Title Next Series --- Author Michael Crichton Cover Art --- Publisher HarperCollins - 2006 First Printing HarperCollins - 2006 Category Biotech Warnings None Main Characters Way, way too many... Main Elements Bio Tech

Welcome to our genetic world.

Fast, furious, and out of control.

This is not the world of the future --- it's the world right now.

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 an adult human being resembles a chimp fetus? 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; test our spouses for genetic maladies and even frame someone for a genetic crime.

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 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. Get used to it.

In most of the Crichton books I've read, he takes a bit of technology and lets it run amok, whether it's cloning Jurasik Park or nanotech in Prey.

I found it was a bit different this time around. Sure you still get to learn of lot of science, mainly through articles interspersed in the text, but its really about the business of bio tech. Can someone patent a gene? Can a company own the cells of a particular person? The ethics of collecting embryos for their stem cells. You can't own a person, since that's slavery, but if you own his cells are you free to retrieve more samples whenever you feel like it, from that person or their descendants? After all same genetics, so you own the grandkid's cells too and if they refuse to come in for a biopsy you can charge them with theft for walking around with what you own inside their very bodies. What about the ethics of implanting human cells into a chimpanzee or orangutang to see if you can make them more human-like? And of course there are all those others, the people with the money, the security guys, the bounty hunters, lawyers, shadowy agents that solve your problems for the right fee, all the kinds of things you run into in high stakes business, whether they are selling stocks or genes.

That was all interesting in it's own way, I won't claim I was bored, Crichton is too good a writer for that, he knows how to move a story along...but at the end of the book I felt that while I was a bit freaked out about the things going on around us (for example one university that owned a patent for a gene would only allow research to be done on it at the cost of exhorbitant royalties...and thus people with any diseases tied to that gene are left to suffer since no researcher wants to go anywhere near it), and that I'd like to learn more about some of the science, I had no particular desire to ever read the book again. I might take some notes for further reading from the bibliography though.

The biggest problem is the HUGE cast of characters, about halfway through I couldn't keep track of them anymore, and started mixing some of them up. That took away from the enjoyment. And then the talking chimp...I could believe that maybe with the right genes say that's possible, to change his vocal chords to be capable of speach...but it was a young chimp and it could talk and express ideas of a human adult. I don't care what genes you stuff in there, it takes time and practice to become that eloquent (problems with verb tenses notwithstanding), as well as having a non-human viewpoint so shouldn't react to everything as a human child would. Although out of the characters in the story I actually liked the chimp...and the African Grey Parrot Gerard, he had wonderful snark.

And since there are so many character there are a lot of plotlines that intersect in all kinds of ways. Arguably, Crichton's books are science fiction really, they are more modern day thrillers with a bit of extra science tossed in, more James Rollins than Isaac Asimov.

Anyway, seems the trend continues that I enjoy Crichtons older stuff more than his newer blockbusters. Andromeda Strain is still one my earliest and favorite SF books ever.