Micro
A Novel
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3.7 • 1.3K Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In the vein of Jurassic Park, this high-concept thriller follows a group of graduate students lured to Hawaii to work for a mysterious biotech company—only to find themselves cast out into the rain forest, with nothing but their scientific expertise and wits to protect them.
In the lush forests of Oahu, groundbreaking technology has ushered in a revolutionary era of biological prospecting, feeding a search for priceless drugs and applications on a scale beyond anything previously imagined. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, seven graduate students at the forefront of their fields are recruited by a pioneering microbiology start-up, Nanigen MicroTechnologies, which dispatches the group to a mysterious lab in Hawaii. But once in the rainforest, the scientists are thrust into a hostile wilderness that reveals surprising dangers at every turn. Armed only with their knowledge of the natural world, they find themselves prey to a technology of radical and unbridled power
An instant classic, Micro pits nature against technology in vintage Michael Crichton fashion. Completed by visionary science writer Richard Preston, this boundary-pushing thriller melds scientific fact with pulse-pounding fiction to create yet another masterpiece of sophisticated, cutting-edge entertainment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 (1942 2008) 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 Eric s boss to join NaniGen MicroTechnologies, a Hawaii-based concern with tools that will define the limits of discovery for the first half of the twenty-first century. 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.
Customer Reviews
Entertaining
If you are looking for a realistic, quantitative science read, this isn't it. If you enjoy an unbridled ride of imagination, then you will enjoy this book. Forget who wrote what and how much, it's a good read. There are a few shallow spots, but overall an entertaining book experience.
Re. Micro
Grave robbing. Like Pirate Latitudes, this book is nowhere near M.C.'s talents or standards. Seems like the publisher is patching together fragments of manuscripts probably deemed unfit or too immature for publication by the author himself. This is just an attempt to wring more money out of an established body of work and it diminishes the authors reputation...Shame.
Micro
Did not like ending. Anticlimactic