After utilizing such incendiary topics as global warming, nanotechnology and, um, time travel as plot devices, author Michael Crichton aims to push buttons once more with the headline-culling NEXT, a genetics thriller.

What makes Crichton’s latest so interesting is not how he works in real-life politics behind the issues of stem-cell research and gene patenting, but how the novel is structured. Rather than telling one story, he tells about half a dozen, with chapters alternating between the threads. Imagine TRAFFIC, then replace “drugs” with “DNA,” and you have NEXT.

One of the main thrusts is a single mother and her son on the run from bounty hunters who want to extract cells from them because a biotech company owns the rights to her father’s cells – and since he’s gone AWOL, they’ll the next best thing. Another intersecting narrative has a scientist introducing his family to the result of his own secret genetic-manipulation project: a half-man/half-ape hybrid … who speaks. Other parallel plots follow various scientists, corporate heads, attorneys and underage-leaning, oversexed security guards.

With so many viewpoints being undertaken, it’s probably not an accident that Crichton starts mining territory he’s already plundered – like CONGO, there’s a talking monkey; like JURASSIC PARK, there’s a stern lesson about fucking around with genes. But what at first seems like a greatest-hits compilation takes shape – however malleable – into an exciting, engrossing thriller-cum-parable that assaults from all angles.

After years of avoidance, I finally gave Crichton a try nearly three years ago when, bored out of mind during a vacation in Dallas, I bought a hardcover of PREY off Borders’ bargain table for a few bucks. His well-balanced melding of science fact and fiction hooked me from the start, and the half-dozen others of his I’ve read didn’t disappoint, either.

Neither does NEXT. The characters may be fairly stock and the ending too pat, but Crichton excels at making you think while offering 400 pages of escape. You may not agree with what Crichton says – nor do you have to in order to enjoy – but at least he says something. With unexpected flourishes of humor and an ending that truly chills, NEXT is another example of how Crichton turns hard science into breezy reading better than anyone else. –Rod Lott

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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• GRAVE DESCEND by John Lange
• STATE OF FEAR by Michael Crichton