Prey

Novel, Michael Crichton, 2002

My husband and I were on a road trip this weekend, and we have a habit of reading out loud to each other as we drive.  This usually works best if the passenger reads to the driver, btw.  Since I'm in the middle of Dune, we opted for another book that we could get through quickly and that neither of us had started yet.  Enter Prey.  I found this lying on the side of the road, so I picked it up, hoping it would be as much fun as Jurassic Park or Sphere, which are my only other two Crichton reads, I think.

Is it wrong to imagine
nanoparticles as fleas?

Well, it wasn't.  It was certainly good for an amusing car ride, and there were some very suspenseful passages, so I wasn't disappointed on my major expectations.  However, I found the whole thing a little disjointed, and some of the pseudoscience was really insufferable.  More on that after a brief summary for those who haven't read it:

In Prey, Jack Forman (solid hero name) is a computer programmer or something, and his wife Julia works for a nanotechnology development company.  The first part of the book sets up some strange events going down around their house--Julia seems irritable, the baby gets a mystery rash, etc.--that, since this is Crichton, after all, are inevitably the effect of said nanotechnology run amok.  The middle of the book is when the nanotechnology gobbledegook gets thick, as we are led on a tour of the company's creepy desert facilities and are introduced to their product: a swarm of tiny particles that can control themselves as a group, like a flock of birds.  This swarm is rapidly evolving, to the extent that it "learns" new behaviors every few hours.  Oh yeah, and it's trained to be a predator.  Why, you ask?  Well, that's how Jack got involved in this whole mess--he wrote some predator-imitating software that Julia's company bought.  So he's trying to kill the swarm.  The rest of the book really picks up the pace as the swarm develops crazy new ideas and hunts down the humans at every step.

An official science picture of nanotechnology

This last part is pretty fun.  However.  The two thirds of the book it took to lead up to the crazy swarm madness were way too much.  Crichton spends a few hundred pages setting up all these great mystery hooks in a slow-ish pace, then races to the end with an entirely different plot than what he started with.  He took the last two pages to explain those little teasers he started with and blew his climax on a crazy subplot that entered in the last section of the book.  This rapid change in pace (nothing-at-all-happening to holy-crap-everything-happening-at-once to what-it's-over?) is what leads to the book feeling disjointed, I think.

What I kept hoping was coming in Prey

I also happen to have a pretty low tolerance for the technical specifications of the nanotechnology.  I understand that that is probably what a lot of people like about Crichton--the THIS COULD ALMOST REALLY HAPPEN BECAUSE LOOK IT'S SCIENCE sort of feeling.  But I don't like when the story gets interrupted every few pages so that Jack can explain to the reader "key" details like what exactly the nanoparticle assemblers are made of.

Anyway, my husband and I just skipped those parts and used some funny voices for the dialogue, and it turned out to be a very enjoyable trip.