A Micro Review of Micro

I finished listening to the posthumously published Michael Crichton book Micro some time back and wrote a short review at that time. Unfortunately, the review was lost when I bent the thumb drive it was stored on; if you remember that story, you also remember it didn't end well (for the the thumb drive, that is ).

If you don't know the story behind Micro, it's about a group of young scientists shrunk down to the size of, oh, carpenter ants, and how they fight off bad insects and bad regular-sized humans with technology available to Lilliputians.

The gist of my comments were...

1. If you like Michael Crichton, you'll like Micro, even if Crichton didn't write most of it.

2. It's better than Pirate Latitudes (also published posthumously).

3. There was a huge missed opportunity at the end. Like most Crichton books, characters we are meant to dislike die, and those we root for (most of them) survive. In the case of this story, miniaturized humans return to full size, but they didn't bring anything back with them that could be threatening at a larger scale.

Think about it: You shrink a group of humans down to tiny size, they battle all sorts of creepie crawlies that are now gargantuan (to them), then you bring the humans back to normal size, and you don't bring back a creepy crawlie along with you?

I mean, the character Dan has wasp larvae incubating in him, for crying out loud. I fully expected to encounter giant wasp larvae that turn into giant wasps.

And of course there's a romance. What would happen it two micro humans mated? Do you get a micro baby?

All I can think of is that they wrote some teasers in and then wrote them out. Maybe the publishers have lost interest, or the Crichton estate wasn't interested, or the Crichton name simply has lost its Jurassic luster. But the miss is just too great to be accidental.

Too bad, but it was worth the read. Well, the listen, and John Bedford Lloyd did an okay job narrating. Took some getting used to, but once I did, it was a fun ride.

Crichton was my one guilty literary pleasure. I've tried a few others but have found none that I enjoy nearly as much. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child come close; they are great reads, but difficult to digest as audio books (IMHO).

Started: 2012-02-20