Prey by Michael Crichton

[Menzo]

I'm a sucker for Crichton, but with Prey he's gone a bit too far. It's clear that he was envisioning a movie (which was signed before he even started writing the book), so what you end up with is some kind of book/script hybrid.

The story is interesting in that this-could-never-happen kind of way, but it's so full of science and logic holes that anyone who reads Qt3 will probably hate it.

I could swear that he cut-n-pasted several sequences straight out of Andromeda Strain (which was a great book and the only movie adaptation of his work that I like). Instead of a runaway virus in AS, you get a runaway nanotech bug swarm in Prey.

It's a fast read, though - took me about four hours to get through it so it was at least a good distraction on my flights back home from Thanksgiving.

[Drunkagain]

Yeah, I enjoyed it, but it definately felt like a made for the movies book. I got the same feel from it that I did The Lost World. Not a bad book, but not his best!

[Anders Hallin]

Is it based on Prey, by 3DRealms? :D

[Chris]

Crichton has always dissapointed me, it seems he comes up with a great idea for a novel but can't do anything with it. I really liked the idea of Jurassic Park but didn't like the execution of it.

[Tyjenks]

Crichton has always dissapointed me, it seems he comes up with a great idea for a novel but can't do anything with it. I really liked the idea of Jurassic Park but didn't like the execution of it.

That's exactly how I felt with Timeline. Waited for it to go somewhere. Still waiting.

[Met_K]

Crichton's powers aren't best-shown in his longer works. He's a very good power writer. He's interesting and fun to read on many levels, especially when he's at his best, but he just drags it on so long sometimes. It's like he has no editor to look over his shoulder and say, "Hey, look, Mike. This is a fun book, but look, do you really need to put a bunch of stamping dinosaurs in at the end who're pissed off and circling a clearing while pissing, then licking it up? No, you won't. That's just filler, man. Stick to what you're best at---action and suspense."

Mike is always at his best when he's writing very incidental pieces. Happen to be underwater, with no way out, and you start having hallucinations that can kill you? Yeah, that would suck, bad. I'm afraid of that. Army taking advantage of something, then ending up starting what could be the death of us all? Yeah, sounds about right, that sucks too. Dead people who can't die... again? Yeah, I'm afraid of that. Big mean dinosaurs on a completely self-contained island? Hrm, let me think. Apes that are supersmart and can't be seen or killed? Yeah, that would blow.

Crichton's very incidental, and almost all of his works play off something very basic. Fear of the unknown, fear of self, insanity, etc. Hell, he -was- a doctor. But then he goes and throws in time travel? OK, you know what, Mike, that was just bad. Just plain bad.

He should go back to writing good books, and being the present-version of H.G. Wells.

[Miramon]

Last Crichton I liked was Andromeda Strain. After the zillionth Luddite cautionary tale in a row, it gets old. Is he writing with a quill pen by candlelight?

I have only looked at the jacket for Prey so I could be wrong about what is actually in the book (lots of jacket blurbs are insanely incorrect.) However, if as the blurb suggests, someone ever builds a nanotech assembler, we will achieve Vinge's singularity very quickly. probably before anyone ever gets around to deliberately making a nanotech weapon. For example, see Blood Music, by uhh, uhh, I forget. We will either wind up transcended or turned to boiling goo as the case may be.

Anyway, that tech level is so awesome in its potential that portraying it in terms of a conventional society that we can reasonably understand is implausible in itself. The best attempt I've seen at a fictional society which is reasonably stable and still uses a lot of self-reproducing nanotech is Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi; and though it was a fun book, it was not terribly plausible either. Stephenson's Diamond Age is more or less reasonable assuming that they haven't got assemblers, but have to just crank out the nanobots from a specialized factory device. As soon as stuff becomes capable of self-replication a la a Von Neumann device, the technology gets seriously out of hand and may possibly be beyond our ability even to conceive properly.

[Met_K]

The thing that I always find funny about nanotech, and superhuman computers in general, is why do people always assume they'll destroy us? I mean, I could easily picture a superhuman computer coming up with all the solutions to a horrible world, and managing it with a caring hand. What's so completely impossible about that? We try to turn it off, it stops us and says "Fuck off, don't do that, I didn't even try and hurt you," and then we learn not to mess with it and it goes about it's business.

If we create a superhuman computer that's so insanely smart, why in the -hell- would it go insane? It makes no sense.

[voltaic]

I could swear that he cut-n-pasted several sequences straight out of Andromeda Strain (which was a great book and the only movie adaptation of his work that I like).

I thought the adaptation of "Eaters of the Dead" was decent.


If we create a superhuman computer that's so insanely smart, why in the -hell- would it go insane? It makes no sense.

Movies need drama.

[Brad Grenz]

For example, see Blood Music, by uhh, uhh, I forget.

Greg Bear. John Shirley is working on a book about nanotech called Crawlers right now that I've got my eye on. He mentioned on his message board that he was worried about his book being seen as a knock off of Prey.

I think Crichton has that problem where you become so successful that you get completely full of youself and start buying your own hype. I understand he even wrote some kind or introduction warning the world about the dangers of nanotechnology...

[Anonymous]

You are correct. Greg Bear wrote this book in about 1998.