I am a very big Michael Crichton fan. He was the first adult author I made a point to read, and he is a huge reason why I love literature  and writing so much. I am not embarrassed to say that I shed a few tears on November 4, 2008, when he died.  He had completed one novel, Pirate Latitudes, published posthumously, and now he has a new novel out, completed by Richard Preston.

            Micro, released Nov. 22, is sort of a mixed bag. I would like to first point out that I do not believe that Michael Crichton was a literary genius or something, along the lines of Milton or Joyce, but I do think he was an extremely effective writer. He combined scientific fact with high adventure to create a style uniquely his own. He put years of meticulous research into each scientific novel he produced, and I can't help but admire him for that.

            With Micro, you can tell he researched a great deal, but it also seems like he didn't really have anywhere to put it, forcing it into the characters' dialogue. I suppose before I get too far into the complaints I should probably do my best in describing the plot, which is a bit of a disappointment.

            The novel begins in such a Crichton style that it almost seems like a cliché. In the opening chapter, three men are killed in a mysterious way. The following chapters describe a bit about Nanigen, a shady corporation seemingly more scientifically advanced than any other company on Earth. In this regard, the opening is very similar to that of other Crichton novels like State of Fear, JurassicPark and even Timeline.

            Nanigen allows a group of graduate students from Harvard to come out to Hawaii to tour the facilities. The main character's brother—an employee of Nanigen—is mysteriously killed and Peter Jansen investigates his sibling's death. For a while the novel becomes a pretty interesting and eerily mysterious, until Peter presents his information to the head of Nanigen, Vin Drake, while on tour and all hell breaks loose. To summarize, Vin Drake shrinks the graduate students as well as one Nanigen employee to hide the evidence.

            This is one of the novel's major drawbacks: the antagonist. Vin Drake is presented as basically pure evil, and there really isn't anything else to his character. Crichton took the easy way out here, and the result is a bit disappointing.

            I had to suspend my disbelief once the whole "shrinking people to one-half inch size" concept was introduced. Crichton goes into technical detail but I can't help but think of Richard Matheson's The Incredible Shrinking Man or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. I suppose you could compare it to Gulliver's Travels, but the cautionary social commentary that Crichton provides us is by no means similar to Swift's use of satire.

            There is an exciting scene in which Peter Jansen escapes and traps a large snake wanting to kill him and then it's basically off to the races. The group of mini-graduate students escapes, miles away from where they need to be to get back to normal size.  There are thousands of organisms in the rainforest that can kill them. This is where the scientific details are kind of stuffed in, with each character rambling about his respective field—botany, biochemistry, arachnology, et cetera.

            The first kill does not disappoint. It is deliciously gory and tremendously exciting. With each character being no more than a stereotype (three-dimensional characters have never been Crichton's strength) the action is really all readers have to look forward to at this point. It becomes kind of like a slasher film, during which you're hoping for violent and unique deaths, and the first one certainly whets your appetite. More deaths come as ants, wasps, bats and centipedes prove to be dangerous.

            As I expected, it turns out there's a bit more to Vin Drake. Not in terms of depth of his character—he's still entirely evil—but there's a twist that explains his methods.

            The novel is stupid and incredibly juvenile for Michael Crichton. I kept expecting Rick Moranis to make a cameo appearance in the novel, and that's never a good sign. All that being said and despite its many flaws, I was entertained by this novel, particularly the last 200 pages or so, which I struggled to put down. It's not fantastic literature or groundbreaking in any way but I liked it.  I like popcorn entertainment every once in a while, and perhaps some of the reason why I liked this novel was because it was the first that I read after spending months on Ulysses. It's nice to come across a sentence that means precisely what it says and doesn't have hundreds of mysteries in it.

            I don't know if I would recommend this to too many people.  The novel lacks depth but I found the action—and there is a lot of it—pretty exciting.