A reader writes in with a literary query:<\/p>\n
\nI was asked to teach a 400-level course on Nanotechnology at my U. In addition to the usual technical content, I would like to include a critical view of how nanotechnology is portrayed in popular culture. So I am looking for suitable works that can be examined. Naturally, Stephenson’s Diamond Age and Crichton’s Prey come to mind. You know of other examples that would make for meaty discussion by a bunch of engineers? […] I want to stress that most of the course will focus on technical content, so whatever work we pick has to have *some* basis in existing science.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I haven’t read the Crichton (I’m not a big fan of his brand of Luddite fiction), but The Diamond Age<\/cite> is the first thing that came to mind for me, too. Sadly, it’s also just about the only thing– I can think of a bunch of recent SF books that use the idea of nanotechnology, but it’s usually as a way to shoehorn magic into an SF setting. They just say “nano” a lot, and suspend the usual laws of physics as a result. Stephenson does a bit of that, but he does at least make a few nods in the direction of treating things seriously.<\/p>\n
I’m not as widely read as I could be, though, so I’ll throw this out to the broader audience: Do you know of any good portrayals of nanotechnology in fiction?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A reader writes in with a literary query: I was asked to teach a 400-level course on Nanotechnology at my U. In addition to the usual technical content, I would like to include a critical view of how nanotechnology is portrayed in popular culture. So I am looking for suitable works that can be examined.… Continue reading Literary Poll: Nanotechnology in Fiction?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,35,7,37,11,29,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-movies","category-physics","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-sf","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}