By Creator
- Alastair Reynolds:
- The Revelation Space Series covers the collapse of much of human civilization following the spread of an alien disease which corrupts human technology in very unpleasant ways. The problem is compounded by the return of the Inhibitors, a vastly ancient machine race who use replicating technology hundreds of millions of years in advance of humanity which might be based on even smaller scale femtotechnology...
- In Pushing Ice, many of the other inmates of the Spican's "zoo" have access to femtotechnology, again far in advance of the nanotechnology humans wield and correspondingly more dangerous when replicators run out of control. In something of a twist, it is suggested that much of the alien femtotech was in fact human in origin... thanks to time dilation humanity progressed significantly whilst the crew of the Rockhopper were in transit to the Spican structure.
- In Century Rain, Earth was abandoned after nanomachines that were supposed to fix global warming start to eat everything to fuel themselves. The Slashers, who are a splinter human group, don't care if nanomachines caused problem in the past and continue to use them, and have them present in their blood.
- John Ringo:
- In the opening of Council Wars, 41st century humanity has reached the point where people have the power to transform themselves into all sorts of nifty things, up to and including sentient clouds of nanites. Which must have been a lot of fun... right up to the point where somebody turns off all the power.
- In Legacy of the Aldenata, the Galactic economy is based primarily on control of nanomachines used to build material from the atomic level up. With the new threat introduced in The Eye of the Storm, Mike O'Neal, Jr kicks this in the head, thanks to Darhel interference with the human forces supposedly defending against hostiles making them varying degrees of useless.
- Stanisław Lem:
- Quickies (or "szustrs" in original Polish text) are the mainstay of Luzanian society in Wizja Lokalna. They do everything, from providing energy and material wealth to enforcing laws of ethics as if they were laws of physics. In Luzania, "man" doesn't kill a "man" — the environment won't let him. They can even provide immortality, but those who tried it generally found that it wasn't worth the effort. Kliwians, the now extinct neighbours of Luzanians, probably had an ethicosphere of their own and it's strongly suggested that the Luzanian one caused their extinction via Unwilling Robotization.
- In Peace on Earth, nanomachines are also the ultimate stage of Mechanical Evolution of human weaponry.
- 12 Miles Below: Relic armor uses a cloud of nanites to repair itself and clean its user. It has strict hard-coded limits on replication, especially on creating nanites unconnected to its current cloud, which is why relic armor can't just make more relic armor for someone else to use.
- Area 51: The Airlia utilize nanites for taking control of or transforming human technology, regenerating their own injuries, turning humans into slaves and completely dissolving corpses.
- Aristoi covers these, in various aspects, in great detail. Nanomachines are pretty much the basis for the entire economy, and a great deal of effort is expended in making sure the few people authorized to design new ones know what they're doing. The novel goes into more than usual detail on what it would take to actually get one running, including troubles such as getting rid of the heat such things would generate, especially in a vacuum. Gray goo does come up a couple times, at least once as a malicious attack.
- "Autofac": In the end, it's revealed that the autofacs have begun constructing capsules filled with nanomachines programmed to build miniature versions of their parent factories.
- Nanomachines figure prominently in Nancy Kress's novel Beggars and Choosers (1994), the middle book of a trilogy beginning with Beggars in Spain (1993) and concluding with Beggars Ride (1996).
- Blood Music is another early user of this trope, although the nanomachines are biological in origin. On the other hand, once you get down to nano-scales, the difference between organism and machine is very blurry. Nanotechnology also features in Greg Bear's other novel Queen of Angels, and its sequel, Slant.
- In Bloom by Wil McCarthy, nanomachines have run amok and eaten the entire biosphere of Earth, plus spread out into nearby space. Human refugees survived by colonizing the outer solar system, including Jupiter's moon Ganymede. The novel's plot follows the first mission sent back sunward to find out what's left.
- Broken Princess: The first time Himiko fights the Public Guardians, they discreetly spray her with nanobots that analyze and monitor her and act as a Tracking Device.
- The Culture: The epilogue of Look to Windward features an artificial shape-shifting assassin composed of "E-Dust" (Everything-Dust), originally intended as a building material but inevitably turned to darker purposes. The Culture in general seem to have progressed beyond nanotech, referring to "picofoam" as the building blocks of their AI Minds. "Picofoam complex" is the backup computational substrate for a mere ship drone's AI core, as described in Excession. Most of a true Culture Mind actually exists in hyperspace, where it may function unburdened by pesky nuisances like the speed of light and neutron decay.
- The Days Of Solomon Gursky by Ian McDonald starts in a near-ish future where nanomachines are routinely used to build virtually anything. Out of diamond if you like. And then the protagonist invents a process that uses nanomachines to entirely replace the cells in a living creature (such as a human). This essentially converts the creature into a new immortal form entirely constructed from nanomachines. The rest of the novella explores the full astounding ramifications of this over the following centuries and millennia.
- Nearly omnipresent nanotechnology is an important part of the setting and plot in The Diamond Age, so named because with nanotech, diamond becomes literally as cheap as dirt, making it a useful building material.
- The Discworld has a Magitek equivalent with "nanodemons". In The Fifth Elephant, one is used to make a spycam-sized iconograph, and in The Last Continent, the unmixing spell Maxwell's Impressive Separator (also known as Bonza Charlie's Beaut Sieve) summons them to do the unmixing.
- The Diving Universe has "nanobits", a Lost Technology used by the Precursors in the Fleet 5,000 years ago. Very few of them are still operational, and those are generally mistaken for a strange natural phenomenon.
- The Draka: The Samothrace operative in Drakon has a small Fabber which can make whatever he wants, diamonds, components for Plasma rifles, anything small enough. The Draka he's chasing was caught in an accident so it doesn't have these luxuries, and it can think of better ways to commit suicide then use the enemy's weapons.
- The anti-Descolada virus designed by the heroes in the Ender's Game sequels. Ironically, the original Descolada virus counts too, as it was engineered by an unknown alien race as a terraforming agent.
- In Fall Revolution, nanotech replicators and the creation of true AI lead to the singularity where many humans upload themselves to a computer framework and boost their intelligence and capabilities to godlike levels. The humans left behind in the solar system after the departure of the Fast Folk (so named due to the speed of their thought) use nanomechanical devices as the basis of much of their technology, the idea being that mechanisms are practically immune to subversion unlike their computer counterparts with corruptible software.
- Used in various ways in Honor Harrington, both for good and evil, but rarely explored outside of its use as a tool for covert assassinations made to look like accidents.
- In Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, these are used as a temporary form of plastic surgery. Hoshi uses them to masculinize her face and deepen her voice when she's disguised as a fisherman.
- The counterculture novel How to Mutate and Take Over the World ends with nanomachines transforming the entire world into key-lime pie filling.
- In the Jacob's Ladder Trilogy, groups of nanomachines called colonies were created by Cynric the Sorceress. They are used for a variety of purposes, including granting Exalts their abilities and making physical bodies for the Angels.
- Larry Niven, aware that Technology Marches On, retconned his Known Space series by saying that Carlos Wu had invented a nanotech-based Auto Doc with astonishing capabilities: in "Procrustes", the story in which it's introduced, Beowulf Shaeffer is able to have his entire body regenerated from just his severed head, and when it reappears in The Ringworld Throne and Ringworld's Children, Louis Wu uses it to reverse being transformed into a Protector — which borders on Deus ex Machina.
- Raymond Z. Gallun's 1937 short story "A Menace in Miniature" features human spacefarers being attacked by microscopic aliens flying microscopic machines against them. Unusually for an early nanotech story, Gallun also considers the limitations of such tiny machines, enabling the protagonists to develop defenses against them. Notable because it pre-dates Dr. Richard Feynmann's original concept of nanotechnology by 22 years.
- The eyves in Moon Rainbow aren't as much nanomachines as they are alien microorganisms, but they do grant people superpowers. Much of the book is devoted to exploring psychological and social consequences of this. In the sequel, though, they are just an excuse for the hero to kick some ass.
- The plot of the Moonrise and Moonwar by Ben Bova revolve around nanomachines. A subversion occurs when one character proposes making nanomachines that act like dust, to blind the invading army, and another character suggests just using dust instead.
- N.E.R.D.S.: Microscopic robots called nanobytes are the source of all superpowers in this universe, commonly acquired by entering a person's bloodstream and enhancing their weaknesses into strengths.
- In the Nulapeiron Sequence (and the prequel, To Hold Infinity) by John Meaney, nanotech is considered rather crude and almost everything is instead done using 'femtotech', comprising 'engineered pseudatoms', whatever that might mean. References are even made to 'attotech', engineering using the fundamental building blocks of spacetime, referred to as Twistors.
- The Plague Year Series details the effects of a devastating nano-tech plague which disassembles all warm-blooded life forms below 10,000ft elevation.
- In Prey, a sentient swarm of nanomachines acts as the central premise, which starts to act in predatory manner.
- Rama II has nanites, small medicinal robots, being used to monitor vital levels for the astronauts. They remain in the bloodstream, and report things like heart rate constantly to a set of monitors, one for each astronaut. For each characteristic measured, each astronaut has a pre-set range of safe values, and alarms sound for the ship medic, Nicole, whenever the nanites detect that these are exceeded. Nicole consults their readings first to find out that one of the astronauts has a heart condition they had been disguising (they are allowed to remain on the expedition), and then later, to see the cause of an unexpected death on board. From her readouts tracking the deceased and other crew members, her suspicions are enhanced that there is something nefarious afoot.
- The source of Tofu's powers in Super Minion. They're limited by a design which is deliberately unstable outside his body, but still allow him to reconstruct his body and disassemble or modify anything he's touching.
- In the second of the Thursday Next series of novels by Jasper Fforde, Thursday's inventing uncle Mycroft invents some nanomachines. Her time-traveling Chronoguard rogue father who does not exist in real time (that's a mouthful) eventually has to time travel to the beginning of life on Earth with the nanomachine colony (instructed to convert all organic material into Dream Topping) in his fist, to prevent the world ending in a sugary, confectionery manner. It turns out that we are all evolved from Dream Topping, which actually explains a lot.
- In the satiric science-fiction novel TIM, Defender of the Earth, one character uses the implications of nanotechnology to turn himself and the rest of Britain's population into a collective hive-mind.
- In Specials, the third book of the Uglies series, it is revealed that the Specials have nanobots in their blood that allow them to heal faster than normal humans. Nanos can also be really bad, though, as in the scene where Tally and Shay end up destroying a museum by accidentally unleashing some. (This scene is referenced for comedic value in Extras, when Shay's solution to a problem is an excited cry of "Nanos!") Nanos are also what allow the Holes in the Walls to work like they do. In fact, nanos are everywhere in that world.
- Nanotechnology in Voidskipper is a well-developed field of science that has almost totally fused with biotechnology. This has resulted in amazing medical wonders, easy availability of materials manufactured with atomic-level precision, and impossibly deadly custom-made mind-controlling pathogens commonly called nanoweapons. That said, the possibility of a grey goo apocalypse is prevented by thermodynamics; simply put there's no good way for a machine that small to get the energy needed to convert an entire planet into more of itself.
- In the Xandri Corelel series, everyone has their own personal nanobots in their bodies, even pets. They're mostly used to quickly heal injuries, but they have other uses too, like hair styling or breast support for formal occasions.
- The X-Files: Antibodies revolves around these. A medical research facility is burned down by the conspirational elements within the US government because they managed to develop nanomachines that are able to cure any fatal disease and trauma within their host. This leads to Agents Mulder and Scully trying to find the one person who still has them before the the Conspiracy can.
