Rating: 
Summary: Science and Chaos, Together Again
Review: OK, so I just bought the book today and I haven't finished yet. I'm only 150 pages into it. But I couldn't pass up the chance to be the FIRST person on Amazon[.com] to review it. I've never been first!OK, I've never left a review before either. But I am a huge Crichton fan. The man is brilliance personified. As always, Crichton is on top of his game as a master of cutting-edge techno-suspense. He knows his subject matter and knows it well. It's hard to tell where the facts end and where the fiction begins. He blends reality with fantasy so seamlessly, it just sucks you in. Unlike other Crichton novels, it is written first-person. However, despite this departure from the usual third-person format, Crichton's suspense-driven style remains completely intact. He drops just enough hints and twists to keep you guessing and turning the pages. Written from the perspective of an experienced software engineer, Crichton throws enough computer science jargon in the book to stimulate the mind of a programmer, such as myself. Like I said, the man is smart and knows his subject matter. Good book, thus far. And I've never read a Crichton book that has disappointed me when I've finished... I'll finish reading it, and if by some miracle the ending really [is bad], I'll be back to revoke this review. "Obey me, I Am Root"
Rating:
Summary: Among Crichton's Best
Review: Just as "Jurassic Park" was a cautionary tale for the dangers of tampering with the genetic code, so to is "Prey" a warning. This time, Michael Crichton has chosen to explore the potential and hazards of nanotechnology; the fashioning of robots at the molecular level. The power of these machines is that they are small enough to go anywhere, and their capabilities are limited only by human creativity. However, since they are so small, they need to be able to apply adaptive learning in order to accomplish their assigned tasks, and that's where the trouble starts. The novel begins with Jack Forman, stay at home dad, and long time, but currently unemployed software engineer, shopping for placemats. This touch of normalcy sets up an environment where Crichton can rapidly ratchet up the tension, as an all-American home life turns distinctly scary. Moreover, Crichton has written the book in the first person, so the reader really has the opportunity to roam around Jack's head. As a result, Jack may be the best character Crichton has written to date. His emotions leap off the page, and his thought processes allow Crichton to seamlessly integrate necessary expository elements into the flow of the novel. Of course, Jack doesn't remain the house-husband for long. It turns out that there are problems at Xymos Corporation, where his wife is a vice-president. It seems that they've lost control of some of the nano-particle swarms that they were working on, and they need Jack to help bring them back into the fold. As it turns out, Jack wrote an early version of the software (which is based upon predator-prey relationships) that is being used as the brains behind the swarm. As an added level of intrigue, Jack suspects that his wife is having an affair with one of the people at Xymos' fabrication plant. I don't want to say much more for fear of ruining the plot, but as one would expect, the situation quickly spirals out of control in typical Crichton-esque fashion. Specifically, I think I can say without giving anything away, that he does a superb job of imbuing what are essential machines with an incredible sense of malice. Anyone who thinks that tiny machines acting in groups aren't scary will quickly have their minds changed by this novel. As with all of Crichton's best work "Prey" leaves you not only entertained, but feeling like you learned something as well. At the same time, unlike "Jurassic Park" and "Timeline" which employed technically possible, but functionally questionable technology, nanotechnology is on its way, and is already here to a degree. Already there are microchip sized laboratories that can perform dozens of experiments on a single drop of blood, and there are exotic materials custom built for specific functions from the molecular level. It is entirely likely, even probable, that within ten or twenty years, we will see some crude version of the technology that plays the central role in the novel. As a result, Crichton writes with a sense of urgency that makes this a thriller you don't want to put down. This is definitely one of his best novels to date: an incredibly exciting story filled with cutting edge, but easily understood, technology. A must read! Enjoy!
Rating: 
Summary: Serve my nanobots with saccharine, please ....
Review: Mr. Crichton has developed a habit of taking current technologic challenges and submitting them to flights of fancy. Such is the case with his latest novel. Here is the thesis: increasingly complex systems become increasingly uncontrolable, and at some point may develop behaviors beyond those intended or anticipated by the designers. In a sense these behaviors may mimic evolution, at some point the creatures imitating if not in fact becoming sentient creatures. Of course these creatures would not be worth a novel if they didn't do Really Bad Things, and couldn't be contained or controlled in a conventional way. The creatures in this case are microscopic machines manufactured (bred?) to act as collectively as a camera, that take on the characterists of a predatory algorithm conveniently built into its programming by its designers. They attack things, multiply, threaten to take over the earth; well, you get the idea. The subplot concerns the marital relationship between an unemployed programmer who just happened to design the algorithm, and his wife, who just happens to be an executive in the company who inadvisedly included his algorithm into the microbots. Did she cheat on him or not? Does the world end? What unswered questions will we have at the last page? Sticky sweet melodrama to be sure, but worth an afternoon to read. The thought came to me as I read another of Mr. Crichton's books (Airframe) that he had written it with the movie rights in mind. No deep character development, thank you, and evenly paced, if not contrived, action. The same happened as I read this book. Now that is not necessarily a bad thing. If you want a little more meat with your starch, maybe try Stephen King. A lot more energy could have been given to what the principals felt and though along the whole way. Narrated by a man who on the one hand is troubled by his wife's (possibly unfaithful) behavior, and on the other by the technology he spawned that threatens mankind, I would have liked a better image of what made him tick, and a little less stereotype. Being part geek by nature I didn't mind all the techno stuff, but it may be off-putting to some. These reservations aside, Prey is worth the time to read it, or as in this case, to hear while on the way to work. Keep your literary expecations in check, though, and try not to lose any sleep over the thought that there may be nanobots in your soup.
Rating:
Summary: Another Crichton Thriller
Review: I like his books b/c they combine cutting edge techno-concepts into a thriller you can't put dowm. This is another great example of the same.
Rating:
Summary: A High Tech Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Review: Crichton does an excellent job of writing a heart-pounding high tech thriller! This is a story of nano-technology gone out of control. Those familiar with Ben Bova's tales (Venus, The Asteroid War series, etc.) would know the concept of nano or microscopic computer technology going in. In both cases the potential is there for both good results and total disaster. It is scary because science is probably trying very hard to perfect this technology and the way things seem to be designed today; the odds are greater for disaster than good. In this novel, a man (Jack) out of work has to take care of his kids until he can find a new job while his wife starts putting in incredibly long hours. His wife starts acting very strange (like a Stepford Wife), being very standoffish with her family and acting very "weird" around them. She starts beating her baby when he starts crying and is constantly snapping at her kids. She starts looking "younger" and leaner especially in the face. Jack starts suspecting that she may be having an affair and when he discusses her behavior with a few people they tell him it is typical behavior of someone who is. Jack seems to not want to face that possibility or maybe senses something else linked to the job. Weird things start to happen like a mysterious black line that seems to engulf his wife and then disappear and then Jack sees what appears to be a young man in his wife's car with her who seems to vanish mysteriously. Other strange things occur like Jack's baby gets a mysterious rash that engulfs his body. Jack rushes him to the emergency room and the doctors are perplexed as the baby gets worse and worse. Finally, they call for an MRI. When the baby is put in there the MRI gets damaged and the baby is mysteriously better. The doctors mentioned that the MRI has a strong magnetic field so the reader immediately suspects that the magnetism of the MRI destroyed whatever was harming the baby. Being in the computer field, I know that magnets destroy computer components, so you can kind of guess what was affecting the baby. When Jack's wife is injured in a car crash, Jack is asked to go back to work (at the same company she was at) and go to where his wife was working to solve a computer programming problem that is threatening to wreck a major project involving nano-technology the company is working on. Jack goes to the facility in the desert to try to help. When he gets there he finds that some of the people working there, like his wife, are acting very strange. For some reason Jack never suspects the truth about them even when he sees evidence of duplicates of some of the people being made. Crichton has written a riveting tale that I highly recommend. The only drawback for me was that the first two pages of the book take place at the end of the story so you know that Jack and his co-worker (Mae) will survive throughout most of the "inescapable" perils of the book. This took away some of the suspense of those scenes.
Rating:
Summary: One of his best
Review: Crichton returns to top form with "Prey". This time out his protagonist must deal with an apparent crisis at a fabrication plant in Nevada. Jack Forman is a programmer, and presumably the underlying difficulty is a code glitch, but events seems to implicate the plant's use of nanotechnology, and some mysterious behavior by Jack's wife, a top executive at the fabrication plant. None of these elements would distinguish this book from a hundred other thrillers, but Crichton brings some special ingredients to the mix: fewer cliches than most of his peers, though more than I would have liked; a plausible technology well backed by information; a slick writing style that goes down like ice cream; more attention to character development than usual. As compared with some recent Crichton efforts, notably "Timeline" and "Airframe" this book is taut and quite brief. The characters are better written, the situations much less implausible. This book marks a return to the form of "Andromeda Strain" and "Jurassic Park" Most of the action occurs within a forty-eight hour period, and Crichton does a good job of showing how the limits of time and the characters' knowledge of the situation restrict their choices. I believe that some other reviewers considered these "holes" in the plot, but I cannot agree. Jack would have done things differently had he known what he was getting into, but he plausibly does not know these things. The technology under discussion here, nanotechnology, has been a fixture of science fiction and science speculation for over fifteen years. Experienced SciFi readers might approach this book with a certain amount of reserve, wondering why it took Crichton so long to follow Drexler, "Blood Music", "Gryphon", "Nanotech Chronicles", "Assemblers of Infinity" and "Aristoi", among others.But Crichton writes thrillers, rather than pure Science Fiction, and his take on nanotechnology owes as much to population biology, artificial life, emergent behavior, and microbial behavior as it does to K. Eric Drexler. He has clearly read a good deal, his bibliography was lovely, and he only fell into the didactic mode about 5 times during the novel-- not much for Crichton. "Prey" is told in the first person, and the character of Jack Forman dominates the novel. Crichton invests far more effort than usual in giving Jack depth, and the results are quite pleasing. Much of the early section of the book takes place against the backdrop of Jack's career as a stay-at-home Dad, buying place mats and picking kids up from soccer practice. Some readers, seeking escape from a similar life, will not find this part entertaining. But it does ground Jack's character in a reality different from the technocrisis, a new twist for Crichton. As stated above, the book is quite brief, and seems shorter than it is. The climax and ending come with the speed of a short story, and the resolution seems to make far too little emotional impact on the protagonist. The emphasis on Jack also drains most of the life out of the other characters--- they are mere acquaintances of Jack's, and it shows. None of this really detracts from the book, and the refusal to milk the ending may simply show restraint by a seasoned writer. I confess that I am writing this review because I find too many of the other posted reviews unjustly harsh. Comparing "Prey" with recent work by Clancy, Preston and Child, and other work by Crichton himself makes this book look even better. It has definite limitations, to be sure, but within those it has a richness the competition can only envy.
Rating: 
Summary: The worst book I've ever read
Review: Do not lose your time in reading this terrible novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Poor effort from an author who should know better
Review: Read this one on a glowing recommendation from my CS 511 prof - which just goes to prove just how stupid the academic elite can be. (Hey, I just proved Dr. Crichton's point and I didn't even have to create a race of super-powered machines to do it.) I'm just glad I got it out of the Borders bargain rack instead of paying list for it.
WARNING - HERE BE SPOILERS...
1) The characters are flatter than lavash bread. Jack is the put-upon saint, Julia is the career-chasing harridan, Ricky is the too-slick corporate type, and so on. I've read better characterization in "Xena: Warrior Princess" fanfiction.
2) Oh-so-convenient plot twists. The techie gurus involved in the Xymos project just happen to need an expert on evolutionary programming, which Jack just happens to have pioneered, so they just happen to fly him out to their top-secret research lab which just happens to be 160 miles from nowhere in the Nevada desert. Sorry, that's just a little too much coincidence for my diet. Oh, and by the way, Dr. Crichton: You've done the science run amok thing many, many times before, and considerably better. Find a new hobbyhorse, please.
3) Shoddy research - and since this is allegedly Crichton's forte, this upset me more than anything.
* Please pick an element - either the nanobots are carbon or silicon. If they're C, there's no reason to eat the memory chips; if Si, no reason to eat bunnies/snakes/humans. (Then too, if silicon was all they wanted, why only take the memory chips and leave the CPUs and such alone?)
* The 'bots should never have been able to survive their own manufacturing process - a 33-tesla magnetic field, pulsed or not, would fuse any metallic assemblage into unusable slag, and fry pretty much any electronically based memory storage system. (My Palm gets scrambled whenever I walk inside the 10-gauss limit of the chem building's NMR unit - that's only .001 T.) All they would have had to do to kill the 'bots permanently would be to pulse that sucker a couple times.
* Phage viruses do ugly things to bacteria, but they wouldn't touch any non-bacterial organism - like, oh, a 'bot.
* Crichton's handling of computer programming hasn't improved any since "Jurassic Park." When Jack goes code-diving into the 'bots' programming, I was painfully reminded of the BS hacking displayed by the kids (it was Tim in the book, Lex in the movie.)
4) As a previous reviewer said, plot holes a T. rex could stroll through. The last chapter (I refuse to call it a conclusion) raises more questions than it answers. The just-happens-to syndrome also recurs in full force.
The only thing that saved this book from a one-star review? One of the programmers is depicted as wearing a "Ghost in the Shell" T-shirt. (For those who've never hung out with an anime otaku or watched late-night Cartoon Network, GITS is a famous Japanese animated drama, which began as a graphic novel and spawned two animated movies and a TV series. It deals with a computerized world in which a rogue program evolves to sentience within the Internet, and how it interacts with the human world. GITS was the inspiration for "The Matrix," and it's also one of my favorite anime series. Dumb, but true.)
Speaking of which, I think I'm going to go throw my copy of "Ghost in the Shell" into the DVD player. At least Mamoru Oshii dealt with intelligent machinery, well, intelligently.
Rating: 
Summary: Typical Crichton Fare
Review: Crichton didn't go far enough in his vision of what nanotechnology is really capable of. Granted, in the book, nanotechnology is brand new and so we don't get to see it in all its glory, but we are led to believe that it is good only for turning once-well adjusted people into evil superhuman zombies. I don't have a problem with technology being corrupt, but the direction Crichton takes us in, I thought, is a tad juvenile and could easily have been concocted by an eleven-year-old.
Despite this drawback, the book was phenomenal for the first third. I found the stay-at-home-dad protagonist to be Crichton's most sympathetic, fully-fleshed, totally relatable character, and it was moving how emotionally confused he is at the prospects of his fantasy marriage falling apart. He's depressed. He's tired. He's flawed. He's human.
Then, as soon as he visits the Xymos research compound, he morphs into a typical Crichton square-jawed-walking-encyclopedia-MacGyver who is familiar with every single study conducted in the field of science and every paper written in any academic science journal since the dawn of mankind. And of course he can recall every last obscure detail from any of these studies and papers in a matter of nanoseconds. And all this from a guy who's been out of work for half a year. For once I'd like to see a Crichton protagonist declare, "I have no freakin' idea what's going on here!"
The storytelling is a little sloppy. He throws us all these mysterious, gripping clues and hints and then leaves you wondering about them until the last handful of pages. Basically it's: "You remember all those mysterious and gripping clues earlier in the book? Well, here are their explanations. Number one . . ." I enjoy the mystery, but not how the mystery is revealed.
I'm probably being too harsh. Did I enjoy the book while I was reading it? A resounding yes. A critic wrote that Prey is Crichton's most "cinema-ready" novel. While I disagree, it's certainly one of his strongest.
For a much more arresting view of what nanotechnology is capable of, read Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines.
Rating:
Summary: Chrichton at his Best!
Review: One of the best Crichton books yet!
Absolutely no complaints at all! Suspensefull, riveting and original plot. The writing was so vivid, that as I turned each and every page I couldn't help but visualise the story in my mind. Like all his books, the underlying supportive facts and attention to detail immerse the reader so intently that he can't help but believe that he is part of a real life experience.
If you Like a little science fiction coupled with todays' cutting edge nano-technological advances, with a lot of mystery and a little drama, this book is for you!!
A guaranteed movie blockbuster if it goes to the cinema!!
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