Nanotechnology is to contemporary society what space flight was to the society of the ’50s and ’60s—achievable but not quite viable yet. And just as space flight inspired some of the ’50s and ’60s most chilling sci-fi horror stories, nanotechnology serves the same role in the 2000s. Alas, while M.M. Buckner’s Watermind has an intriguing concept, it fails to deliver anything resembling a good story.
The eponymous Watermind is a semi-sentient, self-emergent neural net that…