Micro

I rarely read novels outside the fantasy genre. However, if a book is handed to me, I will likely read it regardless of its setting. Micro was one of such cases.

The author, Michael Crichton, was probably most known for Jurassic Park and tv series, ER, though I guess over 200 million books sold worldwide means people have read quite a few of his many works as well.

Crichton died in 2008 leaving Micro unfinished. Richard Preston was brought in and the book saw daylight in 2011. Quite alike to what happened with The Wheel of Time, though Micro obviously wasn't as large undertaking.

I found the book's idea bit silly and even old; being able to shrink or "dimensional shift" people to half inch tall sounds ridiculous. Micro doesn't muck about with the credibility of the idea, however, and a group of graduate students quickly find themselves in the jungles of some Hawaiian isle, shrunk to the size of a finger nail. And after their lives they have the CEO of the company who was about to hire them.

The CEO of Nanigen, Vin Drake, seemed a rather unbelievable character with how far he was willing to go to hide the murder of Eric Jansen, brother of one the mentioned students. Over the story he got slightly more believable but one would think such a madman would have gotten in some serious trouble earlier in his life. He didn't even come off as exceptionally smart; his attempts to get away with multiple murders were quite feeble.

Another thing I had hard time buying was how everything the students needed in the jungle was always close-by. Were it a plant or a centipede and its venom that was required for some curare, they could always find it with little difficulty. I think it should've been more about using what they could find instead of finding what they needed with no problem whatsoever.

I hope Micro was at least accurate in the descriptions of the various insects that were encountered throughout the book. At the end, there's a long list of books Crichton had used as reference but one can never be sure with stories that have fiction mixed with the real world. It all was quite interesting, though. Curious how Hawaii evidently has no species unique to the islands. Instead, everything has come or has been brought from elsewhere.

Micro might make a reasonably entertaining movie -- it reminded me much of Jurassic Park. The book had no surprises, but I suspect watching inch-tall humans battle various insects and journey through a giant jungle for couple hours might not be all that bad.