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.
What's interesting about it is not that 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 four-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 Crichton moves far beyond questioning the morality of such experiments and acknowledges that they happen. His whole thriller-tutorial boils down to one troubling question, asked about each freakish breakthrough described here: Now what? Since Next is one of Crichton's more un-put-downable novels, the reader may experience some frustration. It's tempting to stop and look up each of the genetic, legal and ethical aberrations described here in order to see how wild a strain of science fiction is afoot. Save a step. Just believe this: Oddity after oddity in Next checks out, and many are replays of real events. "This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't," Crichton writes, greatly understating the book's scary legitimacy.
Next draws upon a courtroom case in which UCLA was accused of covertly using tissue from a leukemia patient to develop and patent a lucrative cell line; the court ruled that the man had no property rights to his discarded tissue, and that the university, as a government institution, could claim this material under the doctrine of eminent domain. The book also cites rampant patenting of human genes, genetic modifications (like new, improved pets) made for whimsical commercial use and the grave-robbing theft of bones (including those of Alistair Cooke, the Masterpiece Theater host) for use in transplant procedures.
Then, in a novel using examples from all over the map, there's the way claims of genetic predisposition can be used by defense lawyers. The story includes one pederast who is advised by his lawyer to go out and get into trouble so that he can claim to be a thrill-seeker whose behavior is caused by the so-called novelty-seeking gene. It also takes a swat at the divorce process by suggesting that one spouse could demand genetic testing to try to prove that the other is not an unfit parent.
In establishing the many versions of gene splicing that figure in Next, Crichton uses mix-and-match tactics of his own. This book cross-cuts mechanically from story to story, giving the appearance of a focused narrative to what are actually only loosely linked events. He can also rely too glibly on Hollywood tactics.
Big opening scene: in Las Vegas, at a biotech convention, a man with a container of stolen embryos is tracked by spies and seduced by a Russian hooker. He winds up dead on the floor of an elevator, smothered by the nitrogen that escapes from the container. Only this last chemistry-lab touch is worthy of the book's scientific aspirations.
Despite its seemingly controversial subject matter, Next is not one of Crichton's polarizing books (as was State of Fear, the one intent on discrediting the idea of global warming). Its emphasis is on excitement, and on the strange moral wilderness in which geneticists and biotech profiteers suddenly find themselves. Crichton pointedly defies cliches from time to time. For instance the evangelical in the story is not a fervent opponent of stem cell research. Instead he is an opportunist who exploits the claim that God intended mankind to improve upon nature.
Next does occasionally turn ham-handed: one of its resident idiots is a whiny environmentalist who reads Mother Jones and thinks genetic modification could make cool protest art. Another target is a Washington political columnist and spoiled heir who turns out to have raped a two-year-old.
Crichton uses his case to indict the press (for printing details of the rape), since that has become one of his favorite sidelines. He has a field day with fake news items that punctuate the book, particularly when the supposed bias of one newspaper (the New York Times) can be weighed against other versions of the same story. And when a talking orangutan turns up in Sumatra, the Times misidentifies the locale as Java and then prints a correction.
When it comes to talking animals, this book's most enjoyable invention is Gerard, a semi-human parrot with a Machiavellian streak. When not quoting a weird range of movie dialogue (one line comes from The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer), Gerard enjoys using sound to bait the people around him. He can regale a man's wife with the sounds of a man welcoming his mistress, for instance. But even at his most selfish, Gerard has more scruples than most of the gene-mongering scientists and entrepreneurs who lead Next toward a bizarre, frightening future.
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