"Prey" by Michael Crichton
Reviewed by "Michael Stone"

Before it turns, rather shakily, into another version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", Michael Crichton's "Prey" is a pretty good technothriller that finds yet another thing about modern life to scare us about and does a pretty good job of doing it. ( I wonder how he manages to get out of bed some days without being scared to death of a new danger he hasn't thought up... )
Crichton says that "Prey" is what came about when he tried to think of what the "Frankenstein" monster-on-the-loose theme would look like today. Instead of having Boris Karloff lumber around, "Prey" centers on the emerging science of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology, building microscopic machines out of molecules, is expected to be one of the defining technologies of the coming century, but as you might expect, it's not something you can just gin up an assembly line and do. Finding a way to get molecules to essentially assemble themselves into useful machines has been the goal of much money and manpower for several years now, and although a lot of progress has been made, it's still a technology largely confined to labs.
Crichton's novel starts with a breakthrough gone bad. The Xymos Corporation, for which our hero's wife works, has found a way to manufacture a nanite camera for use inside a human or over a battlefield quickly and easily by marrying the tiny machines with E. Coli bacteria that take in organic material and excrete molecules that the machines can assemble into more machines. The only problem is that some of the nanites were accidentally released into the air outside the remote Nevada manufacturing location and are now acting like a swarm of bees and attacking animals and people. Our hero, Jack Forman, gets brought in because he's an expert in programming distributed systems, that is, breaking down a task into very simple rules so that machines with limited memory and processing power can still accomplish big tasks, such as ants and bees being able to build complex structures together when individually they wouldn't. Jack, it turns out, wrote computer instructions based on predator goal-oriented activity that were loaded into the nanites and now that they're out in the wild, they're following his instructions with a vengeance and it's up to Jack to figure out what they're doing and how to stop them.

This part of the book is a wonderful read and genuinely creepy and scary once it's impressed on you how deadly the little things can be. Like a high-tech update of "The Naked Jungle", the nanites are multiplying by eating tissue and using it to build themselves and may be impossible to stop if they get out of the desert. Crichton even does a clever update on "Them" with a scene where Forman and an assistant go into the nanites' slimy cave "nest" to try and destroy their "birthing" chamber.
But even Michael Crichton can have bad ideas, and some of them find their way into otherwise good stories. Crichton has been saying in interviews that he's had a vision for quite a long time of a well-dressed professional woman standing over her baby hitting it. That was all he had, and he didn't know what it meant. Why he decided it meant it was supposed to be in "Prey" is beyond me, but it apparently provided the inspiration for a secondary plot which has humans taken over by a sneakier form of nanite, kind of like you or I being taken over by the common cold with the goal of consciously and deliberately infecting more people. The sneaky nanites aren't quiet about their plans either, but turn out to be the chatty, braggart-types who are too busy shooting their mouths off gloating about how clever they are to notice the hero's about to pull a fasty on them and spoil their plans of world domination. This is a bit of a stretch to pull off, even for Crichton, but fortunately it doesn't happen until very late in the book. ( I checked Crichton's three pages of reference notes and couldn't find anything on "How Tiny Micromachines Could Suddenly Become Talky B-Movie Villains". Maybe it got left out. )
At any rate, "Prey" is fast and interesting. If it's not exactly the most original plot, the new clothes Crichton has given his plot make for page-turning entertainment. The bestseller lists are likely to fall "Prey" to Crichton's newest effort...

"Michael Stone"