Bloom (edition 1999)

Sometime in the mid-twenty-first century, a nanotechnology accident of unknown origin devours Earth and then the moon. The end result, the Mycosystem, is a growing rot feeding on any organic and inorganic material it encounters. Like its fungal namesake, it spreads by spores.

Riding on the solar wind, these spores cause "blooms" when they enter the human habitats inside Ganymede, Callisto and assorted asteroids. For twenty years, man has survived by developing elaborate "immune systems" to fight the blooms. However, recent blooms show an alarming sophistication and ability to skirt these countermeasures. Armored against "technogenic life", the spaceship Louis Pasteur departs for the depths of the Mycosystem, Earth and Mars. Its mission is to determine whether the Mycosystem has developed the ability to inhabit new niches in the Solar System.

Documenting the mission is John Strasheim, a former cobbler given the chance to practice his talents as an amateur journalist. But, shortly after the mission is underway, evidence comes forth that humans still exist in the Mycosystem -- and that someone wants the mission to fail.

This book has a lot to like. McCarthy tells a taut, hard science story. His nanotechnology is not magic. Indeed, he shows various ways -- ph balances, chemicals, too much and too little energy -- the "gray goo" type of nanotechnology accident could be contained. He also delves into ideas of complex systems, their emergent properties, and the implications of using evolutionary design to combat the Mycosystem and understand it.

McCarthy also does a very good job with the characterization of narrator Strasheim as he learns new truths about the Mycosystem and confronts the possibility of a violent death. The captain of the Louis Pasteur is also a memorable character, a man so lacking in a sense of humor that he literally has one surgically implanted. My only complaint with the novel is that McCarthy doesn't bring to life the other crew members of the Pasteur except for Renata Baucum, a Mycosystem specialist antagonistic to Strasheim.

McCarthy keeps his scientific and political mystery brief and fast moving. While the revelations of the Mycosystem's nature are not totally unexpected, McCarthy brings in enough interesting detail and ambiguity to make it interesting ( )

1998

(Alistair) Now this is fun and reasonably hard SF.

It is the sometime in the mid-21st century, and escaped nanotechnology has essentially devoured the Earth and the rest of the inner solar system, turning it into a seething mass of "technogenic life", known as the Mycosystem. The humans, and their descendants, who managed to get off Earth in time are now dwelling in the outer solar system (the Immunity) and the asteroid belt (the Gladholders), living in an essentially constant state of alert because of the Mycosystem's spores, which are borne outwards by the solar wind and cause the eponymous "blooms" of technogenic life when they land somewhere warmer than the generally cold outer system - meaning, principally, in human settlements.

The book itself centers around a mission launched by the Immunity to probe the Inner System, in a ship with a specially designed hull that should - hopefully - hold off mycoric infections, told from the point of view of a journalist/commentator/historian asked to go along on the mission. Sent on their way early by sabotage, they need to make an unscheduled stop in the Gladholds for resupply - who have a very different culture and approach to nanotech immune systems - discover the possibility of humans surviving in the depths of the inner system, and are caught up even more in the clash between the standard Immunity view of the Mycosystem and that of the Temples of Transcendent Evolution, a religion focused on the Mycosystem as a spiritual entity, and a conscious, intelligent being rather than a mere froth of nanites - before finally making contact with the Mycosystem itself...

...which, alas, was something of an anticlimax. Not to say that it didn't fit nicely - almost too closely - with where we'd been led up to, but I'll confess that I did find the actual denouement rather unsatisfying when viewed in the context of the preceding chapters. Which is not to say that it wasn't a good book, which it was, but it needed more at the end to be really satisfying.
( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/cerebrate/2008/02/bloom-wil-mccarthy.html )

(Amy) And now, a ten-year-old book about nanotech.

I am often fairly enh about nanotech books - not because I have any objection to the concept; quite the contrary, I find it an entirely satisfactory technological concept and, frankly, I'm ready for it to be invented. The medical applications alone would be revolutionary. No, I often dislike nanobooks because a substantial subset of them are pure, unadulterated scaremongery. Bah. And had my husband not recommended it, I would probably never have read this one, either, because as its setting is the outer solar system some years after humanity fled the inner solar system even as it was being eaten by runaway "mycora", I was fairly sure it, too, was one such cautionary tale.

Not . . . quite, as it happens. Full discussion of this would be spoileriffic in the extreme, which even for oldish books I should prefer to avoid, but the protagonist's worldview expands quite a bit through the course of the book, and he begins to question his assumptions about the very nature of the Mycosystem.

I enjoyed this book far more than I expected to, and in fact regard it as an interesting exploration of the social implications of a nano-spread of this magnitude. Not a cautionary tale at all, but rather a snapshot of the adaptability of the human race, on at least two successive levels. Very well done.
( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/zenos-library/2008/05/bloom-wil-mccarthy.html ) ( )

http://bactra.org/reviews/bloom/ ( )