Prey

Crichton, Michael. Prey. New York City: HarperCollins, 2002 (hard-cover fist edn.). New York City: 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. For translations, reprints, and other bibliographical data, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database, for Prey, as of April 2023, here.[1]

High-tech thriller, and/or "near-in" SF with some horror. Back cover on CDs: "In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone 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,[2] AI, "hive-mind" (necessarily cybernetic), computers, and realistic high-tech. Evolved swarms may be capable 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," and Greg Bear's Blood Music (1985) — and Invasion of the Body Snatchers as novel and films (esp. the films as seen through a figurative feminist lens).[3]

For summary and other coverage, see Wikipedia article, as of April 2023, here.[4]

For Prey as the basis for a thought-experiment in law, see Foreman V. Xymos: A Nanotechnology Trial Based [in?] the Facts in "Prey" by Michael Crichton by Victoria Sutton, "the Paul Whitfield Horn Professor, Texas Tech University School of Law" (Lubbock, TX [?][5]: Vargus Publishing, 2019), 82 pages.[6][7]

RDE, 10Jan06; with thanks to K.J. Maroney, finishing 8Apr22