Next Book

NEXT BY MICHAEL CRICHTON: I'm still trying to figure out how this manuscript landed in the hands of an editor and actually got the go ahead to be published in time for Christmas. I can't help but think about all those dads that are going to be so disappointed on December 26th when they crack open the book and find a collection of plot lines with confusing characters and stories that seem to go nowhere.

In Prey and State of Fear, Crichton did what he does best in providing a well researched book with a riveting and thrilling plot, thought I felt the latter a little heavy handed with a viewpoint I didn't necessarily agree with. Compared with Next, I seriously wonder what happened? The book seems barely half finished, even though if runs on for four hundred pages. There are around five to seven plot lines each with their own vague characters that the reader has to struggle to keep straight going on in their own seemingly inane direction. Near the end of the book a few of these plot lines cross over forcefully at the author's hand, and then the book ends and the reader is left wondering where the rest of the book is. What happened to the basic rule of a story? Instead of a beginning, middle and an end, the reader gets a weak infrastructure of a beginning, with part of a middle which suddenly ends!

Combined with this is the overarching philosophy of this novel (which I hope Crichton doesn't subscribe to himself) where every person is one who sees life only for personal gain, to be rich, and feel constant pleasure. The women are always bombshells to be used and discarded, while the characters in general will stop at nothing to satisfy their pathetic personal whims.

As for the learning portion of the novel - with Prey it was the risk of nanotechnology, with State of Fear global warming - Crichton is very heavy handed in the risks of gene therapy and engineering, running the gamut from talking (and by this I mean with extensive vocabularies) parrots and orangutans, to the risks of human cloning, to bounty hunters trying to kidnap and steal tissues from innocent people who simply happen to possess the same DNA as a family member who had his cells declared property of UCLA in a court of law. While Crichton is trying to make the blatant point of "Watch out, this is what can happen," it comes off as over-the-top farce and tomfoolery. And if it wasn't made clear for you, he ends the novel with his note about how patenting genes is bad, as well as a list of other matters involving gene therapy, followed by a bibliography, just to show he did the work, supposedly

It is sad really, for I'd hoped Next would be the return to the great author who gave us truly brilliant novels like Jurassic Park, Sphere, and The Andromeda Strain, but Next can't really be considered an actual book now, because of its failure in the rules of a novel on so many levels.

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