Table of Contents

Press Start  1

Just for Fun  7

Digital Matters  39

Tempest in a Teapot  77

Massively Multiplayer Laboratories  108

Weapons-Grade Cartoons  135

Have Nanosuit—Will Travel  173

Nanopolitanisms  201

My Little Avatar  236

Game Over—Play Again?  293

Acknowledgments  301

Notes  305

Bibliography  349

Index  399

About the Author

Colin Milburn is Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities and Professor of English, Science and Technology Studies, and Cinema and Technocultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Nanovision: Engineering the Future, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

“[Mondo Nano] offers a clear demonstration of how the methods, dispositions and goals of nanotechnology often converge with video game development and culture. … Milburn argues convincingly that video games let us try out different visions of the future, and better understand the present, from the nanoscale up.”  
*New Scientist*

“Milburn's profession isn't about judging the truth of nanotechnological hypotheses; it is about teasing out their technoscientific origins and effects. … Readers bearing that in mind will find Mondo Nano a thoroughly researched, thought provoking read that offers many points to ponder. . . .”
*Physics Today*

"Sure enough, by the end of Mondo Nano, the connection between games and nanotechnology becomes so obvious, so pervasive, and so ubiquitous that one wonders how it was possible that we did not see it earlier. Needless to say, this is exactly how a really compelling argument works, and the elegance with which Milburn maps the terrain only adds graceful transparency to his discussion. . . . Mondo Nano is cultural scholarship at its very best, and it sets the bar very high for similar projects."
*Science Fiction Studies*

"Mondo Nano revisits, in a new frame, the classic questions of technological media studies initially considered by scholars like [Walter] Benjamin: not whether the images have value as art or commerce, but more fundamentally, how do we enter into the worlds these intensively mediated images present? . . . Milburn takes those familiar questions seriously by seriously thinking about play. . . . Mondo Nano is itself designed as a game that playfully goes awry, mixing categories, subjecting science fact to science fiction history, speaking truth to power by reading cartoons of weaponized bodies rather than the actual super soldiers who remain a twinkle in their inventors’ phallic, futural gaze."
*Los Angeles Review of Books*

"Required reading for anyone working in the digital humanities, media studies, or in the transdisciplinary spaces of science and literature, Milburn’s book models several different literary approaches to digital objects."
*American Literature*

"Milburn's study is a brilliant, expansive, and eye-opening read."
*Market Scale*

"...Mondo Nano is a radical reading journey that can take us deeply and critically into nanotech culture and inspire new modes of scholarship and pedagogy."
*Science Fiction Research Association*

"For readers interested in how emerging technologies are realized, this book provides a rich portrayal of nanotechnology’s potential being apprehended and embodied virtually, fictionally, and actually through play. . . . This book comes as a refreshing response to 'gamification' literature, which tends to focus on how games can be extended to solve problems."
*International Journal of Communication*