Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston

This is my review of the book Micro posthumously published by Michael Crichton. 

Sadly I would say that this is a book that should have been left unpublished. The idea was good, but I felt the execution was not up so some of Michael's other books. 

So what was the idea – A group of up and coming graduate students are offered, seemingly the job of a life time, by a company in Hawaii. The firm is doing cutting edge Microbiology. The brother of one of the group is a vice president of the company. 

He them mysteriously seemingly dies in a boat accident, and they start to investigate. Very soon they find out that there is an arch enemy around who uses the companies new technology to zap them with magnetic waves, which shrinks them to a micro size. 

They think they are safe in this Micro world, but they have forgotten about nature, inspects, birds etc. that all look on them as food. The story them becomes a chase across the micro world to see if they can get out alive.

Running parallel to this is an investigation by the police into unsolved murders, and a secret government contract for killer robots. These micro-drones are programmed to attack and do this by getting inside the blood stream and chop the person up from the inside out. So potentially they could kill any leader on the earth.

The text goes into great detail describing the insect world and how it attacks the heroes and kills them off one by one. I love the bit where one of them is eaten alive and then spat back out again still alive, but the trouble is I was not left with any regret when one of them died. The characters just lacked any real personality. If the same number of words had been used to describe the people as was used to describe the world they were inhabiting then it would probably have had a bit more depth to the story line. 

If this is your first Michael Crichton book, then do go on and look for others as he has written some very good thrillers with original plots. Sadly I did not think that this book was quite so good. 

This was book 51 week 33 fiction 47 (14 on audio) non fiction 4