Wil McCarthy has written some interesting, well-informed speculations of a future that may yet come to pass where the tiny little machines of nanotechnology essentially remove the material limits of our current existence. The future described in Bloom, though, is one for which I cannot imagine any sane being wishing. Calling it “a novel of terror” is an understatement: in the opening pages we’re told that 99.9+% of humankind perished in a kind of grey goo industrial accident twenty years before.
Two groups of survivors now live on outposts in the asteroid belt (the Gladholds) and the Jovian moons (the Immunity). Among the latter, life is six days of overtime a week with no vacation or sick days and a population dribbling away as fewer and fewer children are born each year; space closer to the Sun is dominated by the so-called Mycosystem and the Immunity focuses much effort on preventing enchroachment into its cavernous cities. The leadership decides to send an expedition tasked with dropping detectors at the polar caps of Mars, the Moon and Earth–since cold is one of the few defenses left against it, any movement into these frozen zones by the technogenic life would signal imminent danger.
Of course no mission of this stripe is so straightforward nor easily accomplished. Even among the humorless Immunity some believe the Mycosystem must have evolved at a pace that in twenty years will have brought them nearly to the level of a god and so the mission of the Louis Pasteur is blasphemy. The crew, days away from readiness, is forced to make an emergency departure when several believers make an attack that kills one member.
McCarthy has a deft hand. All the while taunting his readers with the horror of being incorporated, an atom at a time, into this all too plausible nanolife, he offers a mental sanctuary by telling the tale in the form of a crewman’s memoirs and opening most chapters with quotes from books written by him in the story’s future. Very well done and despite the foreknowledge of survival, the ending is not as simple or pleasant as expected. Reading the climactic chapters last night I waited in vain for the scene where the story turns happy like a Hollywood movie surely would.
Other bits are done well too. The Immunity polity is drawn as a place of grim survival with little room for even virtual escape in off hours and so the discovery by our narrator that one of the other crew has a young son takes him by surprise. The technology, from the Mycosystem to fusion powerplants to the interplanetary spaceships to the VR-like zee-specs, are reasonable extrapolations from today with little extra necessary for dramatic effect (cf. Mundane SF).
Overall the only complaints I have are a tourist excursion sidebar visit to the Gladholds and a somewhat deus ex machina confrontation with the Mycosystem that furnishes the climax. Neither reach a meaningful level of real discomfort for me, I came away happy to have read Bloom.
recommended
BillSaysThis 