Book Review – Michael Crichton’s “Micro”
Just how well do you think that you know about nature?
I’m not talking about the weather or geography here, but rather plants and insects; some of the most dominant forms of life on this planet. If you were to step outdoors, could you accurately name at least some of the plants and insects found outside of your home?
Sadly, I fall with the majority in my lack of knowledge of the great outdoors. Trees are trees, plants are plants, and bugs are bugs. Some of them fly, others can sting. But as a whole, I just don’t have the detailed knowledge that I should have concerning the world found outside of the home.
Michael Crichton’s book, Micro, easily changes your perspective on the world of plants and insects. Sadly, Crichton died in 2008 before Mirco was finished. Author Richard Preston was asked to pick up where Crichton left off and complete the story. Mirco was finally completed and published in 2011.
Micro begins with a corporate espionage break-in of the company Nanigen. Nanigen’s headquarters is located on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. The company itself specializes in some incredibly advanced technology.
Mario Rodriguez, the person breaking into Nanigen, is somewhat puzzled as it’s really easy to break into Nanigen. There doesn’t appear to be any type of a security system. He walks around some of the laboratories before noticing that he’s bleeding. The cuts just mysteriously appeared on his body. Frightened, Rodriguez flees from Nanigen and returns to the person who hired him, a man named Willy Fong. Fong is being visited by an unknown Asian man when Rodriguez arrives. Rodriguez tries to tell Fong what happened at Nanigen, but all three men are cut by the mysterious forces and they all die within a matter of minutes.
The police arrive at Willy Fong’s office a few days later and discover the three dead men. The cuts on their bodies were made with surgical precision. However, there’s no murder weapon found anywhere inside or outside of Fong’s office. And to make the mystery even more puzzling, the doors and windows are all locked from the inside. There’s no sign of a forced entry or a fourth person at the scene of the crime. It’s as if the three men were sliced open by a ghost.
Mirco then jumps halfway around the world to the land of academia at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Seven graduate students, Rick Hutter, Karen King, Peter Jansen, Erika Moll, Amar Singh, Jenny Linn and Danny Minot, at an unspecified college are leading experts in botany, insects and venoms. One day the students are visited by Nanigen’s president Vin Drake, the CFO Alyson Bender, and another Nanigen executive, Eric Jansen. Eric just happens to be Peter Jansen’s older brother.
Vin Drake conducts a small presentation and recruits the seven graduate students to his company in Hawaii. He cannot tell them everything about Nanigen, but he promises to show them once they arrive in Hawaii and sign a non-disclosure agreement. Curiosity gets to the best of them, and all seven of the students agree to make the journey.
Just before leaving for Hawaii, Peter Jansen receives a quick text message from his brother. All it says is “don’t come.” There’s nothing else. No phone call, no further explanation. A little while later Peter receives a phone call from Alyson Bender. She claims that Eric was killed in a boating accident, and Peter is needed in Hawaii immediately. Peter drops everything and heads to the tropical island chain.
Peter arrives in Hawaii and meets with the police department. There were some witnesses to his brother’s death. They show him somebody’s home video of the boating incident. Sure enough, it’s clear that Eric suddenly abandons ship and jumps into the surf. But when the camera quickly pans around the area, Peter sees Alyson Bender standing on the beach. A moment later she’s gone in the video, but her presence alone tells Peter that there’s more to Eric’s disappearance than it initially seems.
Peter asks Rick Hunter’s friend, Jorge, to hack into Alyson Bender’s phone and send him the transactions. He receives them fairly soon, and the phone transmissions confirm that Vin Drake himself was involved in Eric’s disappearance. The only question to Peter is when to confront Drake with his evidence.
The other graduate students arrive in Hawaii and they are all taken to Nanigen for a tour of the company. Vin Drake meets with the graduate students and begins by leading them on a tour of the forest next to the Nanigen laboratory. He goes into detail about some of the plant species and how his company is collecting specimens of them in a particular manner. After going through the forest, Vin Drake leads the students through the building itself. It’s there that he reveals the secret behind Nanigen — miniature equipment.
The miniaturization process explained in Micro is pretty neat, sort of like how the fossilized DNA found in ancient mosquitoes could lead to the birth of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. In Micro, Nanigen President Vin Drake explains that a study found that workers who were exposed to magnetic fields for long periods of time in nuclear medicine actually shrunk, something like a quarter of an inch after ten years of working in the field. The people were in good health, just a little bit smaller over the course of time. A similar study overseas in France found similar results for people working in a high magnetic field.
What the scientists at Nanigen were doing was taking this a step further. They found a way to successfully shrink not only people but machines as well. The catch is that people could only stay in their shrunken state for only a few days before facing serious medical problems.
After taking the factory tour with his graduate students, Peter Jansen confronts Vin Drake with his evidence. He secretly attaches a microphone to himself before Drake takes him and Alyson Bender into a separate room. Peter plays his evidence, and to his surprise, Drake violently attacks him. While doing so he admits guilt. Drake is surprised though when he discovers the microphone and that the students in the next room heard his admission of guilt.
Vin Drake sounds an alarm at the factory and tricks the students into a false “safety” room. He also shoves Jarel Kinsky, an innocent Nanigen employee, into the room as well. The room is actually the Tensor generator, and Drake shrinks the seven graduate students and Kinsky to about an inch in size.
Drake’s plan is to eliminate the evidence and simply get rid of the graduate students and Nanigen employee. He begins by trying to feed Peter Jansen to a snake. Drake is called away to meet with a police officer, and Peter is able to fend off the snake. His fellow students help him escape from the snake’s cage. Alyson returns and discovers the escaped people. She doesn’t want to kill them, so she carefully places them in a paper bag and hides them in her purse. She makes it look like they all escaped from the laboratory on their own.
Alyson takes the miniature people to a forested area known as Fern Gully, a place where Nanigen is currently doing miniature field research and collecting of samples. Drake is suspicious and follows Alyson to Fern Gully. When he confronts her they both discover a tear in the bag. This time the miniature people escaped for real. They’re an inch tall and now lost in a forest on Hawaii. A forest filled with insects, hungry mammals, and poisonous plants.
Drake convinces Alyson to help him cover up the mysterious disappearance of the students. They load a car with their belongings and take it to the edge of a cliff. Drake then kills Alyson and pushes the car over the cliff, making it look like Alyson was partying with the students before taking a wrong turn straight into the ocean.
The second half of Micro deals with the students facing danger at every turn from ants to a flash flood to a centipede to fellow shrunken humans hunting the graduate students. The people quickly discover that by a simple change in perspective, they’ve now entered a completely different world where humans are far from the top of the food chain. This is a violent and unforgiving world where insects hold the upper hand in strength and numbers.
Jarel Kinsky and all but two of the graduate students die in the forests of Hawaii. Vin Drake gets what’s coming to him in the end, but his ending just doesn’t quite seem satisfying enough. Although the Nanigen laboratory is destroyed, one of the scientists is able to steal the company’s secrets and escape, leaving the ending open for a sequel.
So was Mirco any good?
The first half of Micro is decent. To me, the beginning of the book feels like a cross between the nanotechnology in Prey and the overall adventure of Jurassic Park. The second half of the book feels like an alternate and less interesting version of Jurassic Park.
One of the problems with Micro is that a few of the sequences feel very quick and rushed, almost like they were incomplete ideas. It almost felt like Crichton was setting up some scenarios and Richard Preston had to find a quick way to complete them. Other problems with the book involved overly simple / annoying characters to a simplified and quick ending to the story.
The bottom line here is that most of Micro just does not feel like a Michael Crichton book. Yes, there’s a bibliography at the end, and a few times the story goes into great detail involving plants and insects. But once the students are miniaturized and the story gets rolling, large sections of it also become rather simplified and rushed.
You don’t want to blame Crichton for the bad parts of Micro as he wasn’t able to complete the story. You also don’t want to blame Richard Preston as this is not his original story. He had to pick up the notes and fragments and assemble an entire story out of the material. It’s really a toss up as to whether or not Micro really should have been published.
The miniaturization in Micro was pretty neat, and the attention to detail with the plants and insects was also fascinating. I can tell you this much, if somebody makes Micro into a movie, the parts involving the insects attacking people will be some terrifying scenes.
