What would you do if you were faced with an 18 hour road trip and none of ur favorite music to listen to? We did the next best thing we could. Invested in an audio book, that is. Turns out Michael Crichton’s’Next’ was the best pick we could have made. The hours just flew by .
A lot of us are familiar with the work of Michael Crichton. Even if you are not a reader, chances are that Hollywood’s offerings like Jurassic Park and Congo have not passed you by. Crichton bases his work on science, technology or major corporations gone wrong. From his keyboard(this is the Information Age after all), Next features the sometimes logical, oftentimes fantastic vision of the dangers inherent in the biotechnology age.
Next has a very unique narrative style. Contrary to popular fiction style in which a story contains a set of characters having a resolution at the end, Next is laid out in a different format. Instead of a connected narrative, it is a large set of cautionary tales about what might happen with the state of science and technology and the way humans are progressing. The casual reader might be forgiven at becoming confused in the beginning because characters are introduced rapidly and stories are inter-woven with skill but once the reader keeps in mind that these are all intended to prove a point for the author rather than being invested in the characters themselves the work resolves itself. And, the author’s creative imagination and the state of things as they stand today open your mind to the horrors possible if governments, invidividuals, universities continue as they are today.
After the information age, Crichton rightly argues that the gene is where the future of all research and commercial interest lies. The extinction of the natural blonde, evolution of talking apes, transgenic species like the human-zee, gene patenting, ownership and harvesting, self-aggrandizing researchers, commercialization of research on disease, large corporation and research politics, media hype related to discoveries, ethics and morality in research, genes in the art world, genetics advertising(imagine a Cadbury’s angel fish), human chimeras, research bans -all these and much, much more are covered in this book.
And the scary part is, as his disclaimer in the beginning of the book introduces’All the parts of this story are fictional excepting the ones that arent’. Even a lay-person like me has heard of several of the instances in the book so a researcher involved in the subject might rightly be fascinated. There’s even an extended bibliography list for anyone who is interested. Crichton’s observations about research, academia and the political machinations involved were too eerily close to the truth to make for very disinterested listening.
Overall, I would say that this is a very interesting read if you are into science and sci-fi. Crichton as usual places all of his customary research and information into the book. It is the readers job to separate the chaff from all the information overload. And as a final thought, I would definitely recommend audio books to everyone. The one we listened to was read by the very talented Dylan Baker who did all the voices perfectly, his whining teenagers were spot on. The 4th repetition of’But mooooo-m’, even though read by a 50-something male actor managed to get on our nerves and as a general yardstick I cannot think of anything more effective than this!