Micro

Where Andromeda Strain was suspenseful, exciting, totally believable, and built around a cast of completely dimensional characters, Micro is predictable, unbelievable, and populated with the kind of pasteboard people that one might expect from a contemporary car commercial. I stopped reading halfway through, thought about how the novel might end, flipped to the last few pages, and found not a single surprise or unresolved thread. Even the little "twist" at the end reads like the post-credits mini-scene to which contemporary movie makers are so seemingly addicted. This book will no doubt be made into an equally forgettable action movie epic to open in time for a high traffic summer run, make its money and then, hopefully, sink into a show more well deserved obscurity. show less

As with Pirate Latitudes, I feel like there was a good reason Crichton had not released this before his untimely passing. This novel, even more than the aforementioned, was incomplete enough to require a second writer whose style is so pervasive as to make it difficult to see any of Crichton's story telling magic. I think that it is misleading and shameful to sell this novel on Crichton's name with "and Richard Preston" when it is clearly an idea generated by Crichton and seemingly solely executed by Preston. The clunky writing style does not give the audience any credit and plays to below a lowest-common-denominator point of view. How many times do we need to hear an explanation of what curare is? How little do you trust us readers to show more remember what you said two chapters ago? Obviously not very much by the retelling and reexplaining that goes on in Micro. It is a shame to have to rate this novel so low, but this is basically a novel adaptation of a mediocre screenplay that hasn't be written yet. None of the conventions used mimic Crichton's style of character development and attention to detail while not insulting the audience with rehashing that I so loved in all his novels. I enjoyed the basic concept and the plot line, but the development and story telling seemed like Preston was going straight for the movie version. Many new novels are written like movies these days and it is sad to see the degradation of the craft. We expect blockbuster summer movies to give us action and the heroes get away at just the perfect 1 in 100,000,000 chance moments and then the lead male and lead female realize that they have been in love the whole time and all of the lines are tied up in a pretty little bow at the end that doesn't make you think, but please authors: Stop doing this with novels! My opinion is skip Micro and remember Crichton for his own great works, not his ideas taken and written by someone else and then sold with his name as a large marquee to trick people into believing that they are buying more than just his outline. Harper's should be ashamed to mislead the throngs of fans in this manner. show less

So I think this book actually deserves a 3.5, but half ratings aren't welcome here. Therefore, it gets a 3.

The story and plot were very intriguing. & most of the characters were pretty likable. Except for Danny and Drake, but that's to be expected. I really enjoyed the touch of biology presented and was entertained by the variety of talent on the team.

However, I don't ever recall Crichton using a cliffhanger ending...usually everything is resolved and tied up. Then cement is poured over. I'm going to assume that the ending is Mr. Preston's domain, because it didn't read the same as it usually would if Crichton had done it.

To tie things up: Plot good, characters good, ending so-so, science info provided interesting, death of certain show more characters Not So Good---necessary..possibly, but I still didn't like it. Very intriguing read----just didn't completely hit the mark for me. show less

Sadly for what might have been Crichton's last (pre-posthumous mostly finished) work, I feel I'm being generous giving this 3 stars. Its not a HORRIBLE book by any means.... but basically if you've read any of his previous works, you could foresee where this was going.

Also, if you've seen any formulaic Hollywood action movie.... you know exactly how this pans out. Nothing really to throw out there, other than technology and different insects at you.

I think the only "loop" that is thrown is the survivors of the students who get shrunken down. As an opposite to this, it was pretty obvious that Eric was never really dead.

It was a decently fun romp, that, apparently took me roughly a year to finish. Didn't quite realize I let this shelf show more so long and gone back to read other books. This was pretty much just a typical action book that was set in the "micro" world, and because of that, it allowed Crichton/Preston to use insects almost like aliens, where throwing out a different random bug to attack or a bird, or Vin Drake who was mustache-twirling evil, just to try and throw "curveballs out of nowhere" at the protagonists. But sadly it was all too pretty much straight forward and formulaic. show less

I wasn’t expecting great literature, but I was expecting a more entertaining story.

A mishmash of graduate students who are studying spiders, beetles, venom, medicine, hormones, pheromones, plus a postmodernist who is studying scientists, are visited by three corporate executives who are recruiting for a secret project. The connection is made because a student and an executive are brothers. The students are flown to corporate headquarters in Hawaii, where the project is revealed: “tensor fields” can shrink sophisticated robots to the size of bugs, and hordes of them are at work analyzing flora and fauna at a microscopic scale. So far, the people are pretty much cardboard going through motions, but OK, maybe now they’re in place show more and something interesting can happen. However. Behind the surface secret project is a nefarious secret project. And just before the students arrive, the executive brother disappears in a boating accident. The police play a tourist video of the accident for the student brother, and he recognizes something suspicious. Rather than mention it, he concocts an elaborate plan to elicit a public confession from the villain. This does not have the desired effect. The tensor fields can shrink people too, and the graduate students, now 1/2” tall, are deposited in the landscape. So now they need to get back, through a dangerous jungle of predatory bugs, to the tensor fields, which can unshrink them to normal size. Meanwhile things aren’t going so smoothly for the villain either, because the police aren’t as dumb as he assumes, and it’s the coverup that gets you.

There are actually a few cool bits involving bugs, but nowhere near what one might suppose from the six page bibliography, and not enough to redeem the cartoon plot. show less

Not really written by Crichton, finished after his death by Richard Preston.

You can see the skeleton of a Michael Crichton novel here, which is what Preston started with. But what he constructed around that skeleton is one of the most godawful stories I can remember reading.

Characters don't develop over time, they undergo complete personality changes between paragraphs. Some are clearly caricatures of people we met in previous Crichton novels.

The main plot point is straight out of the 1960's Batman TV series - "I'll do something incredibly complicated and by no means sure to work, then leave them alone and hope they die!"

The world would be a better place, and Crichton's legacy would be much shinier, if this book had never been published.

Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston is a techno-thriller that relies on an all too familiar theme of a greedy capitalist exploiting a technological breakthrough that could benefit humanity. In this story, a shrinking machine and mini-robots are being used for evil instead of for good and anyone who gets in the way ends up murdered.

When a group of visiting grad students stumble on the truth, they are shrunk down to tiny beings and left in the Hawaiian wilderness to die. As the 7 shrunken characters battle giant beetles, wasps and spiders, one can’t help but be reminded of the Walt Disney movie, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”. Of course as the story progresses, they are a number of grisly deaths each one progressively more show more horrifying than the last one.

I understand this this was an unfinished novel of Crichton’s that was completed by Richard Preston and unfortunately this combination of nature against technology doesn’t really work. A story of this nature needs to embrace it’s silliness and so should have had more humour and a lighter touch. I did enjoy some of the survival aspects of the story but the villain was an over-the-top cartoon, the science was ridiculous and the plot felt rehashed from previous books. show less