Bloom by Wil McCarthy

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
An absolutely incredible book. I finished it in one night. The author was able to create a gripping page-turner while keeping his science believable, and not falling back on cheap SF cliches. This book is what more SF should aspire to be like.
—Leonard Benefico This book was terrific. If I could hand books like this to customers, my SF sales would go way up. Why? Because it's readable, enjoyable and most important, relevant to present day. When it shows up, I will put it on the staff rec.
—John Zemler What else is there to say other than this is one of the better SF thrillers I've read in a long time. Very suspenseful. I'm glad I'm not around in the time ofthe Mycora.
—Christopher Olson

From the Publisher

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.


From the Paperback edition.

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. Agent, Shawna McCarthy. (Sept.)

VOYA

In the late twenty-first century, humans fled Earth to escape the mutating mycora-microscopic self-replicating organisms-that took over Earth and the Moon. The Immunity, who are mostly from Northern Europe, settled in the moons of Jupiter, their existence enlivened only by their zee-specs that allow a virtual plug-in to the 'net. Now, just one generation since settlement, the mycora threatens the Immunity defenses. A hastily mounted research expedition using an experimental mycora-proof ship, the Louis Pasteur, faces sabotage even before takeoff. And, as told by Strasheim, a part-time 'net reporter recruited to chronicle the expedition's progress, the mission-to send investigative probes into mycora-infested Earth-may not be as claimed. Settlers in Gladhold, the asteroid belt human stronghold, say they have seen humans amid the mycora on Earth. Then one of the crew suicidally attempts sabotage, claiming the probes are really bombs that will kill an intelligent entity-the mycora. The crew discovers pursuing ships and frantically tries to complete the mission, only to discover that the probes are weapons and the mycora is intelligent. They stop, use their last energy resources to send a message back home, and then the mycora establishes contact with them. McCarthy creates a detailed world and lets it unfold in a nicely Heinleinesque manner, but his plot alternately zooms and plods. Readers never learn whether humans are still on Earth, the climax smacks too much of a deus ex machina, and the ending just fizzles. Bloom is a disappointing effort that will leave most teens scratching their heads, saying "huh?". VOYA Codes: 2Q 1P S A/YA (Better editing or work by the author might have warranted a 3Q, No YA will read unless forced to for assignments, Senior High-defined as grades 10 to 12 and adults).

Library Journal

After an infestation of bioengineered "mycospores" overwhelms the solar system's inner planets, the surviving humans eke out a precarious existence within the asteroid belt beyond Jupiter, where they hope to build a space vehicle to carry them to the stars and--presumably--safety. When a group of researchers sends a manned probe toward the sun on a voyage of reconnaissance and exploration, however, their discoveries lead to a shocking and world-altering transformation. McCarthy (The Fall of Sirius, LJ 8/96) 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. A good choice for most libraries.

Jonas

The book's message is similar to that of The Children Star: In a universe stranger than we know, ignorance may be inevitable but it is definitely not bliss. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

By the early 22nd century, artificially created life-forms 'mycora' that can dissolve stone, metal, flesh, anything, with terrifying speed, have taken over the Earth, the Moon, and Venus; the only human survivors cower behind biological barriers far away in the asteroids (the Gladholders) or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn (the Immunity). The dissenting Temples of Transcendent Evolution, however, admire the Mycosystem and are seeking ways to study it, perhaps even cooperate with it, an idea rejected as impossible by the Immunity's chief scientist, Vaclav Lottick. Instead, Lottick prepares a spaceship with novel defenses to probe the Mycosystem and set detectors down on Mars and Earth's polar regions, where, for some reason, the mycora can't flourish. But the Gladholders report humans living, apparently normally, on both Venus and Earth, so maybe the Temples are correct. Eventually the ship, captained by Darren Wallich and with journalist and narrator John Strasheim aboard, gets under way, but not before it's been attacked by spore-bearing Temple fanatics. And soon Strasheim discovers an eavesdropping device aboard, but who's listening? One of the crew turns out to be a Temple agent, but the others bundle her out of the airlock just before the spores she carries internally can explode into a deadly bloom. Pursued by a fleet of Temple ships, Wallich heads for Earth, only to discover that the detectors he's supposed to plant are actually bombs. Finally, the Mycosystem attacks the ship, or is it some weird attempt to communicate?

Despite some conceptual problems, an ingenious yarn with challenging ideas, well-handled technical details and plenty of twists and turns: a whoppingimprovement on Murder in the Solid State (1996), though the sophomoric narrative voice is dismayingly similar.

What People Are Saying

Walter Jon Williams
Wil McCarthy makes ideas jump. Bloom grabs you from the very first scene and doesn't let go till the last page. It's irresistible.

James Gleick
What clever and compelling science fiction! The Bloom future is all too believable.

David Brin
Bloom is tense, dynamic, intelligent, offering a terifying vivid view of how technology can rocket out of control.

Product Details

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Chapter One

ZERO: Sometimes They Get In

This much we know: that the Innensburg bloom began with a single spore; that Immune response was sluggish and ineffective; that the first witness on the scene, one Holger Sanchez Mach, broke the nearest emergency glass, dropped two magnums and a witch's tit, and died. Did he suffer? Did it hurt? Conversion must have taken at least four seconds, and we can probably assume it started with the feet. These things usually do.

By the time the Response teams began arriving, the bloom was some ten meters across, and two meters high at the center--a fractal-jagged bubble of rainbow fog, class two threaded structure almost certainly visible to those unfortunate enough to be standing within fecund radius when the fruiting bodies swelled and popped. Twenty deaths followed almost immediately, and another hundred in the minutes that followed.

There were cameras and instruments on the scene by this time, windows on what can only seem to be separate events, each holograph showing a different fleeing mob or collapsing building, each soundtrack recording a different cacophony of whimpers and death screams and jarringly irrelevant conversation. I personally have collaged these scenes a dozen times or more, arranging the panic this way and that way, over and over again in the hope that some sense will emerge. But there is no sense in those first few minutes, just the pettiness and blind, stamping fear of the human animal stripped bare. And the heroism, yes; for me the central image is that of Enrico Giselle, Tech Two, pushing his smudged helmet and visor back on his forehead and shouting into a voice phone while the walls behind him froth and shimmer and disintegrate.

"Class five! Class five! Drop two hundred and flush on my command!" At this point, finally, the city began to awaken. The Immunity isolated samples of the invading mycorum, sequenced them, added them to the catalog of known pathogens. Better late than never, one supposes, but by this time the bloom outmassed the city's Immune system by a factor of several million, and though submicroscopic phages gathered at its sizzling interface, now ropy with tendrils that sputtered outward in Escheresque whorls, the growth was not visibly affected.

Fortunately, like all living things, technogenic organisms require energy to survive, and where the witch's tits had fallen or been hurled, pools of bitter cold had arrested the replication process. Not unusual, as any Response officer will tell you. And like organic lebenforms, mycora are also vulnerable to excess energy. Backpack UV lasers were proving effective weapons against the bloom, and soon the streets clanged with discarded chem spritzers and paraphage guns as bloomfighters concentrated on the things that worked.

High above the city, the cavern roof came alive with UV turrets of its own. Machine-guided and wary of the soft humans below, the beams swept back and forth, charring trenches through the rainbow mist, the living dust, the bloom of submicroscopic mycora still eating everything in their reach and converting it to more of themselves. And to other things, as well, a trillion microscopic construction projects all running in parallel, following whatever meaningless program the mycogene codes called out. By now the fecund zone was half a kilometer across, riddled with gaps and voids in the outer regions but much denser at its core, a thickening haze that already blocked the view from one side to the other. Up to four stories tall in places, higher than most of the surrounding buildings, and it had begun to take on structure as well--picks and urchins, mostly, standing out visibly in the haze, their prismatic spines lengthening more than fast enough for the human eye to see.

Some mycora eat lightly, sucking up building blocks like carbon and hydrogen while leaving the heavier elements alone, but this one was pulling the gold right off the streets, the steel right off the shingled walls, the zirconium right out of the windowpanes. You've seen the pictures: a giant bite out of Innensburg's south side, gingerbread houses dissolving like a dream.

The UV lasers, while no doubt satisfying for those employing them, were if anything adding to the problem by throwing waste heat into the bloom, giving it that much more energy to work with, to feed on.

Finally, Innensburg's central processor sought permission from the mayor and city council to move to Final Alert. Permission was granted, the overhead lights and household power grid were shut off, the ladderdown reactors stopped, and the air system reconfigured to pipe through cooling radiators closer to the surface. The cold, the dark. How we humans hate these things, and how very much we need them!

Like all Jupiter's moons, like all the moons of the outer system, Ganymede's surface is cold enough to liquefy both oxygen and nitrogen, and while the spore-fouled air was not cooled quite that far, Innensburg's ground temperature quickly dropped below the freezing point of water, and then below that of carbon dioxide. A seconds-brief rain fell and froze. Mycoric replication slowed to a crawl. A sigh of mingled fear and relief went up all over the city, visible as columns of white steam in the flashlight beams of the Response. The emergency far from over, but now survivable, now something that could be dealt with in a reasoned, methodical manner.

Some thirty-one deaths were later attributed to the cold, to the darkness, to the lack of domestic power and computing, and while some of the families did attempt to bring suit against the authorities responsible, public and judicial outrage squashed the move before it had gotten very far. One hundred and eighty-seven deaths preceded the chilldown, after all, and most of Innensburg's fifty thousand residents came out of it with only minor injuries.

Throughout the Immunity, our problems are the same: so far from the places of our birth, so far from the sun's warm rays, so far from the lives we once expected to lead. Eaten by the Mycosystem, those lives, and billions of others as well. And yet out here in the cold and dark we hang on, even thrive, because we're brave enough to believe we can. If the space around us is lousy with mycoric spores blown upward by solar wind, well, at least we can do what's necessary to keep them outside.

I think the Honorable Klaus Pensbruck, in closing the book on Glazer v. Cholm, speaks for us all with his immortal words, "Shut up, lady. We don't want to end up like the Earth."

  --from Innensburg and the Fear of Failure, copyright 2101 by John Strasheim

ONE

Destination Where?

That my first meeting with Vaclav Lottick went poorly goes without saying. The most powerful man in the solar system, yes, you can believe he had better things to do than exchange small talk with me. And yet, certain business can be conducted in no other way.

He looked up and smiled when his secretary, a quiet, efficient man, ushered me inside the office. Everything beige and cream and shiny, not quite sterile in appearance but compact, and clean. Very clean. The windows' light was from behind Lottick, highlighting every stray hair, and the desk lamp seemed designed to show off the lines in his face. A pale man, nearly bald, his rumpled smock no longer white. Even his zee-spec was an older model, blocky, folding his ears back, weighing on the bridge of his nose, leaving his features to sag that much more.

"John Strasheim, hi," he said, rising from his chair and extending a hand. "Thanks for coming on such short notice."

Shaking his hand, I shrugged. "Happy to help, I guess. What can I--"

"Take a seat, then. Set to receive a flash?"

"Sure."

His thick fingers danced in the space between us. My receiving light went on, and the air before me came alive with information, image windows and text windows and schematic windows rastering in and then shrinking to icons as my spec compressed them in working memory. It was too quick to see much in the way of detail. Pictures of blooms, I thought. Pictures of mycora. Well, what else would one expect from the Immunity's head of research?

I sat.

"I've seen your work," he said to me, his voice vaguely approving. "And read it. Funny, how nobody seems to be doing that sort of thing anymore."

"You're talking about Innensburg?"

He nodded. Behind the zee-spec, his eyes were bright green. "Yes, Innensburg. I survey your net channels from time to time, but it was that piece that really caught my eye. About as close as we have to a regional history, and plaintext was a...curiously appropriate choice of medium. Very astute. I stayed up all night reading it."

"Thank you," I said, nodding once to accept the compliment. Then I smiled politely, waiting. Whatever he'd invited me here to discuss, this wasn't it.

He studied me for a moment, then relaxed, turning off the charm like a lamp he no longer needed. "All right, then."

His fingers stroked the air, manipulating symbols and menus I couldn't see. One of my image icons began to flicker. I touched and expanded it, moved the resulting window to the lower right corner of my vision. It was a video loop, false-color, depicting a complex mycorum which replicated itself in slow motion, over and over again. Not quite crablike, not quite urchinlike, not quite organic in appearance. A tiny machine, like a digger/constructor but smaller than the smallest bacterium, putting copies of itself together with cool precision, building them up out of nothing, out of pieces too small for the micrograph to capture. In short, a pretty typical piece of technogenic life. At the bottom of the window scrolled a horizontal code ribbon showing, in a series of brightly colored blocks, what was presumably the data gene sequence which dictated both the mycorum's structure and behavior.

"This," Lottick said, "is Io Sengen 3a, a sulphurated mycorum with unknown environmental tolerance. Gave us a scare a while back when we thought it could replicate in the volcanic flows on Io, but that turned out to be a false alarm. Now we're concerned again, for different reasons."

"Okay." I nodded, waiting for more, not yet sure why he was telling me this.

"You know that mycora mutate quickly, right? Everyone knows that. A key strength, a key factor. The whole Mycosystem probably depends on this, or it would have died out long ago."

"So I've heard."

"Yes, well, what you probably haven't heard is that they're stealing data gene sequences from our own phages. Nothing major, nothing all that important, but the mechanism and its potential limitations are not known at this time."

"Stealing gene sequences?" I repeated stupidly. My skin had gone cold and crawly. Mycora were not intelligent, not even alive, really. How could they steal?

"It's probably nothing," Lottick said. "Statistically, the chance that they'll steal something important and actually be able to use it to their advantage is...well, it's zero, basically. But we don't understand the mechanism, and that has a lot of people upset. Including me. What if the Mycosystem gets hold of some of our environmental adaptations? What happens if they stumble on nuclear fission, or cascade fusion, or, God help us all, they manage to copy some of our ladderdown designs?"

"I don't know," I said, still cold. "What?"

He shrugged. "They eat the solar system, I guess. They eat the universe. It's not going to happen, Strasheim, but that's the worst-case scenario we've got to work to. Hence the mission."

"The starship?" I asked, puzzled but optimistic. Whatever the problem was, these people seemed to be on top of it. Sort of.

"The starship, yeah, right." He chuckled, sounding tired. "We get it built, we fuel it up, we go on our merry way, every single person who wants to. That's not going to happen either. I know it's the party line, and maybe that's best for the time being, but the real goal of the program is to get our spores out to the neighboring stars before the Mycosystem beats us to it. Immune system fully established, deny the mycora a toehold even in the warm, bright spaces. But we've probably got a thousand years to worry about it, and a lot to keep us busy until then."

"So what are we talking about?"

"The Louis Pasteur," he said. "You may have heard about it here and there; the program is being accelerated in a big way. Ship is designed for inner-system operation--high-temperature, high-radiation, also the t-balance hull--theoretically bloom-proof. But of course, ha ha, we're not going to test that here on Ganymede. The only way to test it is to fly it down there, into the Mycosystem, and see if anything eats it. We hope to do that soon, and if the testing goes well, we'll fly it all the way down to Earth and Mars and Luna. The thinking goes: even in the inner system, there are places too cold, dark, barren for mycora to bloom. If any serious cold-weather adaptations start appearing, the first signs of it will probably be there. So we drop a few detectors on some polar caps, and suddenly we don't have to worry about this problem anymore. Not unless the detectors start screaming at us, which I don't think is going to happen."

"Are these state secrets?" I asked, turning to look at his face. "Can I talk about this stuff?"

His look was disapproving. "There are no secrets, Mr. Strasheim. There's barely any state, and I didn't invite you up here to waste your time. If we didn't want you to talk about this, what would we want you for? You have skills which nobody else in the Immunity seems to possess. You're a commentator, an historian; you record simple facts in a way that's accessible to the public, even entertaining. That ability could be very useful for this project, if you're willing to lend it to us for a while."

"It sounds fascinating," I said sincerely. "I take it you want me to write an article?"

Lottick looked at me as if I were somewhat stupider than he'd been expecting. "No, son. I thought we understood each other. I want you to go on the mission."