Prey, by Michael Crichton

Perhaps it's not a coincidence that the cover of Prey, by Michael Crichton, is so similar to that of Jurassic Park. They are, after all, the same form of cautionary tale warning mankind to keep his horse before the cart, so to speak. Crichton has reemphasized in Prey his belief that when complex situations involving potentially adaptive and intelligent life are introduced into a system (ecosystem, large island park, etc.), no matter how smart humans think they are in "controlling" these creatures, nature and chaos will win in the end.

In Prey, Crichton introduces protagonist Jack Forman, an unemployed software who used to work with artificial intelligence, particularly with creating group consciousness in software programs. He soon finds out that his wife, a psychologist and CEO, and her company have been involved in nanotechnology studies, trying not only to create artificial intelligence but also artificial life. Forman gets brought in to help try to fix the situation (just as the paleontologists are brought to Jurassic Park to try to stop the dinosaurs from eating all the people). He soon realizes what a massive problem they have with these escaped nanites, which have started to swarm and kill living creatures. The story becomes more intense and is full of twists and turns that are rather uncharacteristic of Crichton's other works, which are usually more straightforward (Congo, Jurassic Park, Great Train Robbery, etc.)

Prey is what it is: a techno thriller with Crichton's usual good storytelling, interspersed with large expositions on artificial life research and software development in general (not unlike his similar exposition in Congo on computer programming, etc.). The exposition isn't killer to the story--Crichton still has one solid plot and conflict--but there are points where you'd love to take a scalpel to the studies of pred-prey software development.

Crichton's characters in Prey tend to most of them be tough and somewhat hard. There's a plot reason for that (which I won't disclose here), but at times it makes some of the secondary characters seem cut from the same mold.

Prey is creepy because the nanites come across as a more realistic jump in technology than the cloning of dinosaurs, making the immediacy of a similar threat in the future more threatening to the reader. I'd recommend it to anyone who's looking for a good techno thriller with a heavy dose of Crichton.

On a final note, I was so very sad to hear of Michael Crichton's death during the November 2008 election. He's been an inspiring author, filmmaker, and thinker to me and I hope to see the bookshelves of the world populated by books as equally good as Mr. Crichton's.


Prey, by Michael Crichton. 2002. HarperCollins. 528 pp. $9.99 (PB reprint).