Works of Fiction
- In The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson diamond can be constructed by simply building it out of carbon atoms. Also all sorts of devices from dust size detection devices to giant diamond zeppelins are constructed atom by atom using only carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and chlorine atoms.
- In the novel Tomorrow by Andrew Saltzman (ISBN 1-4243-1027-X), a scientist uses nanorobotics to create a liquid that when inserted into the bloodstream, renders one nearly invincible given that the microscopic machines repair tissue almost instantaneously after it is damaged.
- In the manga series Battle Angel Alita the scientist Desty Nova has specialized in molecular nanotechnology.
- In the roleplaying game Splicers by Palladium Books, humanity has succumbed to a "nanobot plague" that causes any object made of a non-precious metal to twist and change shape (sometimes into a type of robot) moments after being touched by a human. The object will then proceed to attack the human. This has forced humanity to develop "biotechnological" devices to replace those previously made of metal.
- On the television show Mystery Science Theater 3000, the Nanites (voiced variously by Kevin Murphy, Paul Chaplin, Mary Jo Pehl, and Bridget Jones) - are self-replicating, bio-engineered organisms that work on the ship, they are microscopic creatures that reside in the Satellite of Love's computer systems. (They are similar to the creatures in Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Evolution", which featured "nanites" taking over the Enterprise.) The Nanites made their first appearance in season 8. Based on the concept of nanotechnology, their comical deus ex machina activities included such diverse tasks as instant repair and construction, hairstyling, performing a Nanite variation of a flea circus, conducting a microscopic war, and even destroying the Observers' planet after a dangerously vague request from Mike to "take care of little problem". They also ran a microbrewery.
Read more about this topic: Molecular Nanotechnology
Famous quotes containing the words works of, works and/or fiction:
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
—Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)
“They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)