I'm a big fan of Michael Crichton. I've even read his sorta-autobiography, "Travels" (1988). He always writes on something
different than before (with the exception of the Jurassic Park
sequel), and I get the feeling he reads the hell out of a topic that
interests him and then writes a thriller about it to pay his latest
round of bills. He's written on sexual harassment, airplane safety,
virus engineering, even medieval France. This book's topics could
have come straight from the O'Reilly emerging technology conference playbook: biotech, emergent
intelligence, silicon valley software development culture, and
nanotech.
The science in this book is pretty good. I know more about the
subjects than someone off the street, and my bullshitometer didn't
redline once. I could tell where the truth got blurry, but there was
no "and then we exceed the speed of light with a Chevy engine and some
biodiesel!" moment of pure impossibility.
Michael Crichton novels are all written with an eye to being a movie,
I'm sure. This is no exception--Fox snagged the rights before the
book was even published. The book has the usual thriller moments of
narrow escape, renewed fear, and ingenious escape, and makes for a
good read as well as (inevitably) a good view. I consumed it as soon
as I bought it, and recommend it just as quickly.
Overall: 8/10.
--Nat
Have to respectfully disagree
swiftone on 2003-01-14T16:11:43
(I've tried to keep this spoiler-free)
I found the main character incredibly dense...faced with some obviously connected data points, that he even remarked upon ("Why, this is just like..."), he failed to make any connections or draw any conclusions. Several repeat occurances of this sort of thing stretched my suspension of disbelief.
Likewise there were several science areas that I wasn't comfortable with. I'm not an expert in the field, but my understanding is that evolution is the result of environmental pressures (driving natural selection). In genetic programming, these pressures are artificially induced, but still present. He has several vast leaps of an evolutionary type with no explanation of what pressures were involved. This led to me spending much of the book thinking "X and Y don't make sense based on what the character has concluded, therefore there's got to be a surprise Z somewhere"....only it didn't work out that way.
All of this reduced my enjoyment considerably. It was still a worthwhile read, and pretty classic Crichton, but made some leaps that seemed pretty unsupported with even hand-waving. Jurassic (sp) Park had more reasonable science, and some of his other books with less of a scientific basis had better hand-waving.
I'd give it a 6/10: Worth reading, don't pay hardback price. Unless you're a Crichton collector, snag it from the library, you won't be rereading it.
