Name: Prey
Rating: 3.595959595959596 (99 reviews)
ISBN: 9780061015724

Michael Crichton

Deep in the remote Nevada desert, eight people are trapped inside of the Xymos Corporation by a rapidly evolving swarm of predatory molecules that have massed together to form a powerful and intelligent organism that is targeting its creators.

Prey

Aamna

I’m sure it made a lot of sense when Crichton first experienced this as a fever dream. Didn’t translate on paper.

Shape Mismatch

This book can redefine the pop vision with which Nanotechnology is viewed. 
However its ellaborate writing warrants a very movie esque experience as the pages turn with more anticipation than frames of one such movie would. 

I'm surprised that Prey is not already a major feature film

Kirsten Simkiss

I feel like this one deserves 3 stars. It has a great concept and characters that just really let me down.

Here's a quick summary, glossing over some of the smaller details: (view spoiler)[The main character, Jack, has recently been fired and has been a stay-at-home dad for the past six months. After his wife starts acting oddly, he decides to take up an offer the corrupt company he was fired from to help them work on something they sold the company that's been acting up. Aside from his wife acting oddly - not coming home some nights, not calling when she's going to be late, looking like a super model, behaving and dressing as though she's having an affair and on drugs - other odd things occur as well. For instance, one night after his wife comes home, his infant daughter Amanda breaks out into a bright scarlet rash all over her body that is somehow magically cured by an MRI within moments. His son Eric mentions having strange men vacuuming out the house and seeing a strange man in his mother's car one evening. When it's later revealed to him that his wife's company unleashed a sun-powered, reproducing robotic plague (created by specialized e. coli) on the world using one of his old programs, he decides that he has to destroy it. After destroying the swarms of nanobots in the wild, he realizes that a different type has already infiltrated his coworkers and his wife, taking over their bodies and eating them from the inside out while controlling their every move. Eventually able to kill them off using the phage and blowing up the factory they were created in. He then has to infect his family with the phage to save them from what his wife had done to them and hope that it hadn't spread elsewhere before they can fit it into vaccines. (hide spoiler)]

Most of my complaint lies with the main character. Jack was someone who went to MIT, but when it comes down to obvious conclusions about the nanobots, he conveniently forgets them. When you're dealing with robotics and computers, you want to keep them away from magnets. It's actually mentioned when he first arrives at the facility that the super magnet would fry his computer. It's also the solution in saving his daughter at one point in the book, which is accidental. She's cured using the MRI machine, which has a high-powered magnet in it. I don't think it would be possible to hit the guy in the face with more obvious solutions, but he misses them completely. He's a decent dad, but he doesn't bother to actually confront her wife about her weird behavior until the end of the book, at which point he knows she's been affected by the nanobots. 

The smartest character in the story is Mae, who honestly is someone I would want as part of my group in any survival story. She's level headed, smart, and she stays calm when they going gets tough. She was 100% my favorite part of the story and I'm very glad she survived it all.

The science is off, but given that it was written in 2002 and it's now 2016 - not to mention it's science fiction - just remember to read it with a grain of salt and you'll be golden. If the science bothers you more than a main character that can't connect the very obvious dots, I'd have to disagree with you there. It's science fiction and science has changed a lot over the years. 

It flows well. I read it all in one afternoon, but it's not the best thing ever by any stretch of the imagination.

In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles—micro-robots—has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self- reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive.

It has been programmed as a predator. It is evolving swiftly, becoming more deadly with each passing hour.

Every attempt to destroy it has failed.

And we are the prey.

As fresh as today's headlines, Michael Crichton's most compelling novel yet tells the story of a mechanical plague and the desperate efforts of a handful of scientists to stop it. Drawing on up-to-the-minute scientific fact, Prey takes us into the emerging realms of nanotechnology and artificial distributed intelligence—in a story of breathtaking suspense. Prey is a novel you can't put down. 

Because time is running out.
--back cover

Sarah Escorsa

An entertaining enough read but not up to Crichton's usual standards.

Benjamin Harlow

Some interesting concepts. Perhaps it’s just dated badly but the dialogue and the characters were terrible.

Prey

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