I was pleasantly surprised, on picking up a copy of the Foresight Nanotech Institute’s quarterly newsletter, Foresight Nanotech Update (not yet on the web, but it will presumably appear here in due course), to see a two-page, detailed review of my book Soft Machines. It’s actually a pretty positive review – “Soft Machines is an informative and readable exploration of the nanoworld” is a line I can imagine a publicist being pleased to fillet. Perhaps not surprisingly the reviewer doesn’t completely accept my arguments about the feasibility or otherwise of the Drexlerian program, saying “the arguments that Jones produces seem largely sound as far as they go, but not thorough enough to be conclusive”. Actually that’s a conclusion that I’m very comfortable with. We’ll see what things look like over the next couple of years, after some more real debate and some more supporting science.