Self-replicating machines in fiction

A self-replicating machine is a type of autonomous robot that is capable of reproducing itself autonomously using raw materials found in the environment, thus exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature. Such machines are often featured in works of science fiction.

In literature

Fictional self-replicating machines in literature

Year	Work	Author	Notes
1943	"M33 in Andromeda"	A. E. van Vogt	A. E. van Vogt used the idea as a plot device in his story "M33 in Andromeda" (1943) which was later combined with the three other Space Beagle short stories to become the novel, The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The story describes the creation of self-replicating weapons factories designed to destroy the Anabis, a galaxy-spanning malevolent life form bent on destruction of the human race.
1953	"Second Variety"	Philip K. Dick	In the short story a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the West has reduced much of the world to a barren wasteland. The war continues, however, among the scattered remains of humanity. The Western forces have developed "claws", which are autonomous self-replicating robots to fight on their side. It is one of Dick's many stories in which nuclear war has rendered the Earth's surface uninhabitable. The story was adapted into the movie Screamers in 1995.
1955	"Autofac"	Philip K. Dick	An early treatment was the short story Autofac by Philip K. Dick, published in 1955. Dick also touched on this theme in his earlier 1953 short story "Second Variety". Another example can be found in the 1962 short story "Epilogue" by Poul Anderson, in which self-replicating factory barges were proposed that used minerals extracted from ocean water as raw materials.
1955	"The Necessary Thing"	Robert Sheckley	In the short story the Universal Replicator is unwittingly tricked into replicating itself.
1958	"Crabs on the Island"	Anatoly Dneprov	In his short story "Crabs on the Island" (1958) Anatoly Dneprov speculated on the idea that since the replication process is never 100% accurate, leading to slight differences in the descendants, over several generations of replication the machines would be subjected to evolution similar to that of living organisms. In the story, a machine is designed, the sole purpose of which is to find metal to produce copies of itself, intended to be used as a weapon against an enemy's war machines. The machines are released on a deserted island, the idea being that once the available metal is all used and they start fighting each other, natural selection will enhance their design. However, the evolution has stopped by itself when the last descendant, an enormously large crab, was created, being unable to reproduce itself due to lack of energy and materials.
1963-2005	Berserker series	Fred Saberhagen	The Berserker series is a series of space opera science fiction short stories and novels, in which robotic self-replicating machines (The berserkers) strive to destroy all life.
1964	The Invincible	Stanisław Lem	Stanisław Lem has also studied the same idea in his novel, in which the crew of a spacecraft landing on a distant planet finds a non-biological life-form, which is the product of long, possibly of millions of years of, mechanical evolution (necroevolution). This phenomenon is also key to the aforementioned Anderson story.
1968	The Reproductive System	John Sladek	John Sladek used the concept to humorous ends in his first novel The Reproductive System (1968, also titled Mechasm in some markets), where a U.S. military research project goes out of control.
1970	"The Scarred Man"	Gregory Benford	Long before the existence of the Internet, author Greg Benford was inspired by his work on ARPANet in the late 1960s to write this first account of a self-replicating program - a computer virus. His con men program a computer to randomly dial phone numbers until it hits a telephone modem that is answered by another computer. It then programs the answering computer to begin dialing random numbers in search of yet another computer, while also programming a small delay on each computer's processing time. The virus spreads exponentially through susceptible computers, like a biological infection, and the creators profit by "fixing" the slowed computers. (Story text on author's website.)
1975	The Shockwave Rider	John Brunner	An early example of a fictional account of a computer virus or worm.
1977	The Adolescence of P-1	Thomas J. Ryan	Another early fictional account of a computer virus or worm.
1977-1999	Galactic Center Saga series	Gregory Benford	The series details a galactic war between mechanical and biological life. In it an antagonist berserker machine race is encountered by Earth, first as a probe in In the Ocean of Night, and then in an attack in Across the Sea of Suns. The berserker machines do not seek to completely eradicate a race if merely throwing it into a primitive low technological state will do as they did to the EMs encountered in Across the Sea of Suns.
1982	2010: Odyssey Two	Arthur C. Clarke	The novel is the sequel to the 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, but continues the story of Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation with the same title rather than Clarke's original novel. Set in the year 2010, the plot centers on a joint Soviet-American mission aboard the Soviet spacecraft Leonov. Its crew flees Jupiter as a mysterious dark spot appears on Jupiter and begins to grow. HAL's telescope observations reveal that the "Great Black Spot" is, in fact, a vast population of monoliths, increasing at an exponential rate, which appear to be eating the planet. By acting as self-replicating 'von Neumann' machines, these monoliths increase Jupiter's density until the planet achieves nuclear fusion, becoming a small star.
1983	Code of the Lifemaker	James P. Hogan	NASA's Advanced Automation for Space Missions study directly inspired the science fiction novel.
1985	The Third Millennium: A History of the World AD 2000-3000	Brian Stableford David Langford	In the book—a fictional historical account, from the perspective of the year 3000, giving a future history of humanity and its technological and sociological developments—humanity sends cycle-limited Von Neumann probes out to the nearest stars to do open-ended exploration and to announce humanity's existence to whoever might encounter them.
1986	The Songs of Distant Earth	Arthur C. Clarke	In the novel humanity on a future Earth facing imminent destruction creates automated seedships that act as fire and forget lifeboats aimed at distant, habitable worlds. Upon landing, the ship begins to create new humans from stored genetic information, and an onboard computer system raises and trains the first few generations of new inhabitants. The massive ships are then broken down and used as building materials by their "children".
1986	"Lungfish"	David Brin	In the short story collection, The River of Time, the short story "Lungfish" prominently features von Neumann probes. Not only does he explore the concept of the probes themselves, but indirectly explores the ideas of competition between different designs of probes, evolution of von Neumann probes in the face of such competition, and the development of a type of ecology between von Neumann probes. One of the vessels mentioned is clearly a Seeder type.
1987	The Forge of God	Greg Bear	The Killers, a civilization of self-replicating machines designed to destroy any potential threat to their (possibly long-dead) creators.
1990	The World at the End of Time	Frederik Pohl
1992	Cold as Ice	Charles Sheffield	In the novel there is a segment where the author (a physicist) describes von Neumann machines harvesting sulfur, nitrogen, phosphorus, helium-4, and various metals from the atmosphere of Jupiter.
1993	Assemblers of Infinity	Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason	This novel describes self-replicating robots that are programmed not to harm biospheres but instead use materials on the moon for an alien civilization to reproduce and colonize the moon. While this is happening a human scientist on Earth reverse engineers the dormant nanomachines found on Earth (since Earth is a biosphere they don't harm the environment) to make medical nano-machines and is successful at first when he revives a medically dead scientist, but accidentally removes the safety measure, creating a grey goo scenario that he stops at the cost of his life when he activates a high powered x-ray machine built as a safety guard.
1993	Anvil of Stars	Greg Bear	The novel is the sequel to The Forge of God and explores the reaction other civilizations have to the creation and release of berserkers.
1995	The Ganymede Club	Charles Sheffield	A mystery and a thriller, the story unravels in the same universe that Sheffield imagined in Cold as Ice. In it humans have colonized the solar system with the help of self-replicating machines called Von Neumanns.
1995	The Diamond Age	Neal Stephenson	The novel depicts a near-future Earth society wherein nanotechnology, including self-replicators, both exist and influence daily life greatly.
1996	Excession	Iain Banks	In the novel hegemonising swarms are described as a form of Outside Context Problem. An example of an "Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Object" is given as an uncontrolled self-replicating probe with the goal of turning all matter into copies of itself. After causing great damage, they are somehow transformed using unspecified techniques by the Zetetic Elench and become "Evangelical Hegemonising Swarm Objects". Such swarms (referred to as "smatter") reappear in the later novels Surface Detail (which features scenes of space combat against the swarms) and The Hydrogen Sonata.
1998	Moonseed	Stephen Baxter	In the novel Earth faces danger from a self-replicating nanobot swarm after a rock is returned from the Apollo 18 mission. The rock contains a mysterious substance called "moonseed" (a form of grey goo, whether nanobots, an alien virus or something else) that starts to change all inorganic matter on Earth into more moonseed.
1998	Bloom	Wil McCarthy	Bloom is set in the year 2106, in a world where self-replicating nanomachines called "Mycora" have consumed Earth and other planets of the inner solar system, forcing humankind to eke out a bleak living in the asteroids and Galilean moons.
1998	Destiny's Road	Larry Niven	In the novel von Neumann machines are scattered throughout the human colony world Destiny and its moon Quicksilver in order to build and maintain technology and to make up for the lack of the resident humans' technical knowledge; the Von Neumann machines primarily construct a stretchable fabric cloth capable of acting as a solar collector which serves as the humans' primary energy source. The Von Neumann machines also engage in ecological maintenance and other exploratory work.
2000	Manifold: Space	Stephen Baxter	The novel starts with the discovery of alien self-replicating machines active within the Solar system.
2000–present	Revelation Space series	Alastair Reynolds	In the series Inhibitors are self-replicating machines whose purpose is to inhibit the development of intelligent star-faring cultures. They are dormant for extreme periods of time until they detect the presence of a space-faring culture and proceed to exterminate it even to the point of sterilizing entire planets. They are very difficult to destroy as they seem to have faced any type of weapon ever devised and only need a short time to 'remember' the necessary counter-measures. Also "Greenfly" terraforming machines are another form of berserker machines. For unknown reasons, but probably an error in their programming, they destroy planets and turn them into trillions of domes filled with vegetation – after all, their purpose is to produce a habitable environment for humans, however in doing so they inadvertently decimate the human race. By 10.000, they have wiped out most of the Galaxy.
2002	Evolution	Stephen Baxter	The novel follows 565 million years of human evolution, from shrewlike mammals 65 million years in the past to the ultimate fate of humanity (and its descendants, both biological and non-biological) 500 million years in the future. At one point, hominids become sapient, and go on to develop technology, including an evolving universal constructor machine that goes to Mars and multiplies, and in an act of global ecophagy consumes Mars by converting the planet into a mass of machinery that leaves the Solar system in search of new planets to assimilate.
2002	Prey	Michael Crichton	In the novel nanobots were blown into the desert from an isolated laboratory, evolving and eventually forming autonomous swarms. These swarms appear to be clouds of solar-powered and self-sufficient, reproducing and evolving rapidly. The swarms exhibit predatory behavior, attacking and killing animals in the wild and later going as far as to forming symbiotic relationships with humans and even mimicking them.
2002	Lost in a Good Book	Jasper Fforde	The novel features an alternative pink goo end of the world scenario, where a nanotechnology 'Dream Topping making machine' turns all matter on earth into a pink dessert similar to Angel Delight. The Dream Topping is taken back in time to the beginning of earth, where it supplies the organic nutrients needed to create life.
2003	Ilium	Dan Simmons	The first part of the Ilium/Olympos cycle, concerning the re-creation of the events in the Iliad on an alternate Earth and Mars. These events are set in motion by beings who have taken on the roles of the Greek gods. In the cycle the voynix are biomechanical, self-replicating, programmable robots. They originated in an alternate universe, and were brought into the Ilium universe before 3000 A.D.
2003	Singularity Sky	Charles Stross	The Festival, a civilisation of uploaded minds with strange designs on humanity
2004	Recursion	Tony Ballantyne	Herb, a young entrepreneur, returns to the isolated planet on which he has illegally been trying to build a city–and finds it destroyed by a swarming nightmare of self-replicating machinery.
2005	Spin	Robert Charles Wilson	In the novel self-replicating artificial life, shot into space to build a huge sentient network in the outer reaches of the Solar System and gather information about the alien "Hypotheticals". It encounters not just other von Neumann machines, but a pre-existing and galaxy-spanning ecology of them. Apparently this vast network of sentient artificial life is responsible for the "Spin" – the placement of an opaque black membrane around the entire Earth.
2005	Olympos	Dan Simmons	The sequel to Ilium and final part of the Ilium/Olympos series.
2007	Von Neumann's War	John Ringo Travis S. Taylor	In the novel published by Baen Books in 2007 von Neumann probes arrive in the solar system, moving in from the outer planets, and converting all metals into gigantic structures. Eventually they arrive on Earth, wiping out much of the population before being beaten back when humanity reverse engineers some of the probes.
2007	Postsingular	Rudy Rucker	In Postsingular, nanobots devour the Earth and copy everybody they eat into a simulation... luckily, one of the machine's developers also created a backdoor, and is able to reverse the situation, restoring everybody. Soon after, another set of tiny self-replicating machines are released, which don't devour, merely reproduce until they cover every inch of the Earth, sharing information with each other and the people they're on. They connect humanity like they've never been connected before so that one can watch anyone else by experiencing what the "orphids" on that person's body are experiencing.
2010	Surface Detail	Iain Banks	The novel depicts self-replicating machines as a universe-threatening infection.
2011	Lord of All Things	Andreas Eschbach	In the novel (original title "Herr aller Dinge") an ancient nano machine complex is discovered buried in a glacier off the coast of Russia. When it comes in contact with materials it needs to fulfill its mission, it creates a launch facility and launches a space craft. It is later revealed that the nano machines were created by a pre-historic human race with the intention of destroying other interstellar civilizations (for an unknown reason). It is purposed that the reason there is no evidence of the race is because of the nano-machines themselves and their ability to manipulate matter at an atomic level. It is even suggested that viruses could be ancient nano machines that have evolved over time.
2012	The Hydrogen Sonata	Iain Banks
2012–present	The Machine Dynasty series	Madeline Ashby	In the novels the protagonists are von Neumann machines, self-replicating humanoid robots. The original proposal for the self-replicating humanoid robots came from a religious End Times group who wanted to leave a body of helpers behind for the millions of unsaved after the rapture.
2014	Creations	William Mitchell	In the novel biological engineer Max Lowrie gets a job offer of a lifetime that's supposed to pave the way for humanity's future: self-replicating machines that can mine materials from the harshest environments at no cost, opening up as yet unheard of resources in the sea, on land, and ultimately on the Moon.
2016	We Are Legion (We are Bob)	Dennis E. Taylor	In the novels the protagonist Bob Johansson awakens 117 years after his death to find he is being groomed to pilot a von Neumann probe as a replicant.

In film

Many types of self-replicating machines have been featured in the movies.

• The movie Screamers, based on Philip K. Dick's short story "Second Variety", features a group of robot weapons created by mankind to act as Von Neumann devices / berserkers. The original robots are subterranean buzzsaws that make a screaming sound as they approach a potential victim beneath the soil. These machines are self-replicating and, as is found out through the course of the movie, they are quite intelligent and have managed to "evolve" into newer, more dangerous forms, most notably human forms which the real humans in the movie cannot tell apart from other real humans except by trial and error.
• The Terminator is a 1984 science fiction/action film directed and co-written by James Cameron which describes a war between mankind and self replicating machines led by a central artificial intelligence known as Skynet. Machine civilizations are a recurring theme in fiction.
• In the 2008 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still follows Klaatu, an alien sent to try to change human behavior or eradicate them from Earth via grey goo due to humankind's environmental damage to the planet.
• The Star Wars expanded universe features the World Devastators, large ships designed and built by the Galactic Empire that tear apart planets to use its materials to build other ships or even upgrade or replicate themselves.
• The Matrix series features self-replicating nanobots that were deployed by the United Nations to block the rebelling machine population from their energy source.

On television

The concept is also widely utilised in science fiction television.

• The TV series Lexx featured an army of self replicating robots known as Mantrid drones.
• The Replicators are a horde of self-replicating machines that appear frequently in Stargate SG-1. They once were a vicious race of insect-like robots that were originally created by an android named Reese to serve as toys. They grew beyond her control and began evolving, eventually spreading throughout at least two galaxies. In addition to ordinary autonomous evolution they were able to analyze and incorporate new technologies they encountered into themselves, ultimately making them one of the most advanced "races" known. During the course of the series, the replicators assume a human form and pose a huge threat to the galaxy. A more sophisticated version of the human form Replicators, who call themselves Asurans also appear in the spin-off series Stargate Atlantis.
  • In the Stargate SG-1 episode "Scorched Earth", a species of newly relocated humanoids face extinction via an automated terraforming colony seeder ship controlled by an artificial intelligence.
• In Stargate Atlantis, a second race of replicators created by the Ancients were encountered in the Pegasus Galaxy. They were created as a means to defeat the Wraith. The Ancients attempted to destroy them after they began showing sings of sentience and requested that their drive to kill the wraith be removed. This failed, and an unspecified length of time after the Ancients retreated to the Milky Way Galaxy, the replicators nearly succeeded in destroying the Wraith. The Wraith were able to hack into the replicators and deactivate the extermination drive, at which point they retreated to their home world and were not heard from again until encountered by the Atlantis Expedition. After the Atlantis Expedition reactivated this dormant directive, the replicators embarked on a plan to kill the Wraith by removing their food source, i.e. all humans in the Pegasus Galaxy.
• In the Stargate Universe the human adventurers live on a ship called Destiny. Its mission was to connect a network of Stargates, placed by preceding seeder ships, on planets capable of supporting life to allow instantaneous travel between them.
  • In Stargate Universe Season 2, a galaxy billions of light years distant from the Milky Way is infested with drone ships that are programmed to annihilate intelligent life and advanced technology. The drone ships attack other space ships (including Destiny) as well as humans on planetary surfaces, but don't bother destroying primitive technology such as buildings unless they are harboring intelligent life or advanced technology.
• Star Trek's Borg – a self-replicating bio-mechanical race that is dedicated to the task of achieving perfection through the assimilation of useful technology and lifeforms. Their ships are massive mechanical cubes (a close step from the Berzerker's massive mechanical Spheres).
• The episodes "A Clockwork Origin" and "Benderama" of the animated science fiction comedy sitcom Futurama.
• The episode "Walkabout" of Gargoyles (season 2, episode 33) is about grey goo.
• The Babylon 5 episode "Infection" showed a smaller scale berserker in the form of the Icarran War Machine. After being created with the goal of defeating an unspecified enemy faction, the War Machines proceeded to exterminate all life on the planet Icarra VII because they had been programmed with standards for what constituted a 'Pure Icaran' based on religious teachings, which no actual Icaran could satisfy. Because the Icaran were pre-starflight, the War Machines became dormant after completing their task rather than spreading. One unit was reactivated on-board Babylon 5 after being smuggled past quarantine by an unscrupulous archaeologist, but after being confronted with how they had rendered Icara VII a dead world, the simulated personality of the War Machine committed suicide.
• In the Justice League Unlimited episode "Dark Heart", an alien weapon based on the idea lands on Earth.
• In Steven Universe, Gems are a race of artificial intelligences composed of gemstones projecting light-construct bodies. These are created by bacteriophage-like Injector engines that drill into a planet's crust and infuse specific gems with the local biota's life energy, animating it; they do not reproduce naturally, and several similarities to computers have been noticed.

In video games

• Grey Goo is a science fiction real-time strategy video game that features a playable faction based on the grey goo scenario.
• Conway's Game of Life
• Tasty Planet, a game released in 2006 by Dingo Games centers around a gray goo eating the universe, starting at the atomic level and progressing to the cosmic level. In the game the player controls a gray goo and eats many objects, such as bacteria, mice, cars, people, Earth, galaxies, and eventually the universe. In the end, the grey goo over-fills, explodes, and starts the universe all over again.
• Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising
• The Reapers in the video game series Mass Effect are also self-replicating probes bent on destroying any advanced civilization encountered in the galaxy. They lie dormant in the vast spaces between the galaxies and follow a cycle of extermination. In Mass Effect 2 it is shown that they assimilate any advanced species.
• In the computer game Star Control II, the Slylandro Probe is an out-of-control self-replicating probe that attacks starships of other races. They were not originally intended to be a berserker probe; they sought out intelligent life for peaceful contact, but due to a programming error, they would immediately switch to "resource extraction" mode and attempt to dismantle the target ship for raw materials. While the plot claims that the probes reproduce "at a geometric rate", the game itself caps the frequency of encountering these probes. It is possible to deal with the menace in a side-quest, but this is not necessary to complete the game, as the probes only appear one at a time, and the player's ship will eventually be fast and powerful enough to outrun them or destroy them for resources – although the probes will eventually dominate the entire game universe.
• In the Homeworld: Cataclysm video game, a bio-mechanical virus called Beast has the ability to alter organic and mechanic material to suit its needs, and the ships infected become self-replicating hubs for the virus.
• In the computer game Sword of the Stars, the player may randomly encounter "Von Neumann". A Von Neumann mothership appears along with smaller Von Neumann probes, which attack and consume the player's ships. The probes then return to the mothership, returning the consumed material. If probes are destroyed, the mothership will create new ones. If all the player's ships are destroyed, the Von Neumann probes will reduce the planets resource levels before leaving. The mothership is a larger version of the probes. In the 2008 expansion A Murder of Crows, Kerberos Productions also introduces the VN Berserker, a combat orientated ship, which attacks player planets and ships in retaliation to violence against VN Motherships. If the player destroys the Berserker things will escalate and a System Destroyer will attack.
• In the X video game series, the Xenon are a malevolent race of artificially intelligent machines descended from terraforming ships sent out by humans to prepare worlds for eventual colonization; the result caused by a bugged software update. They are continual antagonists in the X-Universe.
• In PC role-playing game Space Rangers and its sequel Space Rangers 2: Dominators, a league of 5 nations battles three different types of Berserker robots. One that focuses on invading planets, another that battles normal space and third that lives in hyperspace.
• In the Star Wolves video game series, Berserkers are a self-replicating machine menace that threatens the known universe for purposes of destruction and/or assimilation of humanity.
• In the Metroid video game series, The massive Leviathans are probes routinely sent out from the planet Phaaze to infect other planets with Phazon radiation and eventually turn these planets into clones of Phaaze, where the self-replication process can continue.
• In the second Deus Ex game, Deus Ex: Invisible War, a videogame features a self-replicating nanomachines bomb in the CGI introduction. A terrorist attack on Boston erased the town and is the beginning of the plot.
• Plague Inc., a plague simulation video game features an artificial self replicating nano-virus, with a built in kill-switch. In-game, the player must evolve symptoms to infect then kill all of humanity whilst keeping the progress of the kill-switch delayed, before they finish the kill-switch and cure of those all infected.
• In Horizon: Zero Dawn, runaway machines that feed off of biomass to replicate themselves effectively wipe out the human race.

Other

• The idea dates back at least as far as Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). A fundamental obstacle of self-replicating machines, how to repair the repair systems, was the critical failure in the automated society described in The Machine Stops.
• In the comic Transmetropolitan a character mentions "Von Neumann rectal infestations" which are apparently caused by "Shit-ticks that build more shit-ticks that build more shit-ticks".
• In the anime Vandread, harvester ships attack vessels from both male- and female-dominated factions and harvest hull, reactors, and computer components to make more of themselves. To this end, Harvester ships are built around mobile factories. Earth-born humans also view the inhabitants of the various colonies to be little more than spare parts.
• In the role-playing game Eclipse Phase, an ETI probe is believed to have infected the TITAN computer systems with the Exsurgent virus to cause them to go berserk and wage war on humanity. This would make ETI probes a form of berserker, albeit one that uses pre-existing computer systems as its key weapons.
• Storm, the trilogy of albums which conclude the comic book series Storm by Don Lawrence (starting with Chronicles of Pandarve 11: The Von Neumann machine) is based on self-replicating conscious machines containing the sum of all human knowledge employed to rebuild human society throughout the universe in case of disaster on Earth. The probe malfunctions and although new probes are built, they do not separate from the motherprobe which eventually results in a cluster of malfunctioning probes so big that it can absorb entire moons.
• Denial-of-service attacks in the virtual world Second Life which work by continually replicating objects until the server crashes are referred to as gray goo attacks. This is a reference to the self-replicating aspects of gray goo. It is one example of the widespread convention of drawing analogies between certain Second Life concepts and the theories of radical nanotechnology.
• In the manga Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, the surface of Mercury is covered in rogue nanomachines from a Gray Goo event and subsequently spawns a being of dubious morphology known as Anomaly.
• Baldr Sky, a Japanese visual novel features self-replicating nanomachines under the name "assemblers". Their inherent threat and a near-catastrophic grey goo event is central to its plot.

See also

• Self-replicating spacecraft § In fiction
• Malware in fiction (category)

External links

• Recursive Creators entry, TvTropes