Prey Mass Market Paperback – Nintendo, October 28, 2008

This was a fantastic book about nanotechnology. Hard to believe it was published in 2009, it is very much relevant today. It starts out as a family book, a stay at home father, Jack, with a hard working wife and three kids including a baby. Dad is quite capable and is better at taking care of the kids than mom is, and she is upset about it. Her high stress job keeps her busy. Jack was forced into unemployment and has been searching for work. He is offered a consulting job at his wife's company. He learns the horrifying details of what they were working on and it has gotten out of hand. I really liked how the story flowed, you were introduced to the family first, then to the disaster. Very thrilling and horrifying in the complications. For the audiobook, the author reads the introduction, his voice weak. The narrator was excellent. It needed an epilogue that we didn't get. Fantastic book, very enjoyable.

Prey is a fun book; I read it cover to cover in one sitting. If that's what you're after (and it was what I was expecting) great.But the plot is a tad implausible. The technology itself, of course, is not -- nanotechnology does, as one character points out early in the book, have the potential to save millions of lives each year, and it does hold some dangers as well. The implausibility in the plot, though, can be summed up by one question: why don't gnats, termites, etc., in the real world behave as Crichton's "swarms" do? That is, why don't the real-world organisms the nano-machines' programming is based on evolve in the same way the nano-machines do in the book? Crichton's only answer, in one sentence buried in the middle, is that the nano-machines are man-made and therefore evolve faster, so they learn in a matter of days how to emulate human appearance, communicate, hunt, avoid danger, etc. But why should their being man-made make any difference?It's worth noting that at least one of Crichton's implicit predictions (the one in Rising Sun) was totally, unquestionably wrong -- the Japanese system of trade and industrial policy led to a huge recession and a near-collapse of the Japanese economy, instead of the corporate domination Crichton foresaw. The problem with Rising Sun, too, was the fact that it didn't ask precisely why this problem hasn't already occurred. In the case of Rising Sun, Crichton predicted that an economy with more government planning and sufficient ruthlessness would out-compete one with less planning. He didn't wonder, even in the book, why, if that were the case, the Soviet Union hadn't already forced the collapse of the U.S. in the sixties. A similar dynamic is at work in Prey. That's not necessarily a killing flaw, but for a novelist with ambitions (pretensions?) of contributing to serious, real-world public debate about current issues, it is worth pointing out.

Even though this book is 20 years old from my reading, I found the story to be prescient and a little scary. The convergence of scientific disciplines and technology continues. That makes this story relevant.

Literature can both reflect societal moods and create them. This book may be an example of this cliche, as it is a jump start on a particular area of technology that is the subject of intense research at the present time: nanotechnology. There is talk about the possibility of self-replicating nanoscale robots, and with also the possibility that these entities could be intelligent, many individuals, scientists and non-scientists alike, feel apprehensive about this technology. The technology is not yet here, but developments in the 21st century are accelerating at an unprecedented rate. The book starts off well, at least after the introduction, which the author has felt the need to insert. The presence of the introduction is a distraction from the story line, at least for me personally, for I want to start the story without any biases or prejudices. The author's opinions in the introduction are somewhat negative about the future and character of humankind. A reader disagreeing with the author's opinions may be tempted to read the book with a hostile frame of mind. The author therefore should have kept his opinions to himself, and have spoken them through the characters in the book. He is clearly very worried about the developments in nanotechnology, and does not trust the scientific community to deal with it responsibly. The author though is bound by the constraint of making the story interesting, and that is hard to do without interjecting a large degree of malevolence in the technologies he is using in his story. Friendly, helpful nanobots are not going to hold anyone's attention for long. The first 150 pages or so of the book were very exhilirating: the tension building in the mind of Jack, the main character, and his doubts regarding his wife's behavior kept my attention. The author does a fine job of capturing his introspection, and in the meantime the reader gets a kind of crash introduction to terminology of evolutionary algorithms and artificial intelligence. Indeed, the reader gets exposed to talk of distributed parallel processing, or "agent-based programs", artificial life, ant routing, genetic algorithms, and protein folding, to name a few. As soon as Jack enters the desert though, the story gets less credible. Since this book has only been released for a few weeks, I could only say why I believe this by revealing the plot, which I don't want to do for the sake of new readers. I was surprised actually that the author took the move he did, as I was expecting the behavior of the nanobots to be much more subtle, as well as their detection. Instead though their behavior was very extreme, and this led me to think of how easy they would be to combat. The behavior of the nanobots would be much more believable if they would have acted in more mischevious ways, and such behavior would follow I think more naturally from the first part of the book. As the story nears its end, the events become more and more unbelievable. In addition, the characters seem to be almost juvenile in their behavior, and the author has the annoying habit of having them constantly using the "F-word". This is supposed to (I guess) make them more realistic, but instead they come across like they are playing nothing more than a difficult video game. In addition, obvious countermeasures to the nano-swarms make the story less believable. One could for example program a collection of swarms to engage in battle with the malevolent ones. Hence in general this is a disappointing book, which again is too bad considering the first part, which was written very well. I did not walk away with a feeling of foreboding that I did when reading the author's "Andromeda Strain" way back when. And if the book was meant to frighten the reader about the perils of nanotechnology, it missed its mark, considerably. But even if it did succeed in instilling fear about the possibility of nanotechnology, the research in this area will continue, and hopefully will be realized very soon.

I have been a Mikael Crichton fan since "Eaters of the Dead". This rival the "AndromedStrain" in hard science and timeliness. A great read and well paced. I could not put it down.

The book was used gently so its condition is still very good. The price was good.The shipping time was good.I’m satisfied with the purchase and the seller.

I simply couldn't put this book down. Scary really, especially when you consider this book was written and because all this is in our world more and more.Thrill of a read.

Book keeps you glued. Takes some time to build its story, goes around and around for awhile, but once it hits the core is amazing. The author keeps you up there continuously. Very entertaining

A real page turner as you can expect from michael crichton

This book perfectly portrays the threats of callous programming, and most importantly depending too much on machines to do your work. Well balanced in narration of the action scenes, the nuances and vivid descriptions as well.