Ahnk Reviews: Prey
With two big movie reviews upcoming, one of the uber violent sequel to Kill Bill, and the other the controversial and embattled prelude to Fahrenheit 9/11, I decided to turn to another artistic form for a review, and that would be the novel. I admit I’m not much of a reader, although that’s not because I can’t read, but because I can’t afford to. Books are expensive, and thus I generally have a large splurge of reading in December when my birthday and Christmas are, and then nothing. Well, last Christmas, I got the Michael Crichton novel Prey, and I was just not interested in it at all. So I let it sit while I read NJO.
I picked it up recently while sick and read it. I had ended up reading it in February or so, so it was actually my second time through, although whether I made it all the way through the first time is up in the air. Prey is from Michael Crichton… by now, you should know his style, and if not, I’ll fill you in. If you haven’t ever read a Crichton book, this is as good as any to start with, because everything Crichton does is very similar, almost as if he were a robot.
So, Prey is like his other books. But is it any good?
Unfortunately, no.
Michael Crichton is a terrific writer. Of this, there is no doubt. The man delivered unto us Jurassic Park and the even better Lost World. He’s stellar in his genre of choice, which is Science Fiction. If you have any doubt that I like Science Fiction… I help run a Star Wars board, you idiot. Obviously I do. So it’s not like Michael Crichton is not my taste.
He’s just…
Okay, well… let’s not focus on the writing and focus instead on the story. This is where Prey shines. A man and his wife are slowly growing apart and in an interesting twist, the wife is the workaholic and the man the stay at home captain household. Solid start, and then mysterious crap starts happening. A microchip is eaten away. A mysterious power box is found. And then, the baby gets sick. Correction, the baby gets REALLY sick and goes to the hospital. With the baby sick, you’d figure that the mom would charge home, only she doesn’t. She gets bitchy and snaps on loafer king and tells him off. Yeah. I’m digging this book so far. Then, the guy calls his lawyer and his sister… maybe not in that order, but probably. I also think he was knocking the lawyer, or such was the impression the book gave me. Anyway, moving on…
So the husband figures his wife is fucking around. Signs start popping up everywhere and he’s paranoid. So he calls his sister to come look after the kids while he gets drunk and destroys stuff (okay, I made that last bit up). And his wife comes back and she is SUPERSAP! Alarm bells go off in everyone’s head but hers, and then she charges off and the husband sees another man in the car. Okay, up until now, this book ROCKS. The interplay in the family is excellent, believable, and the mystery is building to something and it tastes good.
And then, the husband gets hired to come work with the wife. IMMEDIATELY my bullshit detector exploded. How cliché is that? There is a mystery and your wife is spending untold hours at work… hey are you doing anything Saturday night? Want to come force the climax with a really poor segue? Yeah, so right here is when the book takes a nosedive into the predictable and forced demographic of standard hack science fiction for which Crichton has become trademark… nevertheless, the book still has good points. It turns out that they are working on nanomachines manufactured by strains of the… I forget which virus, possibly corona, or a strain of influenza, but that’s not the point. The point is that a cloud of nanomachines was accidentally dumped. Your Spider-Sense is tingling? Mine too, and for good reason… yes, it was dumped intentionally to let it exist in the wild. It was actually for troubleshooting and guess what… man mad life form let go runs wild, whatcha gonna do, brutha, when nanotechnology runs wild on you? This is where the story is really becoming formulaic but again it still has respectable qualities.
Until the climax.
Because it really becomes paint by the numbers here. From “everyone but the bad guys go out on a search party” to “leave no man behind rescue mission” to “spineless coward tries to bolt early, dies, and exposes everyone else to danger” to “stay perfectly still and they will just ignore us” to “we wiped them out… oh shit there they are”, this book goes through every single one of the cliché situations that have existed in science fiction and were used in Jurassic Park, Resident Evil, and every teen horror movie in history, pretty much. Even finding out the source of the wife’s erratic behavior isn’t satisfying because it just smacks of un-imagination. I think Crichton would have been better off leaving the last 6 chapters or so out of the book and rewriting a chapter with “and then everyone died”, because the book really, really takes a face first dive into the sewers with it’s climax. It really doesn’t have much suspense or tension, because you sit around thinking “I’ve seen this before”. Rather then feel tense when they head into the hive of the beast, you almost laugh because it is so stupidly predictable.
It’s really unfortunate because the book starts so well. The epilogue is solid; even if it leaves you dry because it basically guarantees that a sequel is ready to get started. It falls apart in the middle and is just laughably bad in the end. This is really a trademark of Crichton… great set up, rancid execution. He is a very heavy science science fiction writer, and this is good… it gives you the distinct impression that he knows what the fuck he is talking about, and generally makes things that while extraordinary, are scientifically plausible and well described. It makes it a generally enjoyable read, until he hits the plot execution of the denouement, where he becomes more of a self-parody then a novelist. But it certainly is riveting, until it becomes more comedy then drama.
If you want my advice, I would not buy Prey. Instead, borrow it from the local library. There is a chapter where the party leaves the safety of the facility to retrieve a rabbit corpse and is nearly murdered by the swarm of nanites. Close the book at the end of that chapter… when the nanites show up, and consider the book finished like so. The party were killed… the nanites went on to spread across the American continent. The baby died in the hospital. The lawyer went on to become a porno actress. Then the nanites began to really murder everyone, so they took shelter in some massive underground fortresses and used the world’s nuclear arsenal to wipe out the nanomachines forever. Then, go play Fallout and get your SO to take this piece of shit back to the library where some popularist dipshit will read it and love it.
With two big movie reviews upcoming, one of the uber violent sequel to Kill Bill, and the other the controversial and embattled prelude to Fahrenheit 9/11, I decided to turn to another artistic form for a review, and that would be the novel. I admit I’m not much of a reader, although that’s not because I can’t read, but because I can’t afford to. Books are expensive, and thus I generally have a large splurge of reading in December when my birthday and Christmas are, and then nothing. Well, last Christmas, I got the Michael Crichton novel Prey, and I was just not interested in it at all. So I let it sit while I read NJO.
I picked it up recently while sick and read it. I had ended up reading it in February or so, so it was actually my second time through, although whether I made it all the way through the first time is up in the air. Prey is from Michael Crichton… by now, you should know his style, and if not, I’ll fill you in. If you haven’t ever read a Crichton book, this is as good as any to start with, because everything Crichton does is very similar, almost as if he were a robot.
So, Prey is like his other books. But is it any good?
Unfortunately, no.
Michael Crichton is a terrific writer. Of this, there is no doubt. The man delivered unto us Jurassic Park and the even better Lost World. He’s stellar in his genre of choice, which is Science Fiction. If you have any doubt that I like Science Fiction… I help run a Star Wars board, you idiot. Obviously I do. So it’s not like Michael Crichton is not my taste.
He’s just…
Okay, well… let’s not focus on the writing and focus instead on the story. This is where Prey shines. A man and his wife are slowly growing apart and in an interesting twist, the wife is the workaholic and the man the stay at home captain household. Solid start, and then mysterious crap starts happening. A microchip is eaten away. A mysterious power box is found. And then, the baby gets sick. Correction, the baby gets REALLY sick and goes to the hospital. With the baby sick, you’d figure that the mom would charge home, only she doesn’t. She gets bitchy and snaps on loafer king and tells him off. Yeah. I’m digging this book so far. Then, the guy calls his lawyer and his sister… maybe not in that order, but probably. I also think he was knocking the lawyer, or such was the impression the book gave me. Anyway, moving on…
So the husband figures his wife is fucking around. Signs start popping up everywhere and he’s paranoid. So he calls his sister to come look after the kids while he gets drunk and destroys stuff (okay, I made that last bit up). And his wife comes back and she is SUPERSAP! Alarm bells go off in everyone’s head but hers, and then she charges off and the husband sees another man in the car. Okay, up until now, this book ROCKS. The interplay in the family is excellent, believable, and the mystery is building to something and it tastes good.
And then, the husband gets hired to come work with the wife. IMMEDIATELY my bullshit detector exploded. How cliché is that? There is a mystery and your wife is spending untold hours at work… hey are you doing anything Saturday night? Want to come force the climax with a really poor segue? Yeah, so right here is when the book takes a nosedive into the predictable and forced demographic of standard hack science fiction for which Crichton has become trademark… nevertheless, the book still has good points. It turns out that they are working on nanomachines manufactured by strains of the… I forget which virus, possibly corona, or a strain of influenza, but that’s not the point. The point is that a cloud of nanomachines was accidentally dumped. Your Spider-Sense is tingling? Mine too, and for good reason… yes, it was dumped intentionally to let it exist in the wild. It was actually for troubleshooting and guess what… man mad life form let go runs wild, whatcha gonna do, brutha, when nanotechnology runs wild on you? This is where the story is really becoming formulaic but again it still has respectable qualities.
Until the climax.
Because it really becomes paint by the numbers here. From “everyone but the bad guys go out on a search party” to “leave no man behind rescue mission” to “spineless coward tries to bolt early, dies, and exposes everyone else to danger” to “stay perfectly still and they will just ignore us” to “we wiped them out… oh shit there they are”, this book goes through every single one of the cliché situations that have existed in science fiction and were used in Jurassic Park, Resident Evil, and every teen horror movie in history, pretty much. Even finding out the source of the wife’s erratic behavior isn’t satisfying because it just smacks of un-imagination. I think Crichton would have been better off leaving the last 6 chapters or so out of the book and rewriting a chapter with “and then everyone died”, because the book really, really takes a face first dive into the sewers with it’s climax. It really doesn’t have much suspense or tension, because you sit around thinking “I’ve seen this before”. Rather then feel tense when they head into the hive of the beast, you almost laugh because it is so stupidly predictable.
It’s really unfortunate because the book starts so well. The epilogue is solid; even if it leaves you dry because it basically guarantees that a sequel is ready to get started. It falls apart in the middle and is just laughably bad in the end. This is really a trademark of Crichton… great set up, rancid execution. He is a very heavy science science fiction writer, and this is good… it gives you the distinct impression that he knows what the fuck he is talking about, and generally makes things that while extraordinary, are scientifically plausible and well described. It makes it a generally enjoyable read, until he hits the plot execution of the denouement, where he becomes more of a self-parody then a novelist. But it certainly is riveting, until it becomes more comedy then drama.
If you want my advice, I would not buy Prey. Instead, borrow it from the local library. There is a chapter where the party leaves the safety of the facility to retrieve a rabbit corpse and is nearly murdered by the swarm of nanites. Close the book at the end of that chapter… when the nanites show up, and consider the book finished like so. The party were killed… the nanites went on to spread across the American continent. The baby died in the hospital. The lawyer went on to become a porno actress. Then the nanites began to really murder everyone, so they took shelter in some massive underground fortresses and used the world’s nuclear arsenal to wipe out the nanomachines forever. Then, go play Fallout and get your SO to take this piece of shit back to the library where some popularist dipshit will read it and love it.
