Anyone read Michael Crichton's latest yet?

[pokerfan]

http://books.google.com/books?id=Ip_hcQAs7hkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Michael+Crichton+micro&hl=en&ei=SQ_UTvGlK8fiiAKRvqWrDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Michael%20Crichton%20micro&f=false">Micro, published posthumously. Great fun, so far. I'm about halfway.

With flat writing but sometimes amazing detail, 'Micro' by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston involves a secret machine that shrinks people and things, and a harrowing adventure of minuscule proportions.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8917543/Michael-Crichton-and-the-mystery-of-the-posthumous-thriller.html

[Angry Dragon]

1. Honey, I shrunk the kids.

[pokerfan]

2. Exactly

but with more science. The magical quantum magnetic <mumble> shrinking machine is pretty fanciful but the biology of the tiny world is pretty interested and seems to be supported scientifically. It probably helps that it was Richard Preston who was tasked with completing the novel. Should make a good film with the state of CGI these days.

[Gabi Hayes]

3. ugh! was it as good as his shlockola climate change novel?

George Will replaces Michael Crichton as the right wing poster child against global climate change

by Robert Miller

When the Republicans were in control of the House and Senate, they appointed author Michael Crichton as their primary expert on global climate change–he became the honorary right wing anti-global warming poster boy. Crichton was invited to testify in a Senate hearing as the sole Republican expert on “global warming.” He did the usual thing by finding some obscure work and criticized the authors for their shoddy science.

But, it was an embarrassing moment for Crichton and the Republicans and served to enhance the growing public image of the Republican Party in general and Michael Crichton in particular, as being completely daft on the importance of global climate change to our future and the seriousness with which the public feels the issue needs to be addressed.

When Crichton died, there seemed no one available to immediately step into his shoes as the anti-climate change poster boy. Remember, that to adequately replace Crichton, you had to have a complete lack of knowledge of the field, poor training in quantitative science, but enough visibility to make your bullshit stick, at least for a while. That way, you might get some oil money to carry on with your work.

http://themillercircle.org/2009/02/george-will-replaces-michael-crighton-as-the-right-wing-poster-child-against-global-climate-change/

on top of that, I haven't been able to read anything he's written for a long time, including and since Congo, for anything else but a huge yock at his horrid writing

I did like a bunch of his early work, like Terminal Man, Andromeda Strain...can't remember what else. But as I got older, his stuff seemed much more hackneyed, cliched, and especially with State of Fear, laughably, incoherently, dishonestly absurd.

what follows is a review of the above State of Fear which pretty much says what I've been saying here, but better. after all, the guy got paid for his words:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_middlebrow/2004/12/michael_crichton.html

Who dinosaured Michael Crichton? Was it a comet or just the responsibility of being America's prophet of doom? In his new book, State of Fear, Crichton once again ascends to the pulpit to warn us of an impending horror. Like the diabolical Japanese businessmen in Rising Sun and the corporate vixen in Disclosure, these new shadowy forces, Crichton says, lurk among us, poised to wreak havoc. They're among America's fiercest enemies. They're … environmentalists.

State of Fear is a 600-page tirade about global warming. Crichton thinks environmentalists have become overheated about the threat and have substituted demagoguery for hard science. So he unleashes a cabal of ruthless greens, who build weather machines to punish their SUV-drivin', carbon-dioxide-emittin' neighbors with a plague of hurricanes and tsunamis. For Crichton's fans, this has got to be heartbreaking: The boy-novelist who engineered a tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park and mysterious pathogensfrom outer space in The Andromeda Strain has become a political pamphleteer, a right-wing noodge......

[pokerfan]

4. Didn't read that one

This one is pretty devoid of any politics, at least so far. Just an adventure, like Jurassic Park, only an introduction to the micro world. I keep having to look up animals (not to mention a variety of chemical compounds) I've never heard of. Fascinating.

[Gabi Hayes]

5. sounds interesting, reminiscent of Andromeda, maybe?

his prose had become so purple, situations so outlandish, characters so silly, I'd given up since long ago

my brother gave me State of Fear, and I gave it back to him, cause it was so ludicrous, so I haven't looked at anything he's done since then.

that said, I love books with similar premises

a guy who wrote for Rolling Stone (science) did a book on cloning gone mad (based on the genome project) awhile back that I thought was pretty interesting

and there's one called Blood Music that I remember as being OK

and if you like 'cyberpunk'ish stuff with a technological bent, there's always Neuromancer, Count Zero, Virtual Light, Idoru, and others by William Gibson, who's a much much better writer than Crichton

here:

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/

I've read almost all his novels/short stories

Neuromancer is best known/most praised because it was truly groundbreaking along with being very well put together, but I most enjoyed Virtual Light because of the way he uses language, the setting, and its sarcastic POV

one last, and I can't remember the title, either, but the premise was the invention of a plastic eating parasite that got out of the test tube and starting devouring everything polyvinyl in England, causing planes to crash, etc--utter chaos--resulting in total quarantine there, in hopes of staving off the utter destruction of CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT!!

[Gabi Hayes]

6. blood music, by Greg Bear, who also wrote the what-I-found-compelling Darwin's Radio:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_Radio

[Gabi Hayes]

7. oh, yeah, in the opposite vein, re: State of Fear, is the Kim Stanley Robinson, near-future SciFi

roman a clef Forty Signs of Rain, in which an honest to god progressive president fights the PTB over global warming, after the halting of the gulf stream causes climatic chaos, including the flooding, then freezing of Washington DC, and parts east/west of the Atlantic

it's a trilogy, and, as a former DC resident, I found it quite engaging. a review:

http://www.sfsite.com/09b/fs184.htm

[pokerfan]

9. if you can suspend disbelief

of shrinking people and I admit that's not easy, it's pretty much a tour of the microscopic world, much like what Asimov did many years ago with Fantastic Voyage, except that we know so much more biology and biochemistry now than we did then. Richard Preston was certainly equipped to take Crichton's notes and complete this novel so it's not like it's 100% Crichton. All I can say is that it's gripping and a page-turned in much the same way Airframe was, which interesting enough I read on a flight from New York to Seattle many years ago. :) I remember a flight attendant noticing what I was reading, her grinning evilly and saying, "Good, isn't it?"

I'm about two thirds through now and I won't give away any spoilers except that I hope that some of the biomechanical questions/problems with shrinking will be addressed at some point. I believe that they will because Crichton-Preston has been dropping little hints and puzzles along the way. If they aren't addressed by the end I will be disappointed. But so far it's been a fun romp.

[Odin2005]

8. I've never been impressed with Crichton.

Jurassic Park, just as an example, is full of factual errors* and Chaos Theory is treated as some magical force acting to humble the arrogance of Mankind. Many of his novels seem to push the "scientists are arrogant fools who have no humility" shtick. JP is an attack on Biotech, Prey is an attack on nanotech and AI.

* The most glaring is his calling the raptors the wrong species, the ones described in the book and movie are actually Deinonychus antorrhipus, not Velociraptor mongoliensis.

[MilesColtrane]

10. If the movie doesn't have Raquel Welch being attacked by uniform-eating white cells,...

I'm not interested.

[bikebloke]

11. On reserve at the library.

[pokerfan]

12. finished it last night

A lot of fun and I will be surprised if it's not made into a film.

Recommended.