Well, I went down and bought a copy. At first, I couldn't find it. I went to the Sci-Fi section, and there were no Michael Crichton books! No Jurassic Park, or anything. I went to the help desk, and told them what I was looking for; they turned around and found it at the fiction section!
A couple of initial thoughts. Prey was kind of famous when it came out. Nanotechnologists would read it to critique it; they knew what Jurassic Park did for human cloning; it took funds away from research.
I like the bibliography in the back. It mentions one book by Eric Drexler, his technical treatment of nano-manufacturing. I have that; i also have all the B.C Crandell's Nanotechnology, and Prospects of Nanotechnology. Both are collections of papers from talks of the first two Foresight Institute conferences. They started out going every other year; then, they started doing them every year, as nanotechnology research grew. They also then started having you to write your name and say that you won't say what was talked about there. Then, they stopped having Nanotechnology conferences; the information has gone secret.
Not totally secret - there's still science news sights; but, you always get stuff that was published months ago; which means they've gone well beyond.
The majority of the rest of the bibliography is artificial life; these are John Conway's "game of life." John Conway is a major mathematician working on monster groups. Monster groups are huge exception groups to the finite simple groups. They have elements of like 10 to the power of 100,000 or something like that. There's like twenty seven of them. This is all abstract algebra stuff.
Anyways John Conway's artificial life was a fad back in the 1990s, when Crichton wrote this. And judging by the bibliography, it's the angle he wants to play on, in his Prey book.
The game of life/artificial life is mostly a play on genetics. And, it hasn't solved artificial intelligence, much less made deadly swarms, probably because life is not just genetics. I'm pretty sure I know what the missing ingredient is; it's non-equilibrium thermodynamics and chaos theory. Maybe I need to read the rest of Prey; because I know Crichton knows about chaos theory, and uses it in his Jurassic Park book. But, still, the artificial life community doesn't take it into account. And the field has gone the way of the dodo.
