Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter, ColinMilburn, Duke U. Press, 2015. $28.95 paper (424 pp.). ISBN 978-0-8223-5743-8 Buy at Amazon

The term “nanotechnology” elicits differing responses. Novelists warn it may destroy us; moviemakers invoke it to explain the incredible wonders on-screen; and politicians and other scientific laity ascribe to it a litany of coming miracles, from robotic soldiers to self-healing steel.

Nanotechnology’s current reality, while impressive, is less sensational. Many trades meet the late Richard Smalley’s definition of nanotechnology as “the art and science of making stuff on the nanometer scale.” Brewers and bakers adding yeast to carbohydrates, or cheesemakers mixing milk with cow-gut enzymes, have long functioned as nanotechnological empiricists, taking for granted the unseen molecules that underpin their work. Increasingly, however, instruments such as scanning tunneling microscopes and high-resolution scanning electron microscopes are imaging and manipulating the constituent atoms of metallurgy, chemistry, and even life. Physicists and engineers have synthesized simple machines, as well as immensely strong carbon allotropes such as nanotubes and buckyballs, on the nanoscale.

Building on that incremental progress, Colin Milburn, in Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter, discusses nanotechnology both before and beyond its current state. He looks to the past to summarize the initial speculations that sparked the nanorevolution, and he looks to the future to sketch new realities that today’s conjectures may yet catalyze. Based at the University of California, Davis, Milburn is the very model of a modern interdisciplinary scholar; he is a professor not only of English but also of cinematographic technology and science and technology studies (STS). In addition, he is a talented author who usefully reminds us that academic writing need not be dull.

Milburn examines nanotechnology through various conceptual filters, such as history, military technology (both offensive weaponry and defensive armor), speculative fiction, and play. His main theme, however, is the close and productive association that has arisen between nanotechnology and video games. Games, he argues, let us explore nanotechnology through the relaxed, loosely structured, intensive creativity we call fun.

Throughout his book, Milburn emphasizes the role of games, especially massive, multiplayer, online role- playing games, to forecast the likely development of nanotechnology over the next few decades. By using interactive multimedia to manifest the wildest imaginaries of nanotechnology, experts and nonexperts alike can rub shoulders to explore the possibilities of new ideas such as combat exoskeletons and artery-cruising nanotherapeutics. Milburn offers concrete examples based on games such as Crysis and Second Life, in which his avatar Colin Dayafter appears as a winged adventurer. Gamers and politicians (in particular, the prophetic ones introduced up front) may have more in common than either group believes.

Readers with scientific training should note that Milburn’s scholarly methods are not precisely those of the natural sciences. The discipline of STS examines how scientific knowledge is imagined and created and how scientists use that knowledge to achieve consensus and to communicate their findings to the world; it is not used to evaluate data or hypotheses per se but to investigate their contexts. For example, an STS conference I attended this past April featured a paper on late 19th-century ectoplasmic photography. The presenter’s point was to discuss not the likelihood of fairies at the bottom of the garden—the pre-Photoshop evidence is ludicrously faked—but rather the influence of a literal belief in the supernatural on mainstream science a century ago.

Thus when Milburn discusses such early godfathers of nanotechnology as K. Eric Drexler, he ignores Drexler’s naive treatment of the nanoworld as nothing but the macroworld with shrunken dimensions. In the Drexlerian view, nanoscale machinery such as cranes and conveyor belts can be cobbled up with little regard for the nanoscale’s vastly different context, where water is more viscous than toothpaste and Brownian motion makes the average environment as chaotic as a storm-wracked sea. Nor does Milburn ridicule Drexler for touting nanotechnology as a road to physical immortality—a near-religious zealotry that has today convinced mainstream nanoscience to banish Drexler to its margins.

Milburn’s profession isn’t about judging the truth of nanotechnological hypotheses; it is about teasing out their technoscientific origins and effects. And Drexler, like Richard Feynman a generation before him, was undeniably instrumental in sparking a rigorous scientific scrutiny of the nanocosm. Readers bearing that in mind will find Mondo Nano a thoroughly researched, thought-provoking read that offers many points to ponder as well as a few observations that might make some professional scientists grind their teeth.

William Atkinson is a science writer, a professor of English writing at Seneca College in Toronto, and a PhD candidate in science and technology studies at York University in Toronto. His book Nanocosm: Nanotechnology and the Big Changes from the Inconceivably Small (Amacon, 2003) was reviewed in Physics Today (January 2005, page 54).