Booty (novel)
Booty (in the original Prey ) is the title of a novel by Michael Crichton from 2002 . The novel deals with the potential risks of the current research area of nanotechnology . The English word prey describes the predator-prey relationship , mostly in the sense of a predator .
Action overview
Former computer scientist and current househusband Jack is called to the Nevada desert , where a company commissioned by the US military is to build miniature surveillance systems based on organic mini-structures. Human error has led to a disaster here that threatens to spread. Because the artificial machine organisms have escaped and are now threatening to hunt people down. During his research, Jack finds, however, that the escaped “swarms” of synthetic creatures are not the only danger to him and his colleagues, who will soon be cut off from the outside world: Another comes from within - from within their own ranks. A race against time begins.
action
The programmer Jack Foreman was fired because of a corruption scandal that he had nothing to do with himself. Now he is an ordinary householder and looking for a new job. When his wife Julia, a former child psychologist, shows strange behavior, Jack suspects that she is cheating. Then he also finds a strange cube in his apartment that says "SSVT Unit". In this situation he receives an offer from a former colleague to help his old team with a problem. When Jack's wife is eventually injured in a traffic accident and Jack is shadowed by a van marked “SSVT”, he decides to accept his old employer's offer and work as a consultant for his old programming team at a manufacturing facility in Nevada.
Arriving in Nevada, Jack learns that the company has succeeded in producing a large number of nanorobots in a short time that can form a large camera . These nanorobots are made with the help of genetically modified bacteria and are based on a program that Jack wrote.
Allegedly through a faulty maintenance slot, however, a large number of nanorobots could get into the outside world. You have swarms formed and now chasing smaller animals. However, these swarms cannot penetrate the hermetically sealed production facility.
Jack is initially convinced that the nanomachines will corrode or disintegrate after a long enough wait. Nevertheless, he wants to help the team to destroy the swarms. The nanorobots are equipped with a "piezo cell" with which they can generate energy from sunlight. (A real piezo cell doesn't do this, Crichton probably means a solar cell .) Therefore they sink to the ground at night and are inactive. To be able to find the swarms in the night, Jack wants to spray them with a radioactive isotope. However, this isotope is housed in a depot outside the secure facility. Since there is a strong wind blowing the flying nanorobots away, a small team with Jack sets out to get the isotope from the depot. When they are in the depot, however, the wind subsides and the swarms come.
The team can only barely escape the swarms and not all members survive. In doing so, they make unsettling discoveries: the swarm can display and imitate images. And they can kill people and animals by clogging the windpipe.
In the evening, the researchers noticed a person outside the building. But it is not a person, but a crush that is now intelligent enough to imitate whole people. Then three of the researchers set off at sunset to find the swarms and burn them with thermite .
You will find a cave where the swarms live and, thanks to a light-generating bacterium, are also active at night. In a kind of incubation chamber, new nanorobots are built with the help of the genetically modified bacteria. The researchers manage to blow up the entire cave including the breeding chamber with thermite and a vehicle.
Back at the research facility, Jack gets a visit from Julia. However, he is furious at how irresponsible she and the others treated the swarms. Since Julia wanted to communicate with the crush, she promoted the formation of an intelligence instead of destroying the crush when there were still a few "stupid" people.
Eventually, a team member named Charlie is found dead in an airtight room, along with another crush. The reaction of the others, however, seems artificial and exaggerated to Jack. Later he goes to see the surveillance cameras with a former biologist named Mae, trying to find out if Julia is having a relationship with one of his colleagues. When they see Charlie die, they realize that Julia and the others have long been ruled by super-intelligent swarms who can now imitate people almost perfectly.
In order to survive, both phages pass into the manufacturing facility. Phages are bacteria-attacking viruses that are supposed to clog the filters and release methane . This is highly explosive and is supposed to explode. At the same time, Jack pours the phages into the sprinkler system, which the swarms want to prevent him from doing, but cannot. When he tries to set off the sprinkler system with a lighter, he finds out that Julia has switched off safety mechanisms and that his plan is in danger of failing. Julia tries to persuade him to let himself be controlled by a crush and when he refuses, she locks him in a room with a strong magnet that will tear itself apart through its own field in the foreseeable future and kill Jack. Jack manages to lure Julia into the room with a trick. There the swarm is pulled away from her by the magnetic field and Jack notices that Julia is very weak and helpless without the influence of the swarm. So Jack can escape from the room, but is immediately followed by the human swarms. Since all safety mechanisms are still switched off, methane is formed which can explode at any time. Jack and team member Mae have to hurry to escape the facility before the methane explodes. They succeed in this at the last moment and they experience a huge explosion, which was intensified by the thermite. The entire complex is destroyed and only Jack and Mae survive as the only ones.
In the end, it turns out that the swarms were purposely released into the outside world so that they could learn and solve a particular problem on their own. This reinforces Jack's criticism of the irresponsible and overly arrogant use of technology.
theme
The plot is based on the idea that released nanorobots in swarms have similar properties to state-building insects . In connection with the ability to self-replicate , the nanorobots develop unpredictable adaptation strategies and thus risk potential for biological life forms (“ gray smear scenario ”) thanks to individually developable artificial intelligence . Furthermore, technical details such as the production of nanomachines and their problems, agent programming and artificial intelligence are discussed. The programming of distributed agent systems is seen as a way of realizing artificial intelligence or artificial life. Once again, Crichton takes up the topic of the unpredictability of new technologies, which was already emerging at Jurassic Park .
criticism
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote: “With Crichton, the story obeys the usual conflict patterns and rules of classic science fiction or horror films - including a happy ending. Only an American or an author like Crichton can jump back and forth so freely between Pampers and apocalypse, domesticity and technological madness, thinks Halter; from this tension and the overall not unrealistic scenario, "booty" draws its effect - for a limited time. "
In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung it was said: "Flessner cannot deny tension in the novel, but the author has not entered new thematic territory."
"Michael Crichton's novels, all bestsellers, still obey the good old script rule that a plot has to be described in four sentences." "Perhaps the novel has a good thing after all, [...] that is the sobering insight that it must but there is hardly anything left that is worth saving. "
“The disastrous sloppiness of the second half of the book can also be seen in the figure drawing. While Jack Forman as a sympathetic protagonist is carefully built up and can convince, only one-dimensional cardboard comrades act in the Nevada desert. Julia, upgraded with nanotechnology, is a pure laughing stock, her end not tragic, but clumsily trimmed for the (show) effect and leaving absolutely cold. "
literature
- Michael Crichton: Prey (English edition, hardback). HarperCollins Publishers, 2002, ISBN 0-06-621412-2
- Michael Crichton: Prey (English edition, paperback). HarperCollins Publishers, 2002, ISBN 0-06-101572-5
- Michael Crichton: Beute [Prey] (German edition, hardback). Blessing, 2002, ISBN 3-89667-209-6
- Michael Crichton: Beute [Prey] (audio book, German edition, read by Hannes Jaenicke ). Random House Audio, 2003, ISBN 3-89830-556-2
Web links
- Official page for the book
- Action and criticism at krimi-couch.de