Next by Michael Crichton Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $3.93 You Save: $24.02 (86%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.91 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Next
Book Review: A fitting final bow for one of my favorite authors
Summary: 5 Stars
Yes (to echo another reviewer who enjoyed the book), you probably do need to be a Crichton fan to get the most out of reading this one. After the preachy STATE OF FEAR, I approached this last of a favorite author's published works with some hesitation because I didn't want it to let me down. Well, it certainly didn't. Instead it made me laugh, often and in surprise, as Crichton happily poked fun at the quirks and weaknesses of human nature while doing what he's always done best: telling us where we may be going, whether or not we've realized it yet.
A man is stricken with cancer, and in the course of curing him his doctors discover that his genes are special. They proceed to patent those genes. This isn't science fiction; gene patenting is old news, and we still don't understand its implications. That's one of Crichton's themes for this novel. Another is where "improving" the natural world through genetic engineering is taking us; and that, too, is a real world journey which we've already begun. Crichton presents his readers with an array of characters, human and part-human, and lets those characters lead a complex tale whose main fault is that it's sometimes hard to keep straight. I didn't mind that, though, because it was both so frightening and so utterly entertaining. What a fitting final bow!
Book Review: A major mess of a novel
Summary: 2 Stars
Written in the form of the superb Brunner novel, _Stand on Zanzibar_ this novel too mixes news stories (some fictional) with narrative elements to form the body of the work.
Unfortunately, the author here is, unlike Brunner, unable to pull the collage into a whole. Rather than tell a story, the book seems to be bits and pieces of unrelated events populated by the most stupid, greedy and uncaring individuals ever assembled into a book. To be fair, the very few last pages do tie some of these characters together in a series of events so unlikely that you'll strain your eyes rolling them so far.
A book really needs some sympathetic characters or at least one significant character to make you wish to continue to read it. However, here, that doesn't exist. The only half major character who isn't an idiot and greedy at the same time is a bounty hunter who's made to become the comic relief for the book. There are some Costa Ricans who also seem to be normally intelligent humans, but they only get perhaps three paragraphs in the entire novel.
Just to give you a few ideas of how annoying, stupid and idiotic the book's characters are, consider this idea. One animal in the book not only speaks several languages well, but is a walking encyclopedia of knowlege both popular and esoteric. This animal takes a trip of many thousands of miles encountering many humans. Now if you found such an animal, what would be your reaction? The reaction of all the humans this animal encounters is annoyance at it because it's better educated and better spoken than they are.
Just to be politically correct, at one point, an untrained small woman takes on a professional bounty hunter who is described as a superbly fit clone of Hulk Hogan AND his assistant. She, barehanded, defeats both bounty hunters, leaving them too stunned to pursue her. That's one of the more likely events in the novel.
This book was a good idea and should have been much better than this idiotic slapdash mess. It should have caused readers to consider the issues surrounding genetic research and modification. It does to some extent which is why I upped it from one to two stars. However, as a novel, it fails miserably.
Book Review: Absolutely love it
Summary: 5 Stars
Hey, some of us like layers and complexity. And Crichton delivers in Next. Yes there are lots of characters to keep track of. So make some notes on the blank pages as you go and enjoy an entertaining introduction to some of the ethical issues we face in the field of biotechnology.Book Review: Awful
Summary: 1 Stars
This book is sheer crap. I have read and enjoyed many of Crichton's books, but the last decent book he wrote was Timeline. What's with his blatant objectification of women as sex kittens and his debauchery, perversity and lewdness? Bleck...no thanks.Book Review: Better than you'd think
Summary: 4 Stars
From reading some of the reviews here.
First, the other reviews. 'Next' is a bit jumpy, that's the style of these things - fast action, moving one place to the next in quick succession. But 'Next' still reads like a modern novel, this isn't some Russian doorstop where characters and action are hard to follow.
'Next' does take cutting edge science and move beyond that. This is Crichton, it's what he does. Dinosaurs, nanobots, extra-terrestrial diseases. 'Next' is no big shock in that department. The best lines are the parrot's, but the parrot works, too, it's just a step beyond what we have now.
'Next' is by no means perfect, I thought Crichton called upon more than a reasonable number of coincidences. However, the point of a book like this is to give a credible look at an extreme advance in otherwise normal, modern technology. The story rolls along, the science is plausible enough for a techno-novel, and it's a quick, fun read.
'Next' is a much better than the reviews of 'Next'.