9 ms·

Prey is one of a very small number of books I never managed to finish because it scared me at the time.

ergothus 11y ago
Interesting - I greatly enjoyed Crichton's earlish work (e.g. Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain), but found his later stuff to be terrible in its scientific basis and _Prey_ was when I stopped reading because I found it too terrible to just enjoy. Glad someone enjoyed it, I may have been too picky.
- Sgt_Apone 11y ago
  His early stuff is excellent, but the last Crichton book that I enjoyed was Timeline. I found Prey to be disappointing and State of Fear was just about unreadable with its complete misrepresentation of climate change science.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Timeline was fun, but there are much better examples of similar stories. Connie Willis's "Doomsday", "Black Out" and "All Clear" are better.
- jbenz 11y ago
  If it makes you feel any better, I followed the exact same path. He was one of my favorite authors when I was a kid, but by the time Prey came out... yeesh. But I still love Sphere, The Lost World, and so many more. I even love Disclosure, with its hilarious take on virtual reality file storage.
  - harryh 11y ago
    Airframe is pretty good too, even if the plot is eerily similar to Disclosure.
- dghf 11y ago
  Micro, his last novel, was utterly, truly dreadful. But it was posthumously completed by another author (Richard Preston, who wrote The Hot Zone, which I really enjoyed, in a freaked-out way), so I don't know where the blame should lie.
- jfoutz 11y ago
  I enjoyed a bunch of his books. Prey had problems, but i thought it was a fun read after i stopped worrying about power. I gave up on him after http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2006/12/michael_crichto.html http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2006/12/michael_crichto.ht... It's so dirty and underhanded. He seemed like a really interesting guy from the window of his books. Perhaps he just got a little off track at the end there.
  - brwnll 11y ago
    Giving a bad guy's background in a fiction novel a similar some similar traits someone you don't like for openly being critical of your work is "so dirty and underhanded"? This feels utterly backward. If you gave me the option of: A) Having a person publicly criticize my work saying things such as: "I found a man who has long yearned for intellectual stature beyond the realm of killer dinosaurs and talking monkeys" B) An author will write a d-bag into one of his novels and say he went to the same college and works in the same field as me. I find "A" much more appalling.
    - jfoutz 11y ago
      A) is forthright. Standing up and saying, "hi, i'm bob, and joe sucks" is clear and unambiguous. B) is an underhanded rhetorical trick. "Hi, i'm bob, let me tell you a story about Moe. For convienence, Moe looks talks and acts just like Joe. Moe is a child molester." See, there's this internal conflict, either the mythical Moe is just like Joe, and Joe is a child molester, or Moe isn't just like Joe. Just stand up and say Joe sucks. Leave Joe out of the story you're trying to tell.
      - volaski 11y ago
        It's ludicrous to even think of this as an "attack". Just sounds like some conspiracy theory based on this guy's insecurity. Let's say Crichton did mean to use this as an attack. How did it hurt this critic guy? After all, no one would have recognized that it was him if this guy didn't go through all the trouble to come up with his "theory". Even after this guy wrote this blog post, how did this theory hurt him? Based on what you say you did, it just sounds like it was Crichton who's the casualty from this event. Lastly, I think it's stupid to stop reading an author just because of something like this. Let's say everything on that post is true. (Although it only sounds like this guy's theory) Even then this is just some childish personal behavior you can laugh over (It's not like Crichton attempted to bury this critic guy with "underhanded" tactics), it has nothing to do with his ability to write good books.
- jh3 11y ago
  I remember reading Timeline and Prey in high school. They were amazing books to me at the time. I just couldn't put them down. I never cared too much about how scientifically accurate they were though. That's like complaining about the plot holes in Back to the Future. It's entertainment, so to me he did his job well.
  - veidr 11y ago
    Well for me (and I presume at least some other people) bad science in works ruins the entertainment value. For example, if in an otherwise realistic military thriller, the hero finds the runway blocked by a tank, so he throws his F-16 into reverse and takes off backwards, that would completely take me out of the story, destroy the suspension of disbelief, and ruin (or at least severely degrade) the book. Some of Crichton's books do that for me, as does almost every movie in which they use computers, and the computers are all like, bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep! whzzzzt! and sounding like R2D2 with every normal user interface action, such as scrolling text and opening windows.
- bduerst 11y ago
  Prey has a great story to it, and is pretty free of any political bias.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  I loved "State of Fear" because he overtly used the techniques of propaganda almost as a parody. Don't know why, but that was just deeply entertaining. But I also share his concern with the politicization of science.
  - aws_ls 11y ago
    I read "State of Fear" about two years back. The novel (story line) was very interesting. And it convinced me for a while, that 'climate change' is over-rated and a lot of propaganda. I remember his protagonist, scientist who is busting the myth/propaganda in the story, lives in a 900 sq ft. home. Juxtaposed against the lavish life style of those who are propagating 'climate change'. Crichton is a writer who takes a very macro view of the timeline. Lets not forget, he wrote Jurrasic Park, and hence the entire franchise owes him that credit. In this book, he says that this micro environmental changes, don't matter when compared to macro stuff like Ice age, which happens every some 10,000s of years. Also he gives a lot of data in the book. For e.g. Historical temperature charts of various cities etc. to make his case of 'climate change' being over-rated & driven by ulterior motives, than substantive in itself on merits to call such a drastic action. I am just a layman on this. But truth be told, the book did impress me at that time. Which is not a long time ago. And please understand, I am totally not a nutcase who denies science.
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  I recently went back and reread Jurassic Park. It was still an exciting story, but Crichton's strongly negative view of science and scientists shone through brightly to me now. It's really quite shrill in parts.
bduerst 11y ago
I'm still waiting for a movie adaptation of Prey :/
- intruder 11y ago
  I know, right? You'd think they would jump on that story. Especially since so many of his books were made into films.
tnecniv 11y ago
Good thing you stopped. The ending is terrible. It seems that Crichton always had a problem with endings. He always wrote 90% of a book and then vomited up the last two chapters.
- kijin 11y ago
  That seems to be a common issue with novelists who have big ideas. Too many loose strings, brain stack overflow. For example, I'm not terribly fond of the way Stephen King ends his stories, especially the longer ones. J.K. Rowling also always seems to hurry too much at the end of her books. And both are much better writers than Crichton.

Interesting - I greatly enjoyed Crichton's earlish work (e.g. Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain), but found his later stuff to be terrible in its scientific basis and _Prey_ was when I stopped reading because I found it too terrible to just enjoy. Glad someone enjoyed it, I may have been too picky.

Sgt_Apone 11y ago
His early stuff is excellent, but the last Crichton book that I enjoyed was Timeline. I found Prey to be disappointing and State of Fear was just about unreadable with its complete misrepresentation of climate change science.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Timeline was fun, but there are much better examples of similar stories. Connie Willis's "Doomsday", "Black Out" and "All Clear" are better.
jbenz 11y ago
If it makes you feel any better, I followed the exact same path. He was one of my favorite authors when I was a kid, but by the time Prey came out... yeesh. But I still love Sphere, The Lost World, and so many more. I even love Disclosure, with its hilarious take on virtual reality file storage.
- harryh 11y ago
  Airframe is pretty good too, even if the plot is eerily similar to Disclosure.
dghf 11y ago
Micro, his last novel, was utterly, truly dreadful. But it was posthumously completed by another author (Richard Preston, who wrote The Hot Zone, which I really enjoyed, in a freaked-out way), so I don't know where the blame should lie.
jfoutz 11y ago
I enjoyed a bunch of his books. Prey had problems, but i thought it was a fun read after i stopped worrying about power. I gave up on him after http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2006/12/michael_crichto.html http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2006/12/michael_crichto.ht... It's so dirty and underhanded. He seemed like a really interesting guy from the window of his books. Perhaps he just got a little off track at the end there.
- brwnll 11y ago
  Giving a bad guy's background in a fiction novel a similar some similar traits someone you don't like for openly being critical of your work is "so dirty and underhanded"? This feels utterly backward. If you gave me the option of: A) Having a person publicly criticize my work saying things such as: "I found a man who has long yearned for intellectual stature beyond the realm of killer dinosaurs and talking monkeys" B) An author will write a d-bag into one of his novels and say he went to the same college and works in the same field as me. I find "A" much more appalling.
  - jfoutz 11y ago
    A) is forthright. Standing up and saying, "hi, i'm bob, and joe sucks" is clear and unambiguous. B) is an underhanded rhetorical trick. "Hi, i'm bob, let me tell you a story about Moe. For convienence, Moe looks talks and acts just like Joe. Moe is a child molester." See, there's this internal conflict, either the mythical Moe is just like Joe, and Joe is a child molester, or Moe isn't just like Joe. Just stand up and say Joe sucks. Leave Joe out of the story you're trying to tell.
    - volaski 11y ago
      It's ludicrous to even think of this as an "attack". Just sounds like some conspiracy theory based on this guy's insecurity. Let's say Crichton did mean to use this as an attack. How did it hurt this critic guy? After all, no one would have recognized that it was him if this guy didn't go through all the trouble to come up with his "theory". Even after this guy wrote this blog post, how did this theory hurt him? Based on what you say you did, it just sounds like it was Crichton who's the casualty from this event. Lastly, I think it's stupid to stop reading an author just because of something like this. Let's say everything on that post is true. (Although it only sounds like this guy's theory) Even then this is just some childish personal behavior you can laugh over (It's not like Crichton attempted to bury this critic guy with "underhanded" tactics), it has nothing to do with his ability to write good books.
jh3 11y ago
I remember reading Timeline and Prey in high school. They were amazing books to me at the time. I just couldn't put them down. I never cared too much about how scientifically accurate they were though. That's like complaining about the plot holes in Back to the Future. It's entertainment, so to me he did his job well.
- veidr 11y ago
  Well for me (and I presume at least some other people) bad science in works ruins the entertainment value. For example, if in an otherwise realistic military thriller, the hero finds the runway blocked by a tank, so he throws his F-16 into reverse and takes off backwards, that would completely take me out of the story, destroy the suspension of disbelief, and ruin (or at least severely degrade) the book. Some of Crichton's books do that for me, as does almost every movie in which they use computers, and the computers are all like, bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep! whzzzzt! and sounding like R2D2 with every normal user interface action, such as scrolling text and opening windows.
bduerst 11y ago
Prey has a great story to it, and is pretty free of any political bias.
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
I loved "State of Fear" because he overtly used the techniques of propaganda almost as a parody. Don't know why, but that was just deeply entertaining. But I also share his concern with the politicization of science.
- aws_ls 11y ago
  I read "State of Fear" about two years back. The novel (story line) was very interesting. And it convinced me for a while, that 'climate change' is over-rated and a lot of propaganda. I remember his protagonist, scientist who is busting the myth/propaganda in the story, lives in a 900 sq ft. home. Juxtaposed against the lavish life style of those who are propagating 'climate change'. Crichton is a writer who takes a very macro view of the timeline. Lets not forget, he wrote Jurrasic Park, and hence the entire franchise owes him that credit. In this book, he says that this micro environmental changes, don't matter when compared to macro stuff like Ice age, which happens every some 10,000s of years. Also he gives a lot of data in the book. For e.g. Historical temperature charts of various cities etc. to make his case of 'climate change' being over-rated & driven by ulterior motives, than substantive in itself on merits to call such a drastic action. I am just a layman on this. But truth be told, the book did impress me at that time. Which is not a long time ago. And please understand, I am totally not a nutcase who denies science.
snowwrestler 11y ago
I recently went back and reread Jurassic Park. It was still an exciting story, but Crichton's strongly negative view of science and scientists shone through brightly to me now. It's really quite shrill in parts.

bduerst 11y ago

I'm still waiting for a movie adaptation of Prey :/

intruder 11y ago
I know, right? You'd think they would jump on that story. Especially since so many of his books were made into films.

tnecniv 11y ago

Good thing you stopped. The ending is terrible. It seems that Crichton always had a problem with endings. He always wrote 90% of a book and then vomited up the last two chapters.

kijin 11y ago
That seems to be a common issue with novelists who have big ideas. Too many loose strings, brain stack overflow. For example, I'm not terribly fond of the way Stephen King ends his stories, especially the longer ones. J.K. Rowling also always seems to hurry too much at the end of her books. And both are much better writers than Crichton.