Bloom is Wil McCarthy’s fifth book. It was published in 1998, but I have just read it recently to lazily fill the week-end.

Plot

Here’s the plot in a few words (and without spoilers).

In the future, Earth has been taken over by nano-machines that will consume everything they can get their nano-teeth on. Actually, those bots have conquered (devoured?) most of the central planets of the solar system, exiling mankind to the colder outer-planets.

The story is told by Strasheim, a blogger/worker in a shoe factory (?) of Ganymede, as he takes part in an exploration mission back to Earth. Our hero accompanies a crew of scientists sent back home ; they have one simple job: to drop monitoring beacons from space, in order to better assess the threat posed by the everlasting plague.

A short review

This is the first book from Wil McCarthy I ever read, and I loved it. The universe is great, the science works, and the whole story makes sense in the end.

It’s interesting to note how much details are put on the daily gadgets of the starship’s crew. For instance the “future Google Glass”, known as the Zee-Spec, is always present on every character’s face, mind, and at every page-turn. They’re described as a rough counterpart to today’s smart-phones… But do we think about them all the time? You could argue that it is an SF book, so tech lust has to be here, but I’m not so sure.

Then again, the author left many things out that I wish had been explored: comes to mind the relation between the two distant human colonies. How each world sees one another, and why did they develop so differently? There is no real description of the social structures and cultural forces that drove the humanity to two very distinct worlds other than allusions to tech being responsible.

Maybe reading Ursula K. Le Guin influenced me, but I don’t believe every SF novel must be focused purely on tech. In McCarthy’s Bloom, everything is. But there is definitely more food for thought than we’re led to believe.

A consequence of this is that many characters are under-developed, some aren’t credible at all, which could have hurt the story harder that it does. Not to mention the MicoSystem “character”, always present and only used as a scarecrow.

Conclusion

In the end, as I wrote earlier, I enjoyed the book ; it’s relaxing, and I was just looking for that. Yet I wish there were more to it.