Michael Crichton’s last thriller, from beyond the grave

When Michael Crichton died of cancer in 2008, the author left behind an unfinished manuscript on which he had been working feverishly even as he had chemotherapy. He also left several pages of notes scrawled in two sketch pads and on hotel stationery.

With those fragmentary clues and the guidance of Crichton’s widow and personal assistant, a remarkable piece of literary detective work has been completed by another writer drafted in to create a posthumous collaboration.

The result is Crichton’s 17th novel, Micro. About the first third of the 424 pages were written by the best-selling science fiction author himself, the rest by Richard Preston, a science writer and novelist.
Set in the rainforest of Hawaii, the techno-thriller features murderous micro-robots, a villainous nanotechnology entrepreneur, and Harvard biology students shrunk to less than an inch tall, then exposed to killer bugs, among other lethal threats of the natural world.

It is, in many ways, a miniature version of the man-versus-dinosaur scenario of the Crichton classic, Jurassic Park.
Preston, best known for his book The Hot Zone, the true story of an Ebola virus outbreak in Africa, was identified by Crichton’s agent and publishers at HarperCollins for his background in science and bio-terror writing.

He was a long-time fan of Crichton, who also devised the television hospital series ER, though the two had never met. But he was reluctant to try to replicate the voice and style of a writer who has sold some 200 million books worldwide, until he sat down with the partly written manuscript.

“I clearly sensed that this was a man in a race with death,” Preston said. “He was writing at the top of his game and with great intensity, but also with a sense of uncertainty about whether he would finish the novel. Preston, who lives near Princeton, New Jersey, was invited to California by Sherri Alexander Crichton, who had been six months pregnant with the couple’s son when her husband died, aged 66.

There she presented him with the notebooks and hotel paper on which Crichton had jotted down ideas for the book. “They were not the blueprint, but they were beautiful parts of the puzzle,” said Preston.

His first challenge was to decipher the terrible handwriting. Some notes were obvious, such as which characters were to survive, and the clashes with the terrors of the micro world such as tropical downpours, insects and birds.

For help, he also pored over the 75 books on Hawaiian flora and fauna in the Santa Monica study of Crichton, who always carefully researched his projects.

One challenge Preston easily overcame was describing the horrendous demise of some of the students to soldier ants and spiders. “I love gruesome deaths and have specialised in them over the years. Michael Crichton liked grossing people out and I guess I share that quality,” he said.