In addition to my current book Making a Killing, I’m also at the proposal stage with another book on the social and environmental impacts that we can expect from the evolving and interdisciplinary field of nanotechnology. Very few people are writing about the potential impacts of these technologies in a critical way, and a colleague and I have proposed to edit a volume on these impacts. The first press we sent the book to came back to us today with a rejection, but an interesting one (if that’s possible). They liked the idea, but wanted us to instead co-author a book on it, rather than doing an edited volume (apparently, edited volumes don’t sell as well). The weird part about this is that the co-authored book would almost certainly be less strong academically and critically than the edited volume, which would pull together the contributions of people who are tops in the field.

For now, we’re going to shop the proposal around to another press (probably MIT) and see what happens. Keep your fingers crossed for me. I feel like the potential economic, social, and environmental impacts of nanotech are serious and need to be discussed thoughtfully — I hope for the book I’ll edit to be part of that evolving dialog.