Hawaii, present day. Seven
doctoral students are approached by Nanigen, a high-tech company offering huge
salaries and career opportunities. They agree to travel to the company’s Hawaii
HQ. Nanigen’s business is in developing chemicals and pharmaceuticals from the
natural world and they have devised a unique method of accessing new compounds;
by using miniaturising technology to gather samples from nature. The students
stumble into a corporate crisis; murders are commissioned and the students find
themselves miniaturised and lost in the Hawaii rainforest. They have to find
their way back to Nanigen HQ, stop corporate baddie Drake, all the while
evading both the animal, insect and plant dangers, miniature killer robots and
Nanigen’s hit-squads.
Crichton
plots often feature two parallel concerns; the technology-oriented thriller
element, usually a riff on the Frankenstein
notion of not meddling with science that’s not fully understood, and a
conservative cultural/political idea being explored alongside. In Rising Sun, for example, Crichton’s
fears are surveillance technology and Japanese business overtaking US
interests; in Disclosure, it’s
computers and assertive women respectively; in Jurassic Park it’s genetic engineering and chaos theory; in State of Fear (an unintentionally funny
steal from the early 80s nuclear terrorist paranoia flick Who Dares Wins) the worry is leftie climate change do-gooders.
Here, it’s poststructuralism. One of the students is writing on scientific
discourse and is along to snark and be snarked at as he misapplies a range of
literary and cultural studies ideas.
It’s an odd thing indeed.
For once,
Crichton, usually solid on his science-based fictions (we get a non-fiction
introduction and an eight page bibliography grounding the story in some kind of
evidence base) the miniaturising tech is somewhat fudged (it involves magnets);
but Crichton is more concerned with rushing us along to the forest floor where
our dwindling band of students can be picked off one by one in an extended Act
Two which splices any number of jungle-set body count movies such as Southern Comfort or Predator and something approaching the homely wonder of Honey I Shrunk The Kids. We tick off
spiders, wasps, birds, ants and so on before bumping into a Ben Gunn-ish
marooned miniature person with a handy tiny warehouse of useful things.
Narrative
complexity or political subtlety isn’t Crichton’s strong suit here (in
fairness, Micro is the second of two
novels published posthumously; this was finished by The Hot Zone author Richard Preston) and though the tiny-people
action is mostly fun, because it’s being played straight-faced as potential
science it’s much less convincing than if it was done on the level of science
fantasy. The sneering attitude on
display at times doesn’t help either.
Crichton, Michael and Richard
Preston. 2012. Micro (London:
Harper), 541 pages, 978-0007350001
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