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by erin thursby
scopes1925@msn.com
Next is hardly Crichton’s greatest work, it’s more pedantic than intriguing. Jurassic Park covered the same sort of “big ideas” Next does, but JP just had more impact because the characters seemed more sympathetic. Jurassic Park may have had the same sort of loosely configured cast, but they all came together to form something cohesive, something I feel this book doesn’t do, at least not as a novel. The plots in Next don’t converge completely until late in the book and the plots could almost be pulled from their scattered chapters to make a series of interrelated short stories. For me, the tie in came too late to save the book as a novel.
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Plotlines are tossed out, fast and furious as readers attempt to make sense of it all. Even the smartest reader will have trouble slogging through Crichton’s twists and turns, starting with a prologue that gives a us a taste of how left-in-the-dark we’re going to feel for the rest of the book.
I couldn’t tell you what the main plot of the book is, because there just isn’t one. There’s a reason why all of the publisher’s plot summaries of Next are a series of bullet points about ideas rather than characters. My compliant about Crichton in this book is that he writes like a philosopher, not a novelist. It doesn’t feel like he’s interested in telling a story; he seems more interested in using the story to advance his notions on a certain subject.
The subject, genetic engineering, is at least relevant. The author draws as much on the sensationalistic aspects of genetic engineering as possible, but Crichton’s version of this brave new world is frighteningly similar to the world we live in right now. The novel, with its near-human transgenic apes and parrots, speaks to our fears of what genetic testing will mean. The truth is, we barely know what we’re doing, but we’re experimenting anyway.
Most of the characters in Next are briefly sketched, unlikable and barely filled in. Perhaps purposely, Crichton’s transgenic characters are the most relatable and lovable. Gerard, the transgenic parrot was my favorite character of the novel. (Crichton gives him all the funniest dialogue). Your sympathies will be with the cursing orangutan and the humanezee Dave, because most of the humans in this book are downright corrupt and inhuman.
Next appeals to our horror of genetic engineering. What Crichton drives home isn’t that a half chimp, half human is possible, but that it is happening somewhere, right now. The world of genetics simply moves so fast that the slow and ponderous world of law struggles to keep up. In one plotline, a teenage daughter is shooting up fertility drugs in order to sell her eggs for thousands, and her parents have no right to stop her under the law. In a one page follow up chapter, two senators discuss the problem, concluding “Their bodies, their eggs…Anyway the boat’s sailed…Quite a while ago.” You’ll read a lot of stranger-than-fiction facts in this book that are scarier than fiction. Besides the side-show weirdness that permeates the book, it’s this blurring of fact and fiction that will keep you reading. Some of the sensationalistic news item excerpts scattered throughout the book are actually pulled straight from the legitimate media. The BBC really did run a story in 2002 about the possible extinction of blondes, and there really is a cactus that is growing hair. Human hair.
Ideas about patenting genes, about near-human lab created animals and other horrors of genetic manipulation, make this book an attention-grabbing read. Of course, anyone who’s been paying a little attention to the impact of genetics on law will find that the material is hardly new and hardly earth shattering.
Much of Crichton’s fiction has a basis in the myriad what-ifs of science and technology. He is best known for his novel Jurassic Park, which was later made into a blockbuster movie. What you might not know about him is that graduated from Harvard Medical School and that he ran a software company in the ‘80’s. His expertise in the medical field is what may have led him to create the hit TV show ER. He’s worked as a writer and director in the film industry and has served as a producer on projects like 13th Warrior, Twister and Sphere.
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