Crichton's Prey

Pretend for a moment that Michael Crichton weren't the author of the true Great American Novel, Jurassic Park, and one of a half-dozen of the world's most powerful storytellers. His latest, Prey (HarperCollins, 367 pages, $26.95), would still be compelling for pacing that destroys your television. As it is, it stands as a turning point in Crichton's career: a rare first-person narrative, the first time he has explicitly stated his intention to write a cautionary tale and the first time he has injected his work with real supernatural dread. Where he goes from here is anyone's guess; it'll probably be downhill, but it'll be a fun ride.

"As fresh as today's headlines," reads the blurb on Prey, and it is, sure: The book is about swarms of computer-programmed nano-robots that fly around the Nevada desert killing people, kind of like tiny Predator drones. The first few chapters take more from People than Popular Mechanics, though, as Crichton does his best job yet sketching an American family. Jack Forman is an unemployed Silicon Valley software engineer (Crichton never tackled the Internet boom, but he does a fine job with the bust) adjusting to his new role as "househusband... Full-time dad, whatever you want to call it-there is no good term for it." He has three kids he loves dearly and a bitch wife, Julia, who hates them. Julia works at Xymos Technology (subtlety in naming has never been Crichton's thing); she's worth more than Jack ever was and is helming a big medical imaging project.

Jack suspects that Julia is having an affair. Here, as in Disclosure, Crichton does a note-perfect job with marriage and sexual politics (there's no sex, though, which is too bad because that scene in Disclosure was hot). Jack is indecisive and plodding as his wife does more and more outrageous things-lying about voicemails, phoning Nevada on her cellphone, not coming home at night. A sister urges Jack to talk to a lawyer, but he just considers and watches baseball games as Julia builds her case against him. ("You are shutting me out and keeping me away from my children... I'm a good mother, I balance a very demanding job with the needs of my family... You are not supportive of me," he replays in his head.)

The Jack/Juila machinations are so compelling you're almost disappointed when Jack gets a call that he's needed to fix a software bug from Xymos and we fade from home life into that special brand of sci-fi that only Crichton can do. You know the story: a civilian who seems unqualified goes into an alien environment and proves himself to company superiors/army men against a fearsome technological foe. For the middle 200 pages of Prey, we get the Crichton gold standard: three pages of scene-setting action interspersed with a page of dropping knowledge about the real world. The action scenes run like butter; the details on the swarms in the desert ("a peculiar low, thrumming sound...like a heartbeat...swirling and glinting silver") are frightening, believable and rapid-fire, as you learn that the nanoparticles can reproduce, evolve by the hour, pick up new behaviors, communicate with each other and kill things. (They were initially programmed to act as cameras.) Only at the end of the narrative is adultery reintroduced, with Julia quite literally cheating on Jack with her work.

This is when Prey gets truly frightening. The codependence of man and machine has been explored by many authors, but Crichton adds tongue-kissing and stumbles into a grand statement: we already live with fucking machines. We might as well be fucking them.

Then, suddenly, the book's over and you want to read it again because you read it too fast the first time.

Some critics have labeled Prey's educational passages too dense. That's because they're dumb. In truth, the science in Prey is not as complex as that in Jurassic Park, but if you're scared by computers or shrivel at words like "recursion" and "distributed processing," you won't enjoy it. Then again, if you shrivel at words like "recursion" and "distributed processing," you're headed for poverty and death in this world. These are the technologies that will shape the next 30 years. (If you're a computer geek, of course, Prey is manna from heaven-there's actual code in the book! Heh heh.)

As a writer, separate from his abilities as a pacer, storyteller and tv/movie conceptual guy, Crichton stumbles in Prey. Many paragraphs do a fine job describing an emotional state, then end with a summary: "It gave me the creeps," etc. These missteps are especially disappointing, since any decent editor would have torched them, but then again, no editor is credited in Prey; if there were one, they surely would have fixed the five-page introduction, Crichton's worst yet, redeemed only by his deadpan "it is difficult to anticipate what the consequences might be" toward the end. Perhaps the author feels he doesn't need editing?

You can understand why. Look at the list of works in the front of Prey and you'll see several-Sphere, The Andromeda Strain, JP-Indisputable American Classics. Perhaps Crichton is being afflicted by the same hubris he writes about.

No matter. The classics are out there, and MC might have one more left in him. Heck, Prey might even be the one. We wouldn't know yet since there's no movie. Because Michael Crichton doesn't just write books; he writes books, sells them as movies, compels you to read the book after you see the movie and makes sure you decide the book was better. He's got that multimedia attack; he's got more vision and balls than anybody out there; he's 60, so hopefully we'll get a half-dozen more out of him before retirement.

If you buy Prey, you'll finish it in three days. You'll think about it when you're away from it. You'll see the movie and know it inside and out. You might even worry about it before you go to sleep. What more do you want?

Well, you could want Crichton to take the plunge and finally write that sweeping family/media/law/culture commentary he's capable of. With Prey you know it's inside him, swarming to get out.