Michael Crichton

Though he’s scored with things like Disclosure and TV’s ER, Michael Crichton inevitably returns to the theme that’s served him so well so often before, Science Run Amok. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the robot gunslingers in Westworld, the virus in Andromeda Strain (We could go on; he certainly did) are joined by the villain of his latest book, Prey: a killer swarm of nanotechnology. Out in the remote Nevada desert, a team of scientists has built a cloud of intelligent microparticles—very small robots, basically—intended as military spyware. But, as always in Crichton’s books, the scientists don’t fully comprehend the complexity of their creation until it’s too late, and soon the cloud escapes, growing larger and smarter by the hour and developing a taste for human flesh. Crichton’s determination to base even the wildest aspects of his thrillers on real science is admirable, but we find it hard to imagine that Prey will find as large an audience as Jurassic Park did—nanobots seem awfully abstruse compared with the in-your-face threat of a T. rex attack. Still, even a weak Crichton book is a smart mix of tense plotting and cutting-edge pop science, equally suitable for the beach and the physics lecture. (Note: To attend, you must buy a copy of Prey at the store.) Ruminator Books, (612) 215-2600, ruminator.com