04. Prey, by Michael Crichton.

Prey details what happens when a bunch of unscrupulous scientists accidentally-on-purpose create robotic nanobots that act as a swarm, are able to replicate, and learn from their experiences. Then everything starts going pearshaped when they discover that at least one swarm, and much of the precursor materials, have been vented outside the laboratory. They call in further experts to help reprogram or dissolve the swarm, with mixed results.

I was very hopeful when I read this book. Nanobots, I thought, are sure to be interesting - especially ones that are essentially a new form of consciousness. However, the first hundred or so pages - a good quarter of the book - seem to be mostly the main character moping about how his wife is acting different, and his suspicions about her having an affair. While a lot of this creates backstory for things that happen later, it was laid on quite thick, and got rather boring. I'm not sure if the wife was intentionally two-dimensional, given later developments, but I spent a good deal of the first part of the book being bored by the domestic troubles - something that continued later on, when there were seemingly random calls from people back home about trivial events that served no noticeable purpose within the rest of the story.

The nanobots themselves are quite cool. I liked how they were done for the most part, and my only real complaint about them is that we don't get enough nanobot action. A lot of the book is drama with coworkers or family, and the nanobots - the reason I was reading this book in the first place - seem to be distinctly second fiddle. That was somewhat frustrating, as I was expecting there to be much more action than there actually was, and there was a lot that they could have explored more thoroughly within the nanobot fight scenes, as it were, to flesh them out more thoroughly.

Overall, I was expecting the focus of this book to be substantially different to what it actually was, so I was a little disappointed with it as a whole. I also thought that the ending was annoyingly ambiguous, and left a lot of loose ends that never get cleaned up. But if drama-filled action-ish novels are more your thing, then  give it a whirl and make your own judgement call.