Bloom
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
*** A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK ***
Mycora: technogenic life. Fast-reproducing, fast-mutating, and endlessly voracious. In the year 2106, these microscopic machine/creatures have escaped their creators to populate the inner solar system with a wild, deadly ecology all their own, pushing the tattered remnants of humanity out into the cold and dark of the outer planets. Even huddled beneath the ice of Jupiter's moons, protected by a defensive system known as the Immunity, survivors face the constant risk of mycospores finding their way to the warmth and brightness inside the habitats, resulting in a calamitous "bloom."
But the human race still has a trick or two up its sleeves; in a ship specially designed to penetrate the deadly Mycosystem, seven astronauts are about to embark on mankind's boldest venture yet—the perilous journey home to infected Earth!
Yet it is in these remote conditions, against a virtually omnipotent foe, that we discover how human nature plays the greatest role in humanity's future.
REVIEWS
"Tense, dynamic, intelligent... terrifyingly vivid"
—David Brin
"An ingenious yarn with challenging ideas, well-handled technical details, and plenty of twists and turns."
—Kirkus Reviews
"BLOOM is tense, dynamic, intelligent, offering a terrifyingly vivid view of how technology can rocket out of our control"
—David Brin, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of The Uplift War
"A view of mankind's future and the universe reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke."
—The Denver Post
"In nearly every passage, we get another slice of the science of McCarthy's construction, and a deeper sense of danger and foreboding... McCarthy develops considerable tension."
—San Diego Union-Tribune
"The Mycora are an astonishingly original concept, one of the most chilling versions of nanotechnology yet envisioned. McCarthy has a real talent for hard-SF concepts and thriller plotting."
—Science Fiction Age
"Although set in the twenty-second century, this transcendent tale of close encounters with awesome life forms echoes current anxieties over the godlike manipulations of bioengineering.... A wallop of a finale."
—Publishers Weekly
"McCarthy combines straightforward SF adventure with a generous dose of speculative science in this simply told story, which pits a few courageous individuals against an unknown (though once familiar) universe."
—Library Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Engineer/Novelist/Journalist/Entrepreneur Wil McCarthy is a former contributing editor for WIRED magazine and science columnist for the SyFy channel (previously SciFi channel), where his popular "Lab Notes" column ran from 1999 through 2009. A lifetime member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, he has been nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Seiun, AnLab, Colorado Book, Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick awards, and contributed to projects that won a Webbie, an Eppie, a Game Developers' Choice Award, and a General Excellence National Magazine Award. In addition, his imaginary world of "P2", from the novel LOST IN TRANSMISSION, was rated one of the 10 best science fiction planets of all time by Discover magazine. His short fiction has graced the pages of magazines like Analog, Asimov's, WIRED, and SF Age, and his novels include the New York Times Notable BLOOM, Amazon.com "Best of Y2K" THE COLLAPSIUM (a national bestseller) and, most recently, TO CRUSH THE MOON. He has also written for TV, appeared on The History Channel and The Science Channel, and published nonfiction in half a dozen magazines, including WIRED, Discover, GQ, Popular Mechanics, IEEE Spectrum, and the Journal of Applied Polymer Science. Previously a flight controller for Lockheed Martin Space Launch Systems and later an engineering manager for Omnitech Robotics, McCarthy is now the president and Chief Technology Officer of RavenB...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although set in the 22nd century, this transcendent tale of close encounters with awesome life forms echoes current anxieties over the godlike manipulations of bioengineering. Following the total engulfment of Earth and the planets of the inner solar system by mycora, a manmade species of self-replicating fungus that has developed a ravenous appetite for inorganic matter, the remnants of the human race have fled to the moons of Jupiter. Loosely organized as the Immunity, they keep a watchful eye on the encroaching Mycosystem and stamp out the horrific "blooms" by which the technogenic spores literally eat their way into a territory. The Immunity's goal is to relocate to a cleaner planetary system, but not without first investigating transmissions that improbably suggest human life may still exist on Earth. This provokes acts of sabotage by the Temples of Transcendent Evolution, who revere the Mycosystem as "some sort of hyperintelligence, maybe a direct link to God himself," and fear that the mission's covert objective is "deicide." McCarthy (Murder in the Solid State) relates the challenging clash of technology and theory that follows through the experiences of John Strasheim, a freelance journalist onboard the Earth-bound starship Louis Pasteur. The writing is vivid--particularly in sequences that describe the chaos of bloom alerts--but it's also challenging: technojargon casually spoken by the Pasteur-nauts can be so stultifying that it gives the events and people described the dispassionate feel of a virtual reality simulation. Readers who can plug into the prose and navigate its dense circuity, however, will find themselves rewarded with a wallop of a finale that satisfies high expectations for high-concept SF.
