Wil McCarthy's Quantum Dot books

Posted by MacDood
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I've just finished reading two excellent books by Wil McCarthy, a geek science-fiction writer and journo. The first is called Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages, and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms. It's an exploration of a technology called Quantum Wells (and secondarily of other quantum technologies), which are tiny cages in which subatomic particles are arranged in quantities and geometries that mimic both natural and artifical atoms. In this way, you can create "programmable matter," which can be reconfigured to take on the properties of (nearly) any material, going from rigid to limp, relflective to dark, opaque to transparent, magnetic to inert, all at the flip of a nanoscale switch.

McCarthy invokes Clarke's Law (sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic) in respect of these Quantum Dots (regarding which he holds a patent that is itself a fascinating appendix to the book), and as he lays out the science and the possibilities of dots (in language eminently accessible to the laiety), there's a sense that he's onto something really important -- the kind of thing that scientists and science fiction writers will be exploring for decades to come. At the same time, there's a sense of restraint, even as he spins out wild scenaria for superconducting houses that spill heat into the Earth's crust and for computers that measure their power in ME's -- Millennial Equivalences, or "all the computing power on Earth circa 2001." He's a science fiction writer, but he's trying to be sober-sided here, trying to convey that the possibilities are real and even probable.

Which brings me to book number two, The Wellstone, a science fiction novel set in a world dressed in "Wellstone," a programmable matter built out of Quantum Wells. If Hacking Matter is restrained, The Wellstone is almost out of control. It's a boy's-own-adventure story in the tradition the juveniles Heinlein wrote for Scouting mags in the fifties, but gender-balanced, and full of utterly gonzoid, Rucker-grade speculation about a universe dominated by programmable matter and practical immortality, teleportation, and other post-classical physics technology. The novel's a gripper, fast-paced and funny and quite touching at the close. It's the perfect companion to Hacking Matter -- in fact, I think I wish I'd read it first.

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