Title: Prey (365 pages)
Author: Michael Crichton
Published: 2002

Even before the Jurassic Park movies, Michael Crichton had long been considered one of our bestselling novelists. As I have recently discovered, this is for very good reason.’ I was considerably impressed by Prey, not to mention slightly’ upset that I had not latched onto him earlier. If you’re not into thrilling page-turners, stop reading now.

Prey is divided into four books, each of which deals with a different setting as the plot’s energy progresses from ‘Calm with a Side of Suspicion’ to ‘We Have a Problem’ to a ‘Frantic Struggle Against Time’. In each book, more peripheral characters come to the fore, which not only builds very strong characters by the climax of the novel, but saves the reader the trouble of getting to know new people when all he or she wants to do is find out what happens next. As well as having a healthy supporting cast, the first-person voice of Jack, our hero, rings true and proves reliable. He is an intelligent, loving husband, slow to anger and quick to silently ask for the reader’s commiseration. After learning that his wife will disappoint his son by not making a game: ‘I sighed. It was, I told myself, a sign of her caring.’ While this seems untrue to the reader, it allows us to sympathize with Jack. As the narrative progresses, it is a sympathy his character will require more and more.

So what is the book about, anyway? In a word: nanotechnology. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry; you’re not alone. However, Crichton offers quite a sufficient explanation of this very interesting and somewhat frightening technology in the introduction to the novel. And in the case of further interest, he provides an entire bibliography of his own research in the appendix. This book is, more than anything else, assiduously researched. Crichton’s knowledge of the subject he is writing about is first-rate. And although it is a very complicated technology, he does a fantastic job of making it palatable to the common reader as it comes off the page. He makes nanotechnology scary to the average Joe, which is no easy task. He quotes K. Eric Drexler, saying ‘There are many people, including myself, who are quite uneasy about the consequences of this technology for the future.’ Without giving too much away, this book features tiny computers acting in unison’ learning to think almost as if they were humans.

Prey is akin to The Matrix in that it deals with artificial intelligence and the human effort to combat it once it has exceeded the scientists’ locus of control. Concerning artificial organisms, Crichton quotes Doyne Farmer and Alletta Belin, saying’ ‘[T]hey will reproduce, and will ‘evolve’ into something other than their original form; they will be ‘alive’ under any reasonable definition of the word.’ As any of my long-time readers will know, I have a soft spot for the [mostly] horrific proliferations of Stephen King. I found this novel to be just as scary as anything Mr. King has ever written, perhaps even worse, because it all seems so entirely plausible.

In summary, Prey‘ is intelligently written and researched, extremely compelling, and interesting to boot. It is certainly food for thought. It is the perfect techno-thriller. I will be returning to the Crichton section at my earliest convenience; if you’ve never experienced him, it’s time you should. And if you have, Prey is a sure bet.