Saturday, May 28, 2011

New Michael Crichton Novel

I heard the news today that there will be another posthumous Michael Crichton novel published this fall.  Crichton wrote one-third of a book called Micro and left extensive notes behind for it before he died.  Richard Preston, who wrote about the Ebola virus in The Hot Zone, has finished the book.  The Hot Zone was a fantastic book.  (I can still remember where I was when I first read the New Yorker article The Hot Zone was based on - in the Newark airport, waiting for a connecting flight to Chicago.  And I still have a fat folder of newspaper clippings from the first big Ebola outbreak in Zaire in the mid-90s.  Who has files of newspaper clippings about anything anymore?)  Normally, I think finishing and publishing uncompleted posthumously novels is a bad idea.  But Preston is a pretty good writer and his interests mesh nicely with Crichton's.  So this could be a good book.  (And since the book is about scientists lost in the jungle, it is so up my alley that I would make an exception for it even if some anonymous hack finished the manuscript.)

2 comments:

Nick Jones (Louis XIV, the Sun King) said...

Quick unrelated question, BG: do you own a copy of Westlake's Adios Scheherazade? Matt Asprey picked a copy up cheap, only to discover one of the pages had been torn out! So he's looking for anyone who can send him a scan of the page (109/110 in his copy)...

Book Glutton said...

I read a library copy. And I did a quick check and it seems that the book is no longer in the library's online catalog. Next time I hit the library I will check the shelves to see if it is still around.

The same thing happened to me when I read Jimmy the Kid/Child Heist. Luckily, I was able to find an electronic version and read the missing pages that way. (I checked and I don't have a pdf of Adios, Scheherazade.)