Prey

The year of #BigReads is back on track thanks to the quick and easy 504-page Prey. This is the third Michael Crichton book I've read, following Jurassic Park and its sequel, and so far I've been a fan of his stuff. The "science" in his sci-fi thrillers is easily dismissible and sometimes laughably inaccurate, but that's okay! Crichton was never trying to pen any captial-L "Literature" - his work instead was easy and engaging and addicting. And hey, all the better if he could tack on a little preachy moral to his stories, scientific accuracy be damned. Jurassic Park wasn't a good book (or movie) because the concept of genetically engineered dinosaurs is at all plausible, but instead because, hey, fuck, it's about dinosaurs. And the story gets to feel like a smart one whenever Ian Malcolm opens his mouth to express concern. ("You were so busy wondering if you could do it you never stopped to ask if you should." Yes!)

At any rate, Prey is about a crisis at a lab in the Nevada desert. A group of advanced nanomachines has been designed to evolve random quirks in their behavior. Apparently this was a hot idea in software design back in 2002 - add randomizing factors to your programs in order to see them "evolve" in order to solve certain problems. Anyway, one group of these nanobots has turned into a predatory swarm of killing machines. It's learned how to do lots of things - including reproduce - and it's evolving rapidly, and at an accelerated pace at that.

Remember Lost? Remember the Smoke Monster? Yeah, so Prey is basically all about little robotic smoke monster swarms that hunt and kill and consume and reproduce and evolve. The result was a mixed bag for me. Nothing here ever felt as gripping or suspenseful as being stalked by dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or The Lost World, and it was pretty hard to take smoke clouds seriously. A scene late in the book where the characters had tracked the swarm back to its nest in the desert should have been suspenseful as hell, but instead felt completely anticlimactic. The nest turns out to be crawling with worms and bacteria that have somehow coevolved in a symbiotic relationship with the nanobots, which doesn't really make any sense. If the moral here is not to fuck around with randomizing AI components because of how quickly they can evolve, why include these worms and bacteria evolving at the same rate? In fact, the whole third act of Prey fell kind of flat for me because - and I won't spoil it specifically - Crichton seems to recognize that his particle swarms aren't compelling villains, so he brings in some new antagonistic forces at the eleventh hour, and, well, let's just say that Stephen King has managed more graceful endings.

But all in all, I liked this book! The first hundred or two hundred pages in particular did a fantastic job at setting up a vague "problem" and allowed me to make all sorts of guesses and predictions - about half of which came true, which is probably the rate you want to shoot for as an author teasing a reader. The pacing was excellent, even if the conflict itself wasn't, and I'd happily come back for a fourth helping of Michael Crichton someday.