EW Where did you get the idea for Prey?
CRICHTON I had this vision. An image of a businesswoman in a
blue suit and high heels coming home at night and going into a
dark nursery and whacking her baby. Just slapping it over and
over. I began having this vision about five years ago, and then
it started coming more and more frequently. I started obsessing
about it, actually. I had no idea what it meant.
EW Very creepy.
CRICHTON Yes, isn't it?
EW And then you wrote that scene into your book where the main
character realizes something's wrong with his wife when he sees
her slapping their baby...
CRICHTON Yes. I found myself writing it, but I had no idea why.
And then somehow this image of the woman slapping her baby
attached itself in my head to the idea of scientific monsters
and nanotechnology, which I'd been thinking about anyway...
EW Do you get lots of ideas for books from these sorts of
visions?
CRICHTON Sometimes. Other times I'll just have the title for a
novel. That's how I wrote Andromeda Strain. I had a title and
nothing to go with it.
EW How many ideas for books do you have in your head right now?
CRICHTON I'd have to count them up. I'd say about 30.
EW Can you rattle off a few?
CRICHTON No, I don't want to. I find that if I talk about what I
haven't done yet, it becomes this trail that follows me. People
are like, ''So where's that detective story you were going to
do?'' But right now there are about 30. You can think of it as
sort of an assembly line. Some of the ideas on the line are just
collections of unassembled parts, some of them are the chassis,
a few have windshields but no engine. A lot of them will never
make it to the end of the line.
EW How'd you learn about nanotechnology? Do you have teams of
assistants researching the science that goes into your books?
CRICHTON No teams. Just me. I start with journals and
reviews — symposiums on artificial life and things like that. The
goal is to find the state of knowledge in a particular field.
For example, with Prey I had to figure out what a
nanotechnological assembly line would look like. I struggled
with it and was never satisfied. And then I read in a journal
that somebody had figured it out.
EW How long does the writing generally take?
CRICHTON This one was about nine months from when I wrote the
first few pages to the finished book. Writing a book is a bit
like going on location for a movie. You're absent from your
life, your family, and your friends. You're psychologically
gone, so you might as well be physically gone. It can feel very
strange, almost like I've taken a psychedelic. It's as if I'm
residing in a very detailed fantasy world and then I have to get
up and walk outside. It can be very uncomfortable.
EW You had a fairly surreal experience in your actual life
recently — the robbery.
CRICHTON You know, you see so many fictional treatments of that
sort of thing that it's a jolt to actually find yourself in the
real thing. The interesting thing is that I've met a lot of
people since — doctors and lawyers and people like that — who've
had similar sorts of violent encounters. These things happen
more than people talk about. But this is an ongoing
investigation, so I really can't get into it.
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