Micro

November 21, 2011
Does this sound at all familiar? A greedy capitalist exploits a technological breakthrough that could benefit humanity. His effort to show off his work to visitors on an island ends up with them fighting for their lives against savage creatures. Preston (The Hot Zone) has completed a partial manuscript by bestseller Crichton (1942â2008) that will remind many readers of Jurassic Park, though the action takes place on a rather different scale, as the title suggests. Peter Jansen, a 23-year-old Cambridge, Mass., grad student, and his colleagues accept an invitation from his older brother, Eric, and Ericâs boss to join NaniGen MicroTechnologies, a Hawaii-based concern with âtools that will define the limits of discovery for the first half of the twenty-first century.â Via a scientific innovation that comes across as less plausible than recovering dinosaur DNA, NaniGen can miniaturize people. Inevitably, Peter and his companions are shrunk to a size that makes them vulnerable to lower life forms. Most of the book relates their struggle for survival, including the requisite gory deaths of some members of the party. Crichton fans will miss any sense of a larger scientific moral in what amounts to a high-tech 21st-century version of The Incredible Shrinking Man. Agent: Lynn Nesbit.

East Coast grad students get recruited by a cutting-edge tech firm in Hawaii. They travel to Oahu for an interview and get snared in a jungle nightmare only Crichton could concoct. John Bedford Lloyd's delivery is solid, but in some inexplicable way it fails to capture all the excitement and terror of the hapless victims, particularly when they enter extremis, which in this story is often beyond imagining. However, Lloyd compellingly voices the psychotic CEO at the heart of the horror. And one hears the cowardly, whining traitor of the group of victimized students with loathing right from the start. Female characters are well voiced and differentiated from the predominately male cast. Crichton's fans and sci-fi junkies will love it. M.C. (c) AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine