Product Description

The new novel from the bestselling author of Jurassic Park. A terrifying page-turner in classic Crichton tradition, masterfully combining the elements of a heart-pounding thriller with cutting-edge technology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14200 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-04
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In Prey, bestselling author Michael Crichton introduces bad guys that are too small to be seen with the naked eye but who are no less deadly or intriguing than the runaway dinosaurs that made 1990's Jurassic Park such a blockbuster success. High-tech whistle-blower Jack Forman used to specialise in programming computers to solve problems by mimicking the behaviour of efficient wild animals--swarming bees or hunting hyena packs, for example. Now he's unemployed and is finally starting to enjoy his new role as stay-at-home dad. All would be domestic bliss if it were not for Jack's suspicions that his wife, who's been behaving strangely and working long hours at the top-secret research labs of Xymos Technology, is having an affair.

When he's called in to help with her hush-hush project, it seems like the perfect opportunity to see what she's been doing, but Jack quickly finds there's a lot more going on in the lab than an illicit affair. Within hours of his arrival at the remote testing centre, Jack discovers his wife's firm has created self-replicating nanotechnology--a literal swarm of microscopic machines. Originally meant to serve as a military eye in the sky, the swarm has now escaped into the environment and is seemingly intent on killing the scientists trapped in the facility. The reader realises early, however, that Jack, his wife and their fellow scientists have more to fear from the hidden dangers within the lab than from the predators without.

The monsters may be smaller in this book, but Crichton's skill for suspense has grown, making Prey a scary read that's hard to set aside. It's not without minor flaws: the science in this novel requires more explanation than did the cloning of dinosaurs, leading to lengthy and sometimes dry academic lessons. And while the coincidence of Xymos's new technology running on the same program that Jack created keeps the plot moving, it may be more than some readers can swallow. But thanks in part to a sobering foreword in which Crichton warns of the real dangers of technology that continues to evolve more quickly than common sense, Prey succeeds in gripping readers with a tense and frightening tale of scientific suspense. --Benjamin Reese

Daily Express
`A giant of a writer.'

Publishers Weekly
At the top of his game, dealing with a host of important themes, in his most gripping (novel) since Jurassic Park

Customer Reviews

Fairly Good Techno Thriller
Prey is set mainly in the Nevada desert. At a research lab, an experiment with limited intelligence, nano technology, has gone wrong. some of the nano particles have escaped into the atmosphere, and are starting to learn, adapt and multiply outside of the laboratory environment. As they become more intelligent, they start to become a threat to the scientists
inside their facility.

I found this book slow moving at first. We are introduced to themain character, Jack Forman, an unemployed IT expert, and his family. His wife works at the research lab, in the desert, but the first part of the book deals mainly with Jack, and the increasingly strange behaviour of his wife. I suppose this is good from the character building point of view.

Once, he visits the research lab, however, the book starts to get going, and the suspense starts to build, as they realise the enormity of the problem that they have on their hands, and the novel becomes a race against time, to destroy the nano particles. Overall, a fairly good read, with a few twists, but, also, very 'technical' in places.

Erratic Thriller
"Prey" starts off reasonably slowly. It is largely a character-driven piece for the first 150 pages or so. There are several intrigues in there that have relevance to the overall story, and it's certainly not a waste of pages, but those who really want to get down to the business of the hostile nanobot swarm the blurb promises will have to wait till around page 200 to get to it.

Once we get there, it's an effective thriller. The plus-points are the suspense Crichton builds during the scenes where the characters face off against the swarm and the intrigues provided by the gradual increase of self-awareness and evolution of the swarm. The main negative is that all of the characters in the book except for the protagonist Jack (and his new love interest Mae) are exceptionally annoying. Before Jack gets to the nanobot factory, his kids provide the main irritation with their cliched squabbling and insults. Once he gets to the factory, everyone who works there is annoying, and I knew early on that I would be happy to see any of them die. I don't know how nanotech engineers could be as stupid as these guys, I really don't. There is a sense of cliche throughout this book in terms of the characters' interactions and dialogue that is really clunky.

I also thought the last section of the book was rather silly and not remotely feasible. Crichton does a fairly good job of making a sentient nanoswarm and the technology behind it seem feasible and realistic, but then he goes even further with it to a point where I think it's rather ridiculous given the fact that Crichton supposedly believes this really could happen one day.

Nevertheless, Crichton wraps everything up successfully and answers all relevant questions. It was quite exciting at some points along the way. But it didn't have the same breakneck exhilaration as Jurassic Park, and it was marred by cheesy and annoying dialogue and characters. It also has a rather unbelievable final quarter. But it's a decent techno-thriller to while away two or three days with.

Dire
The usually excellent Michael Crichton has turned out something of a dud with Prey. It's so bad that I abandoned the book around the half-way mark, which is seriously disappointing for an author who had "page-turning" ability in spades on previous efforts. What's gone wrong here? Well, it's all rather formulaic and familiar - clever technology goes horribly wrong (so pretty much a re-tread of Jurassic Park, Westworld etc) - and the characters and dialogue are just awful - awful!. It's hard to make a cloud of nanoparticles floating around in the Nevada desert as menacing as a re-constructed dinosaur, and you sense that even the author is having a hard time trying to make it exciting. Padded with a lot of science and important sounding academic references, there's no escaping the fact that Prey is destined for a remainder pile near you soon. Disappointing.