Micro audiobook

I read this in one sitting today. Then I realized that there would be no more new Michael Crichton books after I finish his other posthumous novel, and what a sad finality to have to finally read what Crichton was reportedly working on when he was battling cancer. Now I'll simply have to make do with rereading his previous books. The choice of Richard Preston, the guy who wrote the harrowing The Hot Zone and oh-yes-yes Cobra Event and whose pedigree includes being a brother to don't-get-me-started Douglas Preston of Preston/Child fame, to finish Crichton's book is perfect. Micro is classic Crichton, the quintessential man vs. natural world theme, the always man "vs." nature and not "with," a distinctive statement by Crichton, strong intelligent women characters, and lots and lots of infodump, which is always a good thing no matter what critics and writing teachers say. And if you are into infodumps, there's the mother lode, Arthur Herzog's Heat, dry as the paper it's written on but still manages to be charming. After reading Micro, I've learned numerous life-saving biochem techniques (viable or not) should someone shrink me to around half an inch in size while I'm having a great time in the middle of a forested area in a volcanic island like Hawaii.

I really really liked it.

“Micro” comes from the brilliant mind of Jurassic Park writer, Michael Crichton. This novel was the last one Mr. Crichton worked on before his untimely death, and in fact, he passed before it was finished, which is where Richard Preston steps in. A group of young scientists, working in the finest scientific laboratories in Boston, are invited to Hawaii as part of a recruitment project by start-up entrepreneur Vincent Drake. Here, the group is asked to be part of next-level scientific discovery project hemmed by Drake, as he seeks to develop micro robots that would be able to explore parts of the Hawaiian biosphere that have as of yet been unable to be explored by humans. Jumping at the chance, the group are soon learning about Drake’s powerful technologies and advanced scientific machines. However, the group soon realizes that Drake has a far more sinister plan, manufacturing miniature aircraft and weaponry, and that Drake will go to extreme levels to keep his discoveries a secret. Crichton has a way of writing scientific, intelligent novels that are both interesting and completely readable. There is no heavy scientific text or concepts, and Crichton is able to bring the important scientific facts to a readers’ level, as he did with “Jurassic Park” (another one of Crichton’s novels that I thoroughly enjoyed). Right from the onset, this novel pulls you in. Maybe I’m showing my age, but I was a bit nostalgic for “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids!” (props to Canadian Rick Moranis) during Crichton’s “little people, big world” scenes. That being said, the novel was not at all silly as you might assume, and was every bit as entertaining as you would expect from a scientific novel of Crichton’s. The characters were honest and exceptionally brilliant, and the story was well-told and well-researched. I think I was able to tell where Mr. Preston took over, as I noticed a small difference in the storytelling (but not enough to make any difference to the level of enjoyment) . I have just started to read Crichton (although obviously, I’ve been familiar with his work for many years) , and every novel I read continues to surprise me with its realism and the ability to engage a reader so completely. Although it isn’t a light read by any means, “Micro” is a highly entertaining one!

My first and so far last Michael Crichton Novel was "Jurassic Park". Now I've read "Miro". Again, the author(s) explore(s) a part of new technology and the dark sides of it. But as expected from Crichton he did it in a highly realistic and intelligent way. The book definitely is a page-turner with a lot of surprises! I especially liked the descriptions of the Hawaiian fauna and flora, the green hell the students suddently found themselves in. A lot of fun, definitely to be recommended.

Very imaginative. Incredible tale of determination and survival. I will never, ever, ever look at insects the same way I did before . . .

I have to admit, I was concerned. The reviews of “Micro” seemed so lackluster that I was almost afraid to read it. I wondered if it would taint the memory of an author I really admire. Sure, I knew the reigns were handed off to Richard Preston—a notable author in his own right—but as an author myself, I also know how difficult it would be to pick up someone else’s work and not only finish it, but do it in a way that would please that author’s fans. An author’s voice is unique. To duplicate it would be like trying to duplicate someone’s handwriting. So how well did Preston do?I think he did a fantastic job. “Micro” is a page-turner in every sense of the word. It has lots of fascinating cutting-edge science, plenty of action and intrigue, surprises, a villain you can despise, a scientific team working to solve problems—in short, all the things you expect from a Michael Crichton book. And yet, it was unique enough to stand on its own. To me, it felt like “Jurassic Park” on a microscopic scale. I mean that as a complement, of course, as “Park” was one of my favorite Crichton books.My only criticism would come early in the book. One of the characters reacts to a death in the family in a way that felt, to me, a little unauthentic. I can’t imagine a real person acting the way he/she acted in similar circumstances. However, I also realize that his/her responses were part of the setup for the amazing stuff that comes later. And I can overlook a lot for what comes later. It is awesome.“Micro” is a worthy addition to the Crichton canon. Well done, Mr. Preston!

Nano-techno thriller - fun at times, but pretty frightening mostlyKudos to Richard Preston, who had the daunting task of completing the inimitable Michael Crichton's last work. It's Honey I Shrunk the Kids with real bad guys, and it gets frightening at times. But if you're a Crichton fan or anyone else, give this one a shot.

Okay so. Here’s the thing. I refuse to say anything negative about the aspects of this book that I think would possibly have changed had Michael Crichton been alive to finish it. It read like a rough draft, and the ending felt extremely short and rushed, but considering that the author died of cancer before he finished writing it, I won’t let that affect my review. Mr. Crichton doesn’t deserve to lose stars for dying. That being said, this was a true Crichton-esque scientific thriller, with lots and lots of scientific information and sources to back everything up. I very much enjoy that, but if you don’t, you probably won’t enjoy this book. I didn’t find it as scary as some of his others, like Jurassic Park or Congo, but this is way more horrifying in that it’s creatures we know. Somehow reading about a spider eating someone is more horrible than reading about a T-Rex eating someone. Bugs freak me out, and boy oh boy was this a freaky book. I just hope I don’t have nightmares about parasitic wasps. Hgghgh. I have the creepy crawlies.

What would you get if you mixed "Fantastic Voyage", "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" and "The Island of Doctor Moreau"? This book, that's what you'd get. "Micro" is a super-fun novel. Nothing spectacular, all right, but some bits were so over the top they made the whole book awesome. I'm well aware of the fact that it wasn't met with critical acclaim, still it's a five star read for me. PS = Given the amount of scientific-technical content, I'm pretty sure the first half of the book is 24 carat Crichton, while the second half is mainly Richard Preston.

This is the Michael Crichton I came to love in Jurassic Park. An adventure book filled with information and real science, and description to keep me turning the pages til I got to the end. I could not put this one down! The story centers on a company in Hawaii called Nanigen who is involved in drug research. Only they have a what can only be described as a rogue CEO who is greedier and more evil than the worst you can think of. When 7 college students come to Hawaii at the company's invitation Vin Drake, CEO, promptly minaturizes them and sends them into the jungle hoping to get rid of them so he can cover up a murder. The insects, and microbes they encounter and the wit with which they survive is what makes this book intensly fast moving. The story moves through some predicitable spots with characters being killed off by giant spiders, drowned in downpours of rain, and fending off armed assasins that have also been inserted into the miniature world, but the ending is truly Michael Crichton! It's a surprise and it leaves no doubt that we'll see this one on the big screen.

Micro shows a technology based on the size of materials and how the environment effects the way they live. This book gives a great view of how new works can change the world by a new invention everday. Michael Crichton gave a vivid insight on how in a world where humanity is on the lower level of the food chain and must adapt to there new lives or die trying to fix it. It presents how science and life relate to on another, life can be cruel and unforgiving; science shows how life is like that or what affects the ways things happen and Michael does a great job inducting those into a book. In a field where life is full of invaders and killers, a person who isn't indigenous to that type of ennvironment can't survive so easily.Also the way Michael showed some gruesome scenes portraits that he can write in a way that can intrige a person by how their life is. Nature is literally full of killers, everything wants to kill you for food because thats how the world works. They way he changes his story plot up is genius because everyone expects a main character to survive but in this that doesn't happen. Overall i liked this book because of how different it is, it showed some science, horror, gore, fiction, nonfiction and a futuristic tense of how technology can be or is.

Another solid Michael Crichton book! I wouldn't say that it is one of his best but it didn't disappoint in the action department. I felt that it lost of of the suspense from previous books, maybe because things happened so quickly, there was no time to build the tension that I found in books like Prey and Sphere. The gist of the story is a group of scientist researchers are approached by an up coming tech firm on a hiring drive. The students end up being shrunk and ditched in the rain forest and have to survive all manner of attacks from bugs, humans and the elements. Its fast paced and, as with George RR Martin, no character seems safe. I would recommend it to fans but would add that Prey, in my opinion, is better.

The day Michael Crichton died I was in my parents' house watching BBC 24 and the news scrolled along the bottom of the screen. My reaction was to shout the F word at the top of my voice and put my hands on my head. This was the man that made me want to be a writer. There had been no word that he was even ill, let alone dying. Memories of the times I spent reading his books as a teenager tumbled, of the day I bought Sphere in WH Smiths and got home and simply could not stop reading, of spending the entire week of a family holiday in Builth Wells engrossed in Jurassic Park, and then Congo. Of reading The Lost World the night before starting my A Levels and Binary when I should have been revising for my first year exams in university. I remembered asking my economics teacher about shady Japanese business practices after reading Rising Sun; and reading his amazing autobiography-cum-travel journal, Travels, whilst working in the video shop during the sunny summer of 1995. I read his books throughout my teens and continued doing so as each new one came out in my twenties, and the joy of sheer imaginative fiction never diminished. Even though I disagreed with what he said about climate change in State of Fear the thrill of the story was just as fresh as ever and, anyway, his point was more about the dangers of politicising science than global warming. He was a constant companion through my life, the only author whose back catalogue I have read in entirety, and he had died the same he way he wrote; matter-of-fact and without fuss.I was devastated when he died. To me, he is irreplaceable. I mostly read serious books by serious authors these days and new Crichton releases were joyous interludes.That's not to say Crichton wasn't a serious writer because he was. His novels are head and shoulders above his contemporary techno-thriller authors. He just decided that ideas and excitement should take precedence over finding truths about what it is to be human. His bad guys were pantomime, but brilliantly and deliberately so. How else can you tell such fun stories without fun characters? Even in his final bow, Micro, the villain is gloriously over the top.Any fan of Michael Crichton knows that each novel is prefaced by a short essay on the scientific subject matter of each book. They reveal the author's opinions on the field and finally, ingeniously, he melts reality and reforms it into the world of the novel by speaking briefly of the events that are about to take place in the book in your hands as if they actually happened. The essay is present in Micro and I read it and got to the end, which was truncated. It stopped mid-flow and was followed by the word, unfinished. It really hit hard, reading that. I knew before opening the book that it was going to bring up some emotional feelings but that word unfinished reminded me not only of how I'll miss him just being in the world, but also the stories he never had time to write.Micro itself is pure Crichton. A cutting edge technology firm has discovered how to shrink people and a hapless group of research students find themselves in battle against the ants, wasps and other bugs of the Hawaiian rain forest.The way he takes ideas that appeal to the child in us and makes them, however speculatively, real is his greatest skill. There's not a person on the planet who didn't see the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and think, that's so cool. Nobody in the world who saw Jurassic Park didn’t feel that little chill at the back of the neck when the dinosaurs first came on screen. Just as Spielberg has never lost his inner child, neither did Crichton. The addition of speculative science justifies our reading such stories to the adult part of our minds but really, these stories remind us of the people we were before life knocked us into shape. A novel about being chased through a jungle by giant insects is, simply, massively appealing to anyone who remembers the spirit of adventure you feel as a child.And it pays off too. It wasn't just his death that made me like this book; it is great in its own right. I enjoyed this in the same way I enjoyed the books I read when I was younger. The plot rattles along, the characters are the usual Crichton archetypes that work so well in larger than life stories, and just when you think it can't get any better they start flying around in tiny planes! Michael Crichton always had a way of perfectly balancing a rollicking plot with lessons about nature, the sort of nature you long to be taught about in school. Here you learn about poisons, bug behaviour, and the weapons insects have to rip tiny humans to shreds. There are some twists and turns and a truly shocking moment towards the end that I totally didn't see coming.The book was unfinished at the time of his death and brought to completion by Richard Preston, author of the brilliant non-fiction, The Hot Zone. He's done a great job in realising Crichton's vision, as well as capturing his writing style which is so often aped but never matched.And so Micro is a superb swan song from the creator of the techno-thriller and grand master of the modern adventure story. Inside the cover is an ink drawing of the rainforest in which the novel takes place. If you look very carefully, just near the waterfalls, in type so small you might need a magnifying glass to read it, you find the words, 'Numquam obliviscemur Michaelis Crichtonis' which means Michael Crichton, never forget. I never will. So long Michael, and thanks for the memories.