borg got an explicit nano element, too.

And there are those cheesy 70's movies like The Swarm or that one with killer ants (where they watch through the window as a kid flails around by the dumpster)...

If you can successfully draw out the nano universe, its morals, threats, implications, and how/why people feel/care, it could work.

From the previous posts, it sounds like some other Gregs have been making some progress on this, too.
(I see why I'm having such a hard time pushing past them in the one-name Google search.)

[wick]

Nano-sized, but organic villans, great story, and cool science.

"Dust" by Charles Pellegrino

[kenny]

"assemblers of infinity" :D one of the first nanotech thrillers!

[greg.org]

Sure, it's full of spoilers, but it's a fun, quick read. Crichton's Prey is this week's Digested Read at The Guardian.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/digestedread/story/0,6550,858915,00.html