The Reproductive System by John Sladek

I don't know if this is the first grey goo novel. (Probably not.) But it's an early one - so early that the "grey goo" is actual physical objects, boxy automatons on little legs scurrying across the Nevada landscape. All of the main elements are there: self-replicating human-created critters, runaway growth, an invention totally out of control, widespread destruction, conventional authorities powerless to respond, an ending that's transformative and nearly apocalyptic.

Of course, John Sladek didn't write that straight: he never wrote anything straight. He was one of the great satirists of the SF field, a writer with a deeply cynical view of humanity, very little sympathy for any of his characters, and deep influences from the Surrealists and other mid-century literary movements.

So his 1968 novel The Reproductive System is short - around the typical length for its era, fifty or sixty thousand words - but it ranges widely, it has a large cast, and it's not aiming to make us like or root for the vast majority of them.

(I wrote about my favorite Sladek novel - Tik-Tok, which I also think is his best single book - last year.)

In Millford, Nevada, a failing company - Wompler's Walking Babies - decides to jump on the government gravy train, to start researching something likely impossible to get hold of a new and hopefully unending revenue stream. Between chapters, they get that funding, a visionary (and, it turns out, completely crazy) scientist to run the program - and, pow! the Reproductive System is born.

It's explained mostly in bafflegab, but it's the usual self-replicating, self-organizing, everything-overrunning constellation of automatons - controlled by a central intelligence, but mostly distributed, able to deconstruct and incorporate practically any metallic or manufactured item it encounters, able to learn and change and adapt to circumstances. It's running in a test mode in the Wompler labs when a military envoy comes to review progress.

And it gets free, of course. That's how grey goo stories go. What happens ends up being more complicated than that - the scientist I mentioned before has a Frankenstein complex, among several others - but the Reproductive System gets out, and it starts assimilating whatever it can find in the Nevada desert, hitting Las Vegas quickly.

There are a lot of people - including a group of spies in Paris and Morocco, related to a French moon-shot program which for a long time doesn't seem particularly closely tied to the hegemonizing-automatons main plot - that run around, doing various things, mostly futilely, mostly badly, mostly at cross-purposes.

It's a Sladek novel, so it's full of crazy, misguided, neurotic and just plain confused people doing things. Many of them die along the way. A few make it to the end, more-or-less confront that mad scientist, and seize control of the Reproductive System for themselves:

After that, they had no more paperwork to do - ever. The System had taken care of that.

In fact it had taken over all the jobs no one wanted to do. The System collected garbage and turned it into valuable chemicals like pearls and perfume and maple sugar and finger-paints.

It did all the dishes in all the homes of the world. It filed all the papers no one wanted to read, and it read them, too. It took care of other distasteful jobs like typing, and like preventing war. (p.154)

It's a happy ending, but a quick, whirlwind, kaleidoscopic one. The world has been transformed; the genie is not going back into the lamp. And, the reader thinks - if she spends a moment or two instead of just letting the ending run in her head as Sladek steamrolls it forward - there is no reason the Reproductive System will stay tame and settled and controlled; it has huge capabilities and vast appetites, time is long and humans are transitory and contradictory.

Grey goo never quite goes all the way back into the vat - even this far back. Once it exists, everything is changed.

(Consumer note: I read this in a SF Gateway omnibus, which also includes The Muller-Fokker Effect and Tik-Tok. I think that's the best, easiest-to-find edition of this novel currently.)