Customer Reviews

Micro: A Novel

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(38)
2 star:		(34)
1 star:		(69)

 

 

I was, and am, a huge fan of Michael Crichton's work. I never had very high expectations for this final novel, but that's no reflection on the choice of Richard Preston to complete the work. In any case, for better or worse, Micro lived up to my tempered expectations.

Like several of Crichton's earlier novels, Micro has a high concept hook. Most nanotech companies fabricate on a nano scale, but Nanigen MicroTechnologies has developed revolutionary shrinking technology. Not only can they reduce machines and robots, they can reduce living beings and then return them to full size. I won't get into all the details of the novel's set-up, but seven graduate students learn about this technology the hard way once they become a threat to Nanigen's president. Seven against one is much easier to manage when the seven (and one unlucky Nanigen employee) are half an inch tall. Before they can be dispatched quickly, however, the students escape into Hawaii's verdant "micro world."

Crichton's strengths and weaknesses as a storyteller remain consistent. His primary characters are more archetypes than individuals. Rather than Rick, Erika, Amar, and Karen, these students quickly show themselves to be the Leader, the Warrior, the Know It All, the Weasel, and so forth. Each has an assigned role to fulfill. Some barely live long enough to become typecast, because the micro world is treacherous. When you're half an inch tall, a beetle is not unlike a rhinoceros. Luckily, these students are unusually well prepared to survive their hostile surroundings--or unusually well informed about the danger they're in--depending on how you look at it. Among them there are experts in insects and arachnids, poisons and venoms, and the chemical defenses of plants and animals.

Crichton is great about translating the wonder of science. His amazing shrinking technology won't send me running to the textbooks this time around, but there's still plenty of gee whiz science to be enjoyed in Micro's pages. More than that, he effectively shows the beauty as well as the horror of the situation his characters are in. As for the horror, I have to admit that I found it especially disturbing this time out. I have no special fear of dinosaurs, but I am absolutely phobic about spiders and insects. There are scenes that I definitely could have done without reading, and if this is an issue for you as well, be forewarned.

Much like Jurassic Park, Micro has a picaresque quality, with its protagonists leaping from one threat to another. I hate to say it, but the plotting was pretty by the book. There was a police procedural subplot that never really went anywhere, and true surprises were few and far between. Despite this, I read the novel easily in a day (instead of saving it for my Thanksgiving flight like I was supposed to). Once I started, I didn't want to stop reading, and the pages flew past swiftly.

Preston appears to have done a good job finishing what Crichton left behind. There is no feeling that this is the work of another author. Still, I do find myself wondering how the novel would have differed had Crichton written it all. Alas, we'll never know. If you're a hard-core Crichton fan like me, by all means read this novel. Just don't expect this final work to be the man's masterpiece. And even if you're not a hard-core fan, if the premise sounds fun to you, you could do a lot worse for airplane reading.

If you are hoping for a hard science premise you'll be disappointed. The technology which the plot revolves around has only a very flimsy connection to any real science, and it requires a considerable suspension of disbelief. As a long-time Crichton fan, this part was a bit of a let-down.

But once you get past that, the descriptions of life on a bug's scale were fantastic and well-researched. Some scenes were so real and so graphic that you may find them disturbing. These aren't the cartoon bugs of animated movies, these are the real deal, in all their ruthlessness and magnificent construction. These are the parts of the book that kept me turning the pages. I just wish we could have entered that miniature world in a way that wasn't quite so "honey I shrunk the kids" silly.

Overall a good read, and still worthy of bearing Crichton's name.

Micro is a mildly entertaining book, but it's ultimately a disappointment, and it is a sad coda to a distinguished literary career. I can understand why Richard Preston was selected to complete Crichton's unfinished manuscript; he has a talent for explaining scientific topics clearly and vividly. However, his fiction-writing abilities are simply nowhere near Crichton's. Preston's prose is clunky and awkward and his character-development skills are almost nonexistent.

The idea of shrinking people is basically absurd. Are the micro-people made of fewer atoms, or smaller atoms? If they're made of smaller atoms, how do they breathe air made of normal-size atoms and drink water made of normal-size molecules? Micro mentions these questions but doesn't answer them. As in Crichton's Timeline, an implausible technology is used as a device to launch the characters into an exciting adventure. Crichton could spin a thrilling, engaging story that made you forget the unlikely premise; Preston's storytelling skills are so feeble that you just can't accept the reality of the situation or care about the characters.

The publisher is marketing this as a new Michael Crichton novel. It isn't. It's essentially a piece of hackwork that utilizes a Crichton idea and incorporates some familiar Crichton story elements in a formulaic fashion. Micro has approximately the same literary quality as a movie novelization.

Heard a review of this on NPR and thought I'd give it a go. Unfortunately, I'd heard this story before - "Dr. Shrinker" on the Sid & Marty Kroft show when I was a kid. The characters were completely 2 dimensional, never developed, and there seemed to be so many of them just so that they could keep getting killed off to keep the action going. The "twist" in the plot was easy enough to figure out in the first 40 pages or so. A complete waste of time, IMHO. Definitely not worth $15.

I think I have read almost all of Michael Crichton's "science thriller adventure" novels, and seen most of the movies based on them -- "The Andromeda Strain" (the original) and "Jurassic Park" being the best, or at least most enjoyable, in my opinion.

It's my great hope that "Micro", Crichton's last book (finished after his death by Richard Preston) never gets adapted into a movie... although in a time when stupid ideas get made into huge, stupid movies, it probably will.

"Micro" begins somewhat promisingly, with the mysterious deaths of several men, killed with a succession of tiny cuts inflicted by unseen forces.

And then it goes downhill.

No, that's too mild -- it CAREENS downhill.

We're introduced to seven graduate students from Massachusetts -- none of them at all memorable as characters -- who are induced to come to Hawaii to work with a new company called Nanigen. Within a short time of their arrival, they are lured into a room where a big machine shrinks them down to roughly one-half an inch tall... and a chapter or so later, they are struggling to survive in the Hawaiian jungle, fighting for their lives against insects and other creatures, as well as natural phenomena which are now potentially fatal at their vastly reduced size.

Now, that's a premise which could have been a lot of fun. I'm a big fan of stories of people being shrunk down and having to deal with life at a tiny size -- "The Incredible Shrinking Man" is one of my favorite movies. It's a scenario filled with opportunities for wonder, excitement and peril.

Of course, it helps -- no, it's NECESSARY -- to support such a ludicrous premise with consistent logic, and people it with characters you can care about. "Micro" succeeds on neither of these counts.

The story really begins to fall apart with the hasty exposition explaining the "science" behind the "tensor generator" which shrinks the students down to that one-half inch height. The "science" amounts to this -- very strong magnetic fields causes things to shrink.

Uh-huh.

This is a great example of the value of the "less is more" approach. If you have to do something which is, essentially, theoretically impossible, DON'T try to explain it in a way which is CLEARLY nonsensical to anyone with half a brain. Just briefly make up something about the technology behind your magic device, and move on.

So we have these seven people -- eight, actually, because one of the Nanigen technicians is accidentally shrunken down with the group -- now roughly the size of sugar cubes. (The rationale for the evil head of Nanigen doing this has something to do with a lame sublpot about the brother of one of the students learning the shocking truth about Nanigen, and said student finding out something about the complicity of the evil head of Nanigen in the death -- or APPARENT death -- of said brother.) Obviously -- and it is made obvious in the bad dialogue attendant to this scene -- the evil head of Nanigen has shrunken the students to get rid of them.

And here's his plan: He's going to feed them to one of the many snakes in Nanigen's laboratory. But the first snake the students are offered to doesn't eat them, due to some convenient repellent insect chemicals one of the students is carrying. (But the evil head of Nanigen doesn't realize that, and instead thinks the snake must just not be that hungry.) So then, instead of offering the students to the NEXT snake, and maybe the next one after that, he allows his somewhat reluctant (and obviously somewhat soft-hearted) associate to let the students go... into the jungle. At night. With no supplies or weapons with which to defend themselves from all the predators now extremely dangerous to them at their reduced size. Better than being fed to a snake, I guess, but not by much.

Now, in the hands of a good writer, the following chapters could have been a thrilling series of adventures as these sugar cube-sized students struggle to survive in this now-alien landscape, using their wits and their scientific knowledge to keep themselves alive and somehow get back to their former stature. But Richard Preston is not that kind of writer. Many of his concepts and dialogue choices are simply embarrassingly dopey. Here's one -- it's from the thoughts running through the head of the aforementioned reluctant associate of the evil head of Nanigen, referring to her relationship with same:

"... (he) had been incredibly good to her, advanced her career, paid her unlimited amounts of money..."

Really? The evil head of Nanigen has paid her an infinite amount of money? Huh? Was this book even proofread?

And this howler comes from later on in the book (page 202, to be precise) in one of the many clunky scenes in which everything stops so that some bit of biological science can be tediously explained. This is a character named Rick talking about the ingredient he needs to cook up some curare, a poison he hopes to use to defend them against the creatures who might want to eat them:

"That whiff of bitter almonds... can you smell it? Cyanide -- a universal poison, it'll kill anything, and fast. Cyanide -- a favorite of Cold War spies."

And here's another bizarre one from page 244, when one of the characters is being attacked by a wasp which is laying eggs in him:

"The wasp was... burying her stinger in his shoulder. And he felt nothing. His arm had gone dead.

"No!" he screamed, and grabbed the stinger in both hands, and tried to pull it out."

Now, maybe I'm missing a key element here, but... if one of your arms has "gone dead", how do you then grab something with BOTH hands?

One more -- on page 302, a police detective interviewing the evil head of Nanigen notices the smell of the cigar the evil head of Nanigen is smoking:

"The air had a pleasant aroma of cigar. Given the pleasance of the aroma, Watanabe concluded that the cigar had cost more than ten dollars."

When I first read that second line, I thought "Did the author just invent a word? 'Pleasance'? I've never heard that word before."

I asked my wife -- who had her laptop open -- to do a quick dictionary.com search for the word, and -- to my surprise -- it IS in fact a real word. Here's what dictionary.com had to say about it:

"pleas·ance' '[plez-uhns]

noun

1. a place laid out as a pleasure garden or promenade.

2. Archaic . pleasure."

So the author has chosen to use the archaic meaning of an uncommon word, for no particularly good reason... the mark of someone who writes with a thesaurus open at his side.

I came very close to abandoning "Micro" without finishing it... but I am loathe to do that with any book I've started reading, so I toughed it out and made it to the end. It wasn't easy. This is one of those rare books which was almost painful to read, and not because it includes troubling or disturbing concepts. It's just a terrible waste of trees. I wish I'd followed my earlier impulse and dumped it in the recycling bin.

Michael Crichton had a real knack for taking a premise which was slightly ludicrous and turning it into a compelling story, with just enough real science mixed in to keep up the suspension of disbelief. Richard Preston does not have that ability, if this book is any indication. -- PL

This is not a book written by Michael Crichton. I have read every single one of his books and nothing in this one is representative of his previous writings. I have read only one book by Richard Preston, and it was one of the best non-fiction books I have read in years: "Demon in the Freezer" (5 stars). Unfortunately, "Micro" does not do him justice either.

Crichton always wrote in a believable manner. He developed his far out theses with lots of accurate details. His character development was such that you liked or disliked the players, but you were rarely ambivalent. None of that is in this novel. The detail errors just slap you in the face. Such as a botanist, herpetologist, plant chemist, entomologists all occupying the same lab space at Harvard! This will never happen in a million years. They would be on different floors, different buildings. Then when one brother finds a micro airplane and calls the other brother, the response is "this is an important application, bring it with you when you come to Hawaii." Yet the other brother was just down the road a mile at MIT. Must not have been that important. Oh, and the guy who can track cell phone calls and RECORDS their conversations! Gimme a break, even Big Brother cannot do that. And it goes on and on. The accurate details were not there to build a pseudofoundation for the plot. And the character development was non-existent. I had no empathy when key players fell by the way side. It was ho hum, who cares. Oh, and when did "gone missing" or "went missing" enter the lexicon of literate adults? What happened to "is missing" or "was missing?" Strange.

No, I felt I was reading the script for a Saturday morning cartoon. Or maybe the next release of Toy Story. I was extremely disappointed in this novel. I'll stick with another reread of "The Andromeda Strain."

So "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" meets "A Bug's Life" and a little bit of "Ant Bully". The end tries to be like 24 but is really like the old Cars video "You Might Think". VERY Dissappointed. I've been so irritated reading this, no one even wants to borrow it from me!

This just shows you what publishers will now do to make a buck. Crichton is one of the most creative writers in history. The publisher gets a hold of some notes after Michael Crichton Dies and says the book was his, tarnishing his name.

First the big publishing companies get together and introduce Illegal Price Fixing, and now they have done this - totally unreadable garbage!

Don't waste your money or time. The plot is ridiculous. The dialogue is stilted and insipid; no one talks like this.

Michael Crichton's contirbution to this book is the two and a half page introduction, and the central idea. This is a Richard Preston novel - and its not very good. Preston is a fine writer in his own right - it seems he was trying to write in Crichton's style and he couldn't pull it off. The book is really poorly written, almost embarassingly so, I found myself shaking my head at most of the passages. Chrichton's estate should request a new book cover listing Preston as the author, no way should Crichton be associated with this novel