About the Author

In eleven years as an aerospace engineer, Wil McCarthy has worked with rockets, satellites, lasers, computers, interplanetary probes, and, most recently, robots. He lives outside Denver with his family, and in his copious free time he writes science fiction, including stories published in Aboriginal SF, Analog, Interzone, Asimov's, Science Fiction Age, and a veritable plethora of short fiction anthologies. Bloom is his fifth novel.

From the Paperback edition.

Reviews

"[A] rousing yet thoughtful adventure story."
--The New York Times Book Review "[A] VIEW OF MANKIND'S FUTURE AND THE UNIVERSE REMINISCENT OF ARTHUR C. CLARKE."
--The Denver Post "BLOOM is one of the most fast-paced and powerfully dark visions of nanotechnology gone awry since Greg Bear's Blood Music. McCarthy succeeds on many levels, combining a unique literary style with complex scientific speculation and political intrigue."
--Locus "What clever and compelling science fiction! The Bloom future is all too believable."
--JAMES GLEICK
Author of Chaos: Making a New Science "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."
--WALTER JON WILLIAMS
Author of City on Fire "Swiftly paced, consistently inventive and tightly written."
--The Washington Post Book World "McCarthy is an entertaining, intelligent, amusing writer, with Heinlein's knack for breakneck plotting and, at the same time, Clarke's thoughtfulness."
--Booklist (starred review) "Bloom is tense, dynamic, intelligent, offering a terrifyingly vivid view of how technology can rocket out of our control."
--DAVID BRIN
Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of Startide Rising From the Paperback edition.

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.)

"[A] rousing yet thoughtful adventure story."
--The New York Times Book Review

"[A] VIEW OF MANKIND'S FUTURE AND THE UNIVERSE REMINISCENT OF ARTHUR C. CLARKE."
--The Denver Post "BLOOM is one of the most fast-paced and powerfully dark visions of nanotechnology gone awry since Greg Bear's Blood Music. McCarthy succeeds on many levels, combining a unique literary style with complex scientific speculation and political intrigue."
--Locus "What clever and compelling science fiction! The Bloom future is all too believable."
--JAMES GLEICK
Author of Chaos: Making a New Science "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."
--WALTER JON WILLIAMS
Author of City on Fire "Swiftly paced, consistently inventive and tightly written."
--The Washington Post Book World "McCarthy is an entertaining, intelligent, amusing writer, with Heinlein's knack for breakneck plotting and, at the same time, Clarke's thoughtfulness."
--Booklist (starred review) "Bloom is tense, dynamic, intelligent, offering a terrifyingly vivid view of how technology can rocket out of our control."
--DAVID BRIN
Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of Startide Rising From the Paperback edition.