Nanotechnology in fiction

The use of nanotechnology in fiction has attracted scholarly attention. The first use of the distinguishing concepts of nanotechnology was "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", a talk given by physicist Richard Feynman in 1959. K. Eric Drexler's 1986 book Engines of Creation introduced the general public to the concept of nanotechnology. Since then, nanotechnology has been used frequently in a diverse range of fiction, often as a justification for unusual or far-fetched occurrences featured in speculative fiction.

In 1881 the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov wrote The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea, which included the concept of text that can be seen only through a microscope at 5,000,000 times magnification.

In 1931, Boris Zhitkov wrote a short story called Microhands (), where the narrator builds for himself a pair of microscopic remote manipulators, and uses them for fine tasks like eye surgery. When he attempts to build even smaller manipulators to be manipulated by the first pair, the story goes into detail about the problem of regular materials behaving differently on a microscopic scale.

In his 1956 short story The Next Tenants, Arthur C. Clarke describes tiny machines that operate at the micrometre scale – although not strictly nanoscale (billionth of a meter), they are the first fictional example of the concepts now associated with nanotechnology.

Stanislaw Lem's 1964 novel The Invincible involves the discovery of an artificial ecosystem of minuscule robots, although like in Clarke's story they are larger than what is strictly meant by the term 'nanotechnology'.

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