I finished the latest novel by Michael Crichton yesterday (which I quoted in a previous post), and must say that I'm impressed. The book description is as follows:"Is a loved one missing some body parts? Are blondes becoming extinct? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species? Humans and chimpanzees differ in only 400 genes; is that why a chimp fetus resembles a human being? And should that worry us? There's a new genetic cure for drug addiction--is it worse than the disease?
We live in a time of momentous scientific leaps, a time when it's possible to sell our eggs and sperm online for thousands of dollars and to test our spouses for genetic maladies.
We live in a time when one fifth of all our genes are owned by someone else, and an unsuspecting person and his family can be pursued cross-country because they happen to have certain valuable genes within their chromosomes...
Devilishly clever, Next blends fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where nothing is what it seems and a set of new possibilities can open at every turn.
Next challenges our sense of reality and notions of morality. Balancing the comic and the bizarre with the genuinely frightening and disturbing, Next shatters our assumptions and reveals shocking new choices where we least expect.
The future is closer than you think."
I read that the science here is "a lot less far-fetched than creating dinosaurs from DNA" (referring, of course, to his works in the Jurassic Park series), and if that is the case then this is certainly a troubling read, or at least I should say unnerving.
I've made it a point to read all of Crichton's books in order of release, so I am always on the look-out for the publication dates of his next thriller. I had to wait a few weeks for this one since a few people were ahead of me on the libraries list, but it was worth the wait. I still think Jurassic Park & The Lost World are my favs, but this one is certainly a deserving thief of the readers hours. Give it a part of your soul and see what you think...
2 comments:
So is it accurate to say it is a novel about the dangers of genetic engineering? That's what I've gathered from the reviews on Amazon.
Not so much the dangers, but rather the unsrupulous use of such advances by greedy corportions. The best I can gather there's not a tenor of "we shouldn't be involved with genetic engineering" as much as there is the promotion of being reasonable and responsible. The patenting of genes is really portrayed as a terrible wrong, though I must say I'm not certain how much of that is fact and how much is fiction. It's a good read, though not as politically charged as the other we spoke about, State Of Fear, in which he tackles environmentalism. The one prior to that was Prey and was based on issues concerning nano-technology...now THAT was eye-opening. He's obviously shifted gears as a writer with these last three books, I'm not ready to say it's for the better yet, but it is certainly not inferior to his earlier works. Let me know if you read any of them.
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