It won't win a Nobel prize, but it'll make you think.
Review by Mohamed Ansar on October 7th, 2010
"Next" is an interesting book, and is well honed to the Michael Crichton tradition of speculative fiction, rather than out and out fantasy, in that it's very well researched, and a lot of the concepts in the book are much closer to reality than we would probably like.
It's a very fragmented book, dealing with a series of micro-plots, all of which are linked to the brave new world of genetics we are entering into this century. The different viewpoints (the family on the run due to their valuable genes; the transgenic half-human/half-chimpanzee; the lab worker who stumbles across a genetic cure for drug addiction) and fictional newspaper articles help flesh out the setting immensely, but the huge cast of characters and their little stories can be a bit frustrating. However, as the book goes along, Crichton manages to bring together most of the different plot strands to a satisfying conclusion.
It's not the most literary novel out there, but Crichton's prose goes along at quite a rate, and I found myself at the end of the book before I knew it. While there are rafts of expositionary dialogue, there are also plenty of action sequences, which help with the pacing.
Crichton concludes the book with an appendix in which he outlines his own political and moral stance towards genetics, which is a bit like a revision session after reading the novel, but does show off his meticulous research.
Overall, this is a very thought-provoking book, which, although polemical at times, is still a very entertaining read.