Word: preying
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Just how does Michael Crichton do it? His new novel, Prey (HarperCollins; 367 pages), lacks almost everything a good novel needs. It contains not one single quotable line of dialogue ("We have to help him!" "There's nothing we can do." That should give you a sense of it). It offers not one single well-realized character. It's riddled with plot holes you could drive a reconstituted brontosaurus through. And yet...and yet ...it does something few novels can manage: it holds your attention ruthlessly from start to finish...
...With Prey Crichton goes from dino to nano: the baddie comes from the currently hot field of nanotechnology, the science of building microscopic machines. The hero is an unemployed computer whiz named Jack Forman, a likable blank who has the misfortune to be married to Julia, a workaholic exec at Xymos, a shady Silicon Valley start-up. Xymos builds tiny nanorobots that possess no intelligence of their own but can assemble themselves, insect-like, into swarms capable of solving complex problems, reproducing and even evolving. Since the thoughtless hubris of scientists is Crichton's Big Theme, all this must...
...great in the inevitable movie), but the real star of the show is Crichton's intricate plotting and flawless pacing, which deliver the necessary shocks and surprises at the precise intervals necessary to keep readers riveted until the more or less satisfying denouement. It lacks a human heart, but Prey is a relentlessly efficient machine that grips and doesn't let go. Don't try to resist. There's nothing you can do. --By Lev Grossman
...stretches from Bombay to Kerala?has followed the sad but familiar tale of modern development. In the last decade man drowned many of the forests behind vast new dams, cut down what timber remained and hunted to extinction the wild deer, boar and sheep that are the leopards' preferred prey. In the time it took to fill a reservoir, the leopards of the Ghats found themselves in the open, homeless and hungry. You'd expect a few attacks from these desperate creatures. Then you'd expect them to disappear...
...main prey was a man called Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi. Known as Abu Ali, he was, according to Yemeni officials, a former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden's and the local mastermind of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Aden harbor in October 2000. When an American Predator drone fired its Hellfire missile into al-Harethi's car as it moved along a remote desert road east of Yemen's capital Sana'a, it also killed five other people--all of them al-Qaeda operatives, according to the U.S., one a man Yemen says was a U.S. citizen...