I’m not the biggest Michael Crichton fan anymore. While he’s a good researcher and does a good job of presenting raw data in some kind of entertaining fashion, his books are starting to read like movie scripts. That isn’t a bad thing in itself, it’s just a personal thing.

I had never heard of Next, which is his latest book. For Christmas we got the in-laws an audiobook copy of it. Someone else had gotten them a hardback copy, and they turned around and gave that to me. It wasn’t a re-gifting so much as it was a “we’ll never use this, you probably will.” So I started reading it the other day. All I knew about Next is that there’s a barcode on the front and a picture of a monkey. He’s really starting to adapt this minimalist cover pattern. Prey was the same way.

I can’t even really tell you what the book was about other than genetics, and the application of American law towards the research of genetics. It was more convoluted than any other book I’ve read. Most of the time you read a book and there are a few different storylines that end up tying together somehow. These tied together somehow, but very weakly, and really it wasn’t even that entertaining. For the last 100 pages, I was just trying to finish the damn book.

The fact that this book has video ads (Amazon) only solidifies my thinking that ol’ Mike is just writing a movie script. It’s alarmist, it has random sex spliced in everywhere, and it’s got a few of those heartstring moments. The problem is it all seems canned – as it does with most authors that get their taste of the big screen.

It’s not an awful book, it’s just nothing I’d really recommend. It’s a fast read for a thick book, and he does deliver quite a dearth of information on the state of genetic research. More fascinating was the Bayh-Dole Act and Crichton’s argument against it. The short story of the Bayh-Dole Act is that publicly funded universities, meaning those that you and I pay tax money to, can sell/patent any research findings.

Wouldn’t be a bad read, say at the beach or something. I’d wait for the paperback or buy a used copy. It’s not likely you’ll get it from the library anytime soon as people loves them some Crichton.