MICRO: CRICHTON'S LAST BOOK - OR IS IT

I recently uploaded Michael Crichton’s Micro on my Nook Book.   I have always been, and am still, a fan of Michael Crichton’s books.   He surpasses science fiction into the realm of science possibility.   

Micro is a monumental disappointment.   Crichton did not actually write the book.   After his death the unfinished manuscript was found on his computer and the book was written by Richard Preston.   This book is filled with mathematic impossibilities and unrealistic science that Crichton would have never published.  

The premise of the book is that a group of graduate students are shrunk by a mad scientist/business CEO, using strong magnetic fields, to one half an inch tall. 

These tiny people find themselves released on a jungle trail about two miles from a trailhead parking lot.  They have four days to get back to the parking lot and somehow steal away a ride back to the facility that shrunk them, or they will die.

NOW FOR SOME NERD SCIENCE

1.  If a person is six-foot-tall, we can figure his relationship to a mile in length:(rounding off numbers for ease.)   It would take ninety people, six feet tall, laying foot to head, to create a human line one mile long.  Therefore, we can approximate that an equivalent mile in the tiny person world, where people are ½ inch long, to be 90 x ½ ; or forty fine inches.   We will round that to four feet; so, in the tiny world and equivalent mile is four feet. 

2.   The average person can walk approximately three miles per hour; so, in the tiny world, half-inch people could walk 12 feet in one hour.  

3.   in the normal world two miles equals approximately 10,500 feet.  

4.  If we divide 10,500 feet by 12 feet an hour in the tiny world, we find that it would take the tiny grad students 875 walking hours to reach the parking lot – or 36.5 days non-stop.   Remember, they only have four days to live.

INSULT TO INJURY

After two days of travel (possibly 250 feet), and avoiding, and falling prey, to carnivorous insects, the students decide that the mad CEO has set a trap for them at the parking lot; so instead they decide to climb a two thousand foot sheer cliff to a supply depot on top of a mountain where tiny airplanes  exist.  Remember, they are ½ inch tall, with only two days left until they die. 

Crichton would have never allowed this mathematical inconsistency to exist in one of his novels.  

Now the story poses that the tiny people, being so lite in weight, can jump to numerous times their own height, because their small size is less effected by earth’s gravity.

If a person that is six feet tall, which is 72 inches, shrinks down to ½ inch; they are 1/144^th. of their regular size.    If that six-foot person weighed 144 pounds, at ½ inch size he should weigh one pound.   A ½ inch object weighing one pound is not light enough to be unaffected by gravity.

The survival story in book is beyond ridiculous – these students should have been dead within the first day.  

This book was not written by Michael Crichton.    When a person dies, they should end publishing books under his or her name.  It is not fair to their legacy.

My favorite Crichton book is Eaters of the Dead.  The movie, The Thirteenth Warrior, was good, but the book is better: it is the story of a Neanderthal tribe that survived extinction and terrorized Viking settlements in far northern Norway.  This book is a great description of Viking life. 

Most writers, like Stephen King, I would not hold to a scientific standard; but Michael Crichton would hold himself to a higher scientific standard. 


This is a good time to stay home and read; and a good time to share a review of books you have read, on line.

the Ol'Buzzard