Michael Crichton - Prey

I had been pretty curious to read Prey ever since I'd heard about it. However, I only bought the book a few months back, and never got around to reading it, until now. I don't know why I waited so long, because I'm surprised by how quickly this novel hooked me. I started it today morning, around 11, and now, five hours and one visit to the doctor later, I'm done.

This is a book about a nanotechnology experiment gone horribly wrong. I'm pretty sure everyone has atleast heard of nanotechnology, if not understood it (My favourite, and first, reference is SuperPatriot and the cans of nanobots he carries around, but that's a story for another day). If it sounds alien, then this isn't the best place to start, because the nanotech here isn't exactly the friendliest of tech, and If you're looking forward to understanding the technology behind it, well I'm not sure how much Chrichton has made up, but most of it kinda went over my head. It's still a fascinating read, no matter where your interests lie, because like most of his other novels, what the protagonists do with the tech is just as fascinating as the tech itself.

The blurb at the back of the novel is quite fine in it's description of the novel. However, its ominous tone is a bit misleading. See, the novel itself isn't very scary. There are a few deaths, and the last few chapters are quite tense, but the horrors of rogue nanobots running (or rather, swarming) amuck in a civilian population are only implied, and after reading this, I'm sure most of us won't have any troubles visualising that.

And this is precisely the kind of creepy that scares me the most, because everything depicted here could actually be happening right now, someplace, somewhere. It doesn't rely on luck or fate or running across supernatural interference, but rather, it's the highly volatile, often stupidly self-destructing nature of human beings that acts as the prime catalyst for the whole darn mess.

For every fire-breathing dragon, there's the righteous knight; for every blood-sucking vampire, there's the holy water and wooden stake; for every lycanthrope there's the silver bullet; but for every moronic homosapien with more power than he can control, there's only another homosapien to muck things up. We are doomed.