The story begins with Jack, a stay-at-home-dad not necessarily by choice, but by requirement. His wife, Julia, works for a startup company that’s working on cutting edge nano technology, and Jack recently suffered a significant setback in his career.

What follows in Prey leads Jack to question whether or not his loving wife of more than a decade is having an affair on him. She’s dressing more seductively, spending less and less time at home, and nearly ignoring her children. Beyond that, her demeanor is erratic: one minute she’s enraged by little family matters, and the next she’s trying to play the part of a nice home maker. But when Jack finally reaches the breaking point, everything changes within a few short hours. His former company calls him, requesting his urgent return to work as a contractor for Julia’s company – and his background of distributed computing and intelligent agents becomes the focal point of the next few harrowing hours.

Prey is, simply put, a novel about the potential future of nanotechnology. Out in the Nevada desert, the company that Julia works for has built a nano prodution facility that has gone wrong – what was supposed to be a secure manufacturing facility is now a breeding ground for a rapidly developing form of nearly intelligent life.

I’ve read several of Crichton’s books, including Jurrasic Park, Next, Sphere, and State of Fear, and each one of them has an amazing amount of depth, even as a page turning thrill ride. It’s almost impossible to put down Prey – each chapter cliffhangs on to the next. The story itself is told in less than a week of time, which really propels the drama forward. Flipping through the last 5 pages of the novel reveals dozens of sources that Crichton used to research the novel. In individual pieces the current nanotech research is fairly limited, but Crichton takes a leap forward and combines numerous facets of this new technology to create the nemesis we discover in Prey.

I’m not one to feel necessarily threatened by the future of nanotechnology. I’ll be the first to say that I think innovations like carbon nanotubes will truly put the world on a new pace of advanced construction – perhaps even my favorite – the development of a space elevator. A guy can dream, can’t he? But what Crichton points out deftly in this novel is that we must keep a close eye on those companies that are innovating nanotechnologies, because a misstep could result in dramatic and potentially devestating failure.