Fiction Addict

Genre: Thriller

Publisher: Harper

Publication Date: November 2011

Reviewed by Josh Olds

It’s everywhere, but you never see it; it could kill you, but you don’t even know it’s there. It’s another world completely, one you’re a part of even though you hardly ever realize it. It’s Micro and what you find there will be nothing like what you expect. Is this posthumous thriller, Richard Preston builds on the manuscript left by the late Michael Crichton to throw readers into a world every bit as terrifying as Jurassic Park. Only much, much smaller.

When seven graduate students jump at the chance to take a job with the startup company Nanigen MicroTechnologies, they think it’ll be a great opportunity to pad their resumes. They’re promised tools and funds unlike anything academia could offer. And Nanigen delivers in a big way. Of course it’s not all about science. Nanigen has a dark side as well, one that’s much more profitable than scientific discovery—at least in terms of cold hard cash. The students see Nanigen as an opportunity to discover the undiscovered, to explore where no one else has explored. But Nanigen CEO Vincent Drake has other applications in mind.

A few of those students uncover Drake’s plans and end up in a battle for their lives—shrunk to the size of the insects in the micro world. David versus Goliath plays out on a grand scale across the island of Oahu as the students must not only deal with their minute size, but the terrifying Micro world they’ve been thrown into. Each of their specialties and skills come in handy for their survival, but not all will make it back alive. It’s only a matter of a time before the effects of being shrunk kill them, so it’s a race against the clock to get back to Nanigen and somehow reverse the process. And even then they’ll have to find a way to stop Drake.

Micro is a truly immersive thriller, taking readers to a place they’ve probably never been before and showing them the true terrors that surround them and would certainly kill them if they were only smaller. Sometimes this causes the plot to get bogged down in explanation as readers need to be able to understand this new world. Sometimes the action gets broken down to explain some sort of scientific fact. But it does a have a purpose and overall the science of the book does not get in the way of the story and rather adds to its interest.

The group dynamic—these seven grad students who aren’t exactly the best of friends and have to figure out how to work together—is sometimes good, sometimes poor. Crichton and Preston do a good job of showing their struggles, idiosyncrasies, and petty feuds, but at points their pettiness just seems unbelievable given the fact they know that they need one another to survive. (Or maybe I somehow have some faith left in the human race.) Each character is also more-or-less an obvious achetype (The Leader, The Bully, etc.) rather than being three-dimensional.

In the end, Micro isn’t the instant classic the inside flap promises. The writing suffers at points (for example, at one point, a character who has had an arm paralyzed by a wasp sting is said to remove the stinger with both hands), the dialogue is somewhat stilted at points, and character development is somewhat weak, yet I still found myself drawn into the journey and kept turning pages. Micro isn’t Crichton’s best, but if you’re a fan of science or a fan of Crichton, you may want to pick this one up.