Book Details
| Title: | Micro | |
| Author: | Michael Crichton, Richard Preston | |
| Times Read: | 1 | |
| Last Read: | 07.01.12 |
Other Books Read By This Author (0)
| Date Read | Note |
| 07.01.12 | Crichton's (hopefully) last novel, this one I guess unfinished at the time of his death. It seems like it. While reading this, Pirate Lattitudes definitely seemed to come from a different author. I have no idea when Pirate Lattitudes was written but I'm guessing it was like... Eaters of the Dead era or something. Maybe he trunked it because of the Johnny Depp movie or something and it had some kind of major flaws in the last half but there was an excitement behind it that felt old-school Cricthon. Micro feels much more on the track that Prey, State of Fear, and Next presented. Interesting ideas thinly wrapped in wear story. Only here it's even worse because the prose itself is fairly poor. The story is that a bunch of grad students get shrunk Honey-I-Shrunk-The-Kids-style except for instead of a back yard they're in the Hawaiian jungle and instead of Rick Moranis trying to find them it's an evil psychopath CEO. So once you get past the corniness of the presence and the dangerous similarity to Prey, interesting events start to happen that eventually gripped me enough to keep me entertained throughout the book. Stuff like being able to smell pheromones, not taking any damage from impossible falls, the extreme danger of nature's predators, and uber-gross behavior of several animal species all captivated me and made me see everyday terrain in completely different ways. I got a little bit of the same stuff from The Incredible Shrinking Man and Honey I Shrunk the Kids but this is much more gross via Richard Preston's scientific recounting of biological breakdown. Anyone that read The Hot Zone can attest that the man knows how to describe gross shit happening to the human body, but his skills at fiction prose are... well ok it's hard because I wasn't really impressed with Crichton's last few efforts either so I don't really know who's to blame. Either way, I found the writing to be generally poor. Were it not for the plot (which still gets pretty ridiculous especially at the end) it would have been a poor book. Thankfully, there's still enough ideas and plot turns that made me enjoy it. But yeah, the ending was really crap. |
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