28.nov.06
New York Times
Janet Maslin
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/books/28masl.html
NEXT
By Michael Crichton.
HarperCollins. $27.95.
Maslin writes in this review that when a couple of congressmen in “Next” are alerted to the mind-bending perils made possible by biotechnology, they vow unconvincingly to speak out on this tricky subject. No need: Michael Crichton has done the job for them. He has tackled the topic with his usual academic fervor, making “Next” speechy and data-packed enough to be a legislator’s dream.The following is a line from “Next”: “Dot.gks.org/98726767/9877676/490056
22K—Cached—Similar pages.”
What’s interesting about it is not that Mr. Crichton may be the only pop novelist writing Google code, but that he can weave it into a plot. The mumbo-jumbo is an excerpt from one of six fake Google entries purporting to be about a rare disease called Gandler-Kreukheim Syndrome. One of this book’s many contentions is that we are gullible enough to think that any scientific-sounding data we read is true.
“Next” has a subplot about a 4-year-old named Dave, the alleged Gandler-Kreukheim sufferer. Among his symptoms are excessive hairiness and a talent for climbing trees. Why? Because Dave is a transgenic creature, part human and part chimpanzee. He was created in a laboratory by a scientist who, in the course of research on autism, inserted his own genes into a chimpanzee embryo. The researcher hoped to create and then dissect a fetus, but things got a little out of hand.
“Next” would be a narrow, uninteresting book if its sole point were to condemn such tactics as transgressive. Instead Mr. Crichton moves far beyond questioning the morality of such experiments and acknowledges that they happen.