Prey

Crichton, Michael. Prey. New York: HarperCollins, 2002 (hard-cover fist edn.). New York: Avon, 2003 (mass-market paperback). Prey: A Novel. Unabridged. Read by George Wilson. Introd. Written and read by MC. HarperAudio, UACD 5202(11). 11 CDs, 13 hours.

High-tech thriller, and/or "near-in" SF with some horror. Back cover on CDs: "In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gon horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles—micro-robots—has escaped from the laboratory. The cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive. It has been programmed as a predator. It is evolving swiftly, becoming more deadly with each passing hour." See for technology/biology interface—the cloud incorporates nanorobots and organic elements from bacteria, making it a cyborg—insectoid robots, nanotech, the "swarm" motif, AI, "hive-mind" (necessarily cybernetic), computers, and realistic high-tech. Evolved swarms may be capbable of bodily invasion of humans, in some ways improving them, in a symbiotic cyborg relationship, but making them into what Don Siegel, the director of the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers film, called "pod people." Cf. and contrast S. Lem's "The Invincible," and "The Upside-Down Evolution" (listed under Fiction in C1), and Greg Bear's Blood Music (1985), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers as novel and film (esp. the film as seen through a figurative feminist lens). (RDE, 24/11-01/10/06)