automatonrevolution

So..the question, well…one of the questions, thats flapping around the turmoil and disarray that is my brain, is whether or not the so called “Master of the modern technothriller” has finally given up the ghost. Has Mike Chrichton flipped? Is he bovvered? Is he having a midlife crisis? Did he write his latest “novel” on the back of a bus ticket?

See, the reason I wonder this, and the reason i wrote novel is inverted commas, is that his latest book, “Next”, really isnt very good, definately isnt up to par with even his weakest earlier books (Congo is better than this….thats how bad it is), and shouldn’t be classified as a novel. While it is his usual doorstop sized tome…the actual story is tiny. The rest, all the faux newspaper clippings and the side stories about the transgenic ape and the guy who gets arrested because people think hes been mucking around with the genetics of sea-turtles, are all blatant filler. Its like he hada vague idea that he battered out on a PC one week and then realised it was about a third of the size of his usual stuff.

Hes usually so good at doing characters, giving us details of who they are and what they think, mannerisms that define them as people without making them cliches. Next has none of this. Next almost reads like a movie script for a slasher film…its characters are THAT weak and paper thin…hard to identify with and harder to care about.

Its not good enough. Not from the guy who wrote Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain. And this is perhaps the root of the problem. The “Stephen King” syndrome. Chrichton is SO big, and SO well known, that his books are always going to sell millions, so his publishers and editors are letting him get away with writing any old rubbish without reigning him in. Some tough editor really needed to thrown NExt in a bin and say “Mike, I dont care if you researched all this stuff…you can write better than this”.

They really should.