Prey  (English, Paperback, Crichton Michael)

Prey is a scientific thriller that revolves around predatory nanorobots who are set free in the desert of Nevada and their prey are human beings. The story details how a group of scientists try to stop these nanorobots and their predatory activities.

Summary Of The Book

Prey is a thriller that portrays the hazards of scientific experiments that have gone wrong. Jack Forman, the protagonist, is an unemployed software engineer and lives in California. His wife,  Julia, is the Vice President of Xymos, a nanorobotics company and works very long hours. This makes Jack suspect that she is having an affair. One day, Julia has an accident and Xymos hires Jack as they have software issues. 

Jack goes to the Xymos laboratory in the middle of the Nevada desert. Due to a technical fault, some predatory nanorobots have escaped into the desert and have formed self-sustaining swarms. The swarms live on solar-power and can reproduce rapidly. In fact, they even have basic intelligence and are capable of learning from their experiences. The swarms move around the lab facilities and only go away when there are strong winds blowing or when it is nighttime. The scientists decide that it is of uttermost importance to find the nest of the swarms and they set about tagging a few robots with radioactive isotopes to trace the nest. The team follows these tagged robots into their nest, but their attempts to destroy the swarms fail. In the attempt, a few lives are lost and people are injured.

Meanwhile, Julia is discharged from the hospital and she returns to the lab. Jack sees that her behavior is extremely erratic. He realizes that their lab has also been infected by the swarm and that most of the scientists have been infected by this mechanical plague. Jack and his friend Mae, a field biologist, are the only two who are healthy and they try to save the others from the deadly swarms.

Prey is a novel of breathtaking suspense. Like Crichton’s other books, this one throws light on how scientific advancements can go wrong. In this book, he focuses on nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering.

About  Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton was an American  director, screenwriter, producer, and author.

Crichton’s first novel, Odds On, was published in 1966. Some of his other books are Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Disclosure, ER, Congo, Sphere, and Travels.

The author was known for his works in the fields of thriller genres, medical fiction, and science fiction. More than 200 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. He has been the only creative artist in history whose works were rated the best in film, television, and books sales, for Jurassic Park, ER, and Disclosure respectively and simultaneously in 1994.

He was born in 1942. Crichton graduated from Harvard College and then went on to do his MD from Harvard Medical School. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and taught writing at MIT and anthropology at University of Cambridge. The author won the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Technical Achievement Award in 1994. ER won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 1996. He passed away from cancer in 2008 at the age of 66 years.