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Next (novel)
Encyclopedia
Next is a 2006 techno-thriller
novel by Michael Crichton
, the last to be published during his lifetime. Next takes place in the present world, where both the government
and private investors spend billions of dollars every year on genetic research
. The novel follows many characters, including transgenic
animals, in the quest to survive in a world dominated by genetic research, corporate greed, and legal interventions.
In the backstory, Frank Burnet contracted an aggressive form of leukemia
and underwent intensive treatment and four years of semiannual checkups. He later learned that the checkups were a pretext for researching the genetic basis of Frank's unusually successful response to treatment, and that the physician's university had sold the rights in Frank's cells to BioGen, a biotechnology
startup company
. As the book opens Frank is suing the university for unauthorized misuse of his cells, but the trial judge rules that the cells were "waste" that the university could dispose of as it wished. Frank's lawyers advise that, even if he wins an appeal, the university as a tax-funded organization can still claim the rights to the cells under the doctrine of eminent domain
.
Ruthless venture capitalist "Jack" Watson, wishing to acquire BioGen at a knock-down price, conspires to steal or sabotage BioGen's culture
s of Frank's cells. As part of his terms for financing BioGen, Watson previously forced the company to accept his irresponsible nephew Brad Gordon as its security chief. After Brad's carelessness nearly allows one of Watson's sabotage attempts to succeed, the company frames Brad for aggravated rape
of a minor
. Watson's price for providing a defense lawyer is that Brad must contaminate BioGen's cultures. Brad's lawyer plans to claim in defense that Brad has a gene for recklessness, and instructs him to engage in various high-risk activities. As a result Brad gets into a fight with a pair of martial arts
experts, and is finally shot by the police.
After Brad's sabotage, BioGen consults lawyers, who advise that under United States law they have the rights to all of Frank's cell line and thus the right to extract replacement cells, by force if necessary, from Frank or any of his descendants. When Frank goes on the run, BioGen hires bounty hunter
Vasco Borden to obtain such cells irrespective of whether the donors consent. Vasco plans to snatch Frank's grandson Jamie from his school, but is foiled by Jamie's mother Alex, whom he tries to seize instead. After escaping, Alex and Jamie also go on the run.
Henry Kendall, a researcher at another biotech company, finds that his illegal introduction of human genes into a chimpanzee
a few years ago while working at the NIH primate research facility unexpectedly produced a transgenic chimp, who can talk and whose behavior is generally child-like but reverts to chimp patterns under stress. The agency intends to destroy
the chimp-boy Dave in order to cover up the unauthorized experiment but Henry sneaks him out of the lab. Henry's wife Lynn strongly opposes bringing Dave into their home, but their son, also called Jamie, becomes close friends with him. Lynn becomes Dave's most determined defender, uploads reports of a fictitious genetic disease and creates an article about it on Wikipedia
to explain Dave's odd appearance, and groom
s him as a senior female would groom a very young chimp in the wild. Dave is sent to the same school as Jamie and gets into trouble after biting the leader of a gang of bullies who attack Jamie. The chimp-boy becomes increasingly isolated at school; academically, he is backward in some areas such as writing, while in sports, his classmates regard him as unfair competition.
Paris-based animal behavior researcher Gail Bond finds that her two-year old African grey parrot
, Gerard, into which human genes were injected while he was a chick, has been helping her son to produce near-perfect homework
. While she is testing Gerard's abilities, the bird becomes bored and mimics the voices and other sounds of her husband having sex
in their home with another woman. After a quarrel Gail's husband, an investment banker, gives Gerard as a "money can't buy this" present to an influential and lecherous client. The client finds Gerard an embarrassment and passes him on to another owner, and so on. Eventually Gerard ends up in the hands of Stan Milgram
, who loses patience with Gerard's loquacity while delivering the parrot to yet another owner three days' drive away, and leaves the bird by the roadside. Fortunately for Gerard the series of transfers has made his wings overdue for clipping
, and he flies out of danger and off in search of pleasanter surroundings.
After a few more narrow escapes, Alex and Jamie head for the home of her childhood friend Lynn. Vasco anticipates this move and tries to snatch Jamie – but abducts Lynn's son Jamie instead. Dave saves Lynn's Jamie, severely damaging both Vasco and the ambulance in which Vasco planned to extract the tissue samples. However Vasco's associate snatches Alex' son while everyone is celebrating the rescue of Lynn's. While the hunt was going on, Biogen's lawyers applied for an arrest warrant against Alex on the grounds that she had stolen the company's property, namely hers and her son's cells. She has to go straight from the fight to the courtroom, where her lawyer outplays Biogen's and the judge adjourns to check details of the relevant laws and precedent
s overnight. Alex and Henry discover that Alex' son is being moved to a private clinic where the tissue samples are to be taken. As they move in to retrieve him, Gerard, now a resident of the clinic's gardens, reminds Jamie to shout for his mother, who rescues him. Vasco gives up after Dave attacks him and Alex threatens him with a shotgun
. The next day the judge rules in Alex' favor and rejects the precedents as attempts to abolish normal human feelings by decree, a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
, which forbids slavery
, and likely to hamper research in the long run as patients will sell their tissues rather than donate them for research.
Gerard is welcomed into Lynn's home for helping in the rescue of Alex' son, and helps Dave with math homework. Press commentators praise the household as a trend-setting inter-species transgenic family, and Henry is honored by some scientific organisations, while religious and social conservatives condemn the family in lurid terms.
In other plot threads:
The book also features news report boxes, many about the genetics of blondes and of Neanderthal
s. These two themes combine into reports that Neanderthals were the first blondes, were more intelligent than Cro-Magnon
humans and interbred with Cro-Magnons out of pity; and that "cavemen preferred blondes
". At one point three successive reports feature a scientist's press release that Neanderthals had a gene that made them both behaviorally conservative and ecologically conservationist
, an environmentalist
's claim that modern humans need to learn from the Neanderthals lest they too become extinct, and a business columnist's interpretation that over-caution caused the Neanderthals' extinction.
In an appendix the author argues against patent
s on naturally-occurring genes, against corporate ownership of individuals' cell lines, and in favor of legislation to abolish these.
web site Metacritic
gives Next a score of 48%, meaning "mixed or average reviews". In The New York Times
Janet Maslin described the book as "one of Mr. Crichton's more un-put-downable novels", and USA today
said Crichton was "in top form". The Independent
said that "Next is middling Crichton, perhaps because it lacks the simple suspense situation around which most of his books are constructed." The London Review of Books called it "an unintentionally hilarious emulsion of bombast and bathos", The Washington Post
described it as "part lecture, part satire and mostly freak show", and Dave Itzkoff in The New York Times
′s Sunday Book Review called it "a barrage of truths, half-truths and untruths".
Maslin pointed out how many of the plot incidents and fictitious news reports were "replays of real events", giving the book a "scary legitimacy". Award-winning science journalist Matt Ridley
, writing in The Wall Street Journal
, often could not spot the boundary between fact and fiction in the scientific aspects, although he found the almost immediate effects of the "maturity" gene implausible. He also thought that Crichton's "uncanny prescience in choosing subjects where fact will soon catch up with his fiction" was on target again, as the early hype over biotechnology has subsided and recent advances offer credible benefits.
In The Sunday Times
Joby Williams called the book "more a satiric
polemic
than the thriller we have come to expect from Crichton", and notes that there is no central character and the story is told as a collection of distinct episodes. Ridley described the plot as "a collection of short horror stories from the biotechnology industry," and The Independent
′s view was similar. The Washington Post
and The Onion A.V. Club concluded that Crichton tried to cram too much into the book and would have preferred a storyline that focussed on Dave the chimp-boy and Gerard the talkative parrot. Entertainment Weekly
complained that it was hard to track over 30 named characters through intersecting sub-plots. However USA Today
′s reviewer liked the story's brisk pace and thought the interleaved plot threads came together well at the end.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
s Karen Carlin enjoyed the novel highly and said "You realize what he's fictionalizing could be happening now, not "Next." And that's what makes it all so terrifying."
Opinions about the characters ranged from "dislikable and indistinguishable" to "deliciously vivid". The Onion A.V. Club thought the characters were barely developed enough to support the dialog and plot, and Ridley commented that in real life "most biotech executives are stressed and insecure people with mortgages" rather than sybaritic super-villains. However reviewers liked Gerard and Dave.
Some reviewers welcomed the injection of humor into the book, noting the parodies
of stereotypes, and Ridley regarded much of the story as a farce
. However others thought most of the humor was unintentional.
The novel has also attracted (mostly negative) commentary from legal reviewers.
′s hardback fiction bestseller list for the year 2006, and in December 2007 it reached 3rd place in Publishers Weekly
′s weekly paperback fiction bestseller list.
In mid-December 2006 Next reached 9th place in a United Kingdom hardback fiction bestseller list.
to ban future gene patents and abolish existing ones. Writers on technology-related law suggested Next and Crichton's opinion article in The New York Times may have been partly responsible for this bill. Public interest in gene patents had previously been declining, and gene-only patent applications were becoming less frequent as the industry realized how much work is needed to turn a gene into a salable product.
(IMDb), a film based on Next has been announced. As of June 21, 2010 no actors have been officially confirmed for any of the roles. The film is set to be released some time in 2011. (The 2007 science-fiction thriller Next is not related to the Crichton novel.)
of The New Republic
alleged that, in retaliation for his having written a negative review of Crichton's previous novel State of Fear
, Crichton named a character with a mercifully small penis
who rapes a baby after him. From page 227: "Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers." Both Crowleys were Washington-based political columnists who had graduated from Yale.
Techno-thriller
Techno-thrillers are a hybrid genre, drawing subject matter generally from spy/action thrillers, fantasy/war novels, and science fiction...
novel by Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton
John Michael Crichton , best known as Michael Crichton, was an American best-selling author, producer, director, and screenwriter, best known for his work in the science fiction, medical fiction, and thriller genres. His books have sold over 200 million copies worldwide, and many have been adapted...
, the last to be published during his lifetime. Next takes place in the present world, where both the government
Government
Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...
and private investors spend billions of dollars every year on genetic research
Genetics
Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....
. The novel follows many characters, including transgenic
Genetically modified organism
A genetically modified organism or genetically engineered organism is an organism whose genetic material has been altered using genetic engineering techniques. These techniques, generally known as recombinant DNA technology, use DNA molecules from different sources, which are combined into one...
animals, in the quest to survive in a world dominated by genetic research, corporate greed, and legal interventions.
Plot summary
"This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't."
In the backstory, Frank Burnet contracted an aggressive form of leukemia
Leukemia
Leukemia or leukaemia is a type of cancer of the blood or bone marrow characterized by an abnormal increase of immature white blood cells called "blasts". Leukemia is a broad term covering a spectrum of diseases...
and underwent intensive treatment and four years of semiannual checkups. He later learned that the checkups were a pretext for researching the genetic basis of Frank's unusually successful response to treatment, and that the physician's university had sold the rights in Frank's cells to BioGen, a biotechnology
Biotechnology
Biotechnology is a field of applied biology that involves the use of living organisms and bioprocesses in engineering, technology, medicine and other fields requiring bioproducts. Biotechnology also utilizes these products for manufacturing purpose...
startup company
Startup company
A startup company or startup is a company with a limited operating history. These companies, generally newly created, are in a phase of development and research for markets...
. As the book opens Frank is suing the university for unauthorized misuse of his cells, but the trial judge rules that the cells were "waste" that the university could dispose of as it wished. Frank's lawyers advise that, even if he wins an appeal, the university as a tax-funded organization can still claim the rights to the cells under the doctrine of eminent domain
Eminent domain
Eminent domain , compulsory purchase , resumption/compulsory acquisition , or expropriation is an action of the state to seize a citizen's private property, expropriate property, or seize a citizen's rights in property with due monetary compensation, but without the owner's consent...
.
Ruthless venture capitalist "Jack" Watson, wishing to acquire BioGen at a knock-down price, conspires to steal or sabotage BioGen's culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
s of Frank's cells. As part of his terms for financing BioGen, Watson previously forced the company to accept his irresponsible nephew Brad Gordon as its security chief. After Brad's carelessness nearly allows one of Watson's sabotage attempts to succeed, the company frames Brad for aggravated rape
Rape
Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...
of a minor
Minor (law)
In law, a minor is a person under a certain age — the age of majority — which legally demarcates childhood from adulthood; the age depends upon jurisdiction and application, but is typically 18...
. Watson's price for providing a defense lawyer is that Brad must contaminate BioGen's cultures. Brad's lawyer plans to claim in defense that Brad has a gene for recklessness, and instructs him to engage in various high-risk activities. As a result Brad gets into a fight with a pair of martial arts
Martial arts
Martial arts are extensive systems of codified practices and traditions of combat, practiced for a variety of reasons, including self-defense, competition, physical health and fitness, as well as mental and spiritual development....
experts, and is finally shot by the police.
After Brad's sabotage, BioGen consults lawyers, who advise that under United States law they have the rights to all of Frank's cell line and thus the right to extract replacement cells, by force if necessary, from Frank or any of his descendants. When Frank goes on the run, BioGen hires bounty hunter
Bounty hunter
A bounty hunter captures fugitives for a monetary reward . Other names, mainly used in the United States, include bail enforcement agent and fugitive recovery agent.-Laws in the U.S.:...
Vasco Borden to obtain such cells irrespective of whether the donors consent. Vasco plans to snatch Frank's grandson Jamie from his school, but is foiled by Jamie's mother Alex, whom he tries to seize instead. After escaping, Alex and Jamie also go on the run.
Henry Kendall, a researcher at another biotech company, finds that his illegal introduction of human genes into a chimpanzee
Chimpanzee
Chimpanzee, sometimes colloquially chimp, is the common name for the two extant species of ape in the genus Pan. The Congo River forms the boundary between the native habitat of the two species:...
a few years ago while working at the NIH primate research facility unexpectedly produced a transgenic chimp, who can talk and whose behavior is generally child-like but reverts to chimp patterns under stress. The agency intends to destroy
Animal euthanasia
Animal euthanasia is the act of putting to death painlessly or allowing to die, as by withholding extreme medical measures, an animal suffering from an incurable, especially a painful, disease or condition. Euthanasia methods are designed to cause minimal pain and distress...
the chimp-boy Dave in order to cover up the unauthorized experiment but Henry sneaks him out of the lab. Henry's wife Lynn strongly opposes bringing Dave into their home, but their son, also called Jamie, becomes close friends with him. Lynn becomes Dave's most determined defender, uploads reports of a fictitious genetic disease and creates an article about it on Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
to explain Dave's odd appearance, and groom
Social grooming
In social animals, including humans, social grooming or allogrooming is an activity in which individuals in a group clean or maintain one another's body or appearance. It is a major social activity, and a means by which animals who live in proximity can bond and reinforce social structures, family...
s him as a senior female would groom a very young chimp in the wild. Dave is sent to the same school as Jamie and gets into trouble after biting the leader of a gang of bullies who attack Jamie. The chimp-boy becomes increasingly isolated at school; academically, he is backward in some areas such as writing, while in sports, his classmates regard him as unfair competition.
Paris-based animal behavior researcher Gail Bond finds that her two-year old African grey parrot
African Grey Parrot
The African Grey Parrot , also known as the Grey Parrot, is a medium-sized parrot found in the primary and secondary rainforest of West and Central Africa. Experts regard it as one of the most intelligent birds. They feed primarily on palm nuts, seeds, fruits, leafy matter, but have been observed...
, Gerard, into which human genes were injected while he was a chick, has been helping her son to produce near-perfect homework
Homework
Homework, or homework assignment, refers to tasks assigned to students by their teachers to be completed outside of class. Common homework assignments may include a quantity or period of reading to be performed, writing or typing to be completed, problems to be solved, a school project to be built...
. While she is testing Gerard's abilities, the bird becomes bored and mimics the voices and other sounds of her husband having sex
Sexual intercourse
Sexual intercourse, also known as copulation or coitus, commonly refers to the act in which a male's penis enters a female's vagina for the purposes of sexual pleasure or reproduction. The entities may be of opposite sexes, or they may be hermaphroditic, as is the case with snails...
in their home with another woman. After a quarrel Gail's husband, an investment banker, gives Gerard as a "money can't buy this" present to an influential and lecherous client. The client finds Gerard an embarrassment and passes him on to another owner, and so on. Eventually Gerard ends up in the hands of Stan Milgram
Stanley Milgram
Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist most notable for his controversial study known as the Milgram Experiment. The study was conducted in the 1960s during Milgram's professorship at Yale...
, who loses patience with Gerard's loquacity while delivering the parrot to yet another owner three days' drive away, and leaves the bird by the roadside. Fortunately for Gerard the series of transfers has made his wings overdue for clipping
Wing clipping
Wing clipping is the process of trimming a bird's primary flight feathers so that it is no longer fully flighted.-Technique:Wing clipping is usually performed by avian veterinarians, pet store employees, breeders, or the birds' owners themselves. It is generally carried out on pet birds,...
, and he flies out of danger and off in search of pleasanter surroundings.
After a few more narrow escapes, Alex and Jamie head for the home of her childhood friend Lynn. Vasco anticipates this move and tries to snatch Jamie – but abducts Lynn's son Jamie instead. Dave saves Lynn's Jamie, severely damaging both Vasco and the ambulance in which Vasco planned to extract the tissue samples. However Vasco's associate snatches Alex' son while everyone is celebrating the rescue of Lynn's. While the hunt was going on, Biogen's lawyers applied for an arrest warrant against Alex on the grounds that she had stolen the company's property, namely hers and her son's cells. She has to go straight from the fight to the courtroom, where her lawyer outplays Biogen's and the judge adjourns to check details of the relevant laws and precedent
Precedent
In common law legal systems, a precedent or authority is a principle or rule established in a legal case that a court or other judicial body may apply when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts...
s overnight. Alex and Henry discover that Alex' son is being moved to a private clinic where the tissue samples are to be taken. As they move in to retrieve him, Gerard, now a resident of the clinic's gardens, reminds Jamie to shout for his mother, who rescues him. Vasco gives up after Dave attacks him and Alex threatens him with a shotgun
Shotgun
A shotgun is a firearm that is usually designed to be fired from the shoulder, which uses the energy of a fixed shell to fire a number of small spherical pellets called shot, or a solid projectile called a slug...
. The next day the judge rules in Alex' favor and rejects the precedents as attempts to abolish normal human feelings by decree, a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially abolished and continues to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. It was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, passed by the House on January 31, 1865, and adopted on December 6, 1865. On...
, which forbids slavery
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
, and likely to hamper research in the long run as patients will sell their tissues rather than donate them for research.
Gerard is welcomed into Lynn's home for helping in the rescue of Alex' son, and helps Dave with math homework. Press commentators praise the household as a trend-setting inter-species transgenic family, and Henry is honored by some scientific organisations, while religious and social conservatives condemn the family in lurid terms.
In other plot threads:
- BioGen researcher Josh Winkler accidentally exposes his drug-addicted brother Adam to a "maturity" gene that the company is developing for the control of irresponsible and addictive behavior. After Adam reforms within a few days, their mother pressures Josh to administer the gene to friends and relatives who also behave irresponsibly. By the end of the book all of his rat and human subjects die of accelerated old age.
- The staff at a hospital provide samples from corpses for use by unscrupulous relatives in lawsuits, sell corpses' bones for medical uses, and desperately destroy records and samples to cover their tracks.
- Henry Kendall's boss Dr. Robert Bellarmino, a mediocre scientist but skillful manipulator, is also a lay preacher and slants his comments to journalists, schoolchildren and politicians according to whether his audience has religious or pro-science inclinations. He is ultimately shot by Brad Gordon at an amusement parkAmusement parkthumb|Cinderella Castle in [[Magic Kingdom]], [[Disney World]]Amusement and theme parks are terms for a group of entertainment attractions and rides and other events in a location for the enjoyment of large numbers of people...
. Ironically, Bellarmino was only at the park to look for people who may have the gene for recklessness, and Gordon was only there to bolster the evidence for his lawyer's case that he has the gene. - An orangutanOrangutanOrangutans are the only exclusively Asian genus of extant great ape. The largest living arboreal animals, they have proportionally longer arms than the other, more terrestrial, great apes. They are among the most intelligent primates and use a variety of sophisticated tools, also making sleeping...
in SumatraSumatraSumatra is an island in western Indonesia, westernmost of the Sunda Islands. It is the largest island entirely in Indonesia , and the sixth largest island in the world at 473,481 km2 with a population of 50,365,538...
becomes famous for its comments, often obscene, in Dutch and French. An adventurer overdoses the orangutan with tranquillizer while trying to capture it, and has to give it mouth to mouth resuscitation. As a result the orangutan dies from a respiratory infection, and an expert who dissects its corpse finds that its throat is very human-like but concludes from the shape of its skullSkullThe skull is a bony structure in the head of many animals that supports the structures of the face and forms a cavity for the brain.The skull is composed of two parts: the cranium and the mandible. A skull without a mandible is only a cranium. Animals that have skulls are called craniates...
that its brain is pure orangutan. - An avant garde artist uses genetic modification to change the appearance of animals, while another self-named "artist/biologist" is falsely accused of modifying turtles so that females laying eggs are less vulnerable to predators because the turtles' genetically engineeredGenetic engineeringGenetic engineering, also called genetic modification, is the direct human manipulation of an organism's genome using modern DNA technology. It involves the introduction of foreign DNA or synthetic genes into the organism of interest...
bioluminescenceBioluminescenceBioluminescence is the production and emission of light by a living organism. Its name is a hybrid word, originating from the Greek bios for "living" and the Latin lumen "light". Bioluminescence is a naturally occurring form of chemiluminescence where energy is released by a chemical reaction in...
attracts tourists. An advertising agencyAdvertising agencyAn advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services...
proposes to make genetically engineered animals and plants carry advertisements, and claims that this would be a very effective conservation strategy. - Billionaire "Jack" Watson becomes the victim of an extremely aggressive form of genetic cancer, and is very nearly unable to receive treatment due to others' patents on the relevant genes, giving Watson "a taste of his own medicine". He eventually procures experimental treatment, which fails to save his life.
The book also features news report boxes, many about the genetics of blondes and of Neanderthal
Neanderthal
The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...
s. These two themes combine into reports that Neanderthals were the first blondes, were more intelligent than Cro-Magnon
Cro-Magnon
The Cro-Magnon were the first early modern humans of the European Upper Paleolithic. The earliest known remains of Cro-Magnon-like humans are radiometrically dated to 35,000 years before present....
humans and interbred with Cro-Magnons out of pity; and that "cavemen preferred blondes
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a 1953 film adaptation of the 1949 stage musical, released by 20th Century Fox, directed by Howard Hawks and starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, with Charles Coburn, Elliott Reid, Tommy Noonan, Taylor Holmes, and Norma Varden in supporting roles...
". At one point three successive reports feature a scientist's press release that Neanderthals had a gene that made them both behaviorally conservative and ecologically conservationist
Conservationist
Conservationists are proponents or advocates of conservation. They advocate for the protection of all the species in an ecosystem with a strong focus on the natural environment...
, an environmentalist
Environmentalist
An environmentalist broadly supports the goals of the environmental movement, "a political and ethical movement that seeks to improve and protect the quality of the natural environment through changes to environmentally harmful human activities"...
's claim that modern humans need to learn from the Neanderthals lest they too become extinct, and a business columnist's interpretation that over-caution caused the Neanderthals' extinction.
In an appendix the author argues against patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
s on naturally-occurring genes, against corporate ownership of individuals' cell lines, and in favor of legislation to abolish these.
Book reviews
The review aggregatorReview aggregator
A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services . This system stores the reviews and then uses them for purposes such as: creating a website for users to view the reviews, selling information to third parties about consumer tendencies and creating databases for...
web site Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
gives Next a score of 48%, meaning "mixed or average reviews". In The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
Janet Maslin described the book as "one of Mr. Crichton's more un-put-downable novels", and USA today
USA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
said Crichton was "in top form". The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
said that "Next is middling Crichton, perhaps because it lacks the simple suspense situation around which most of his books are constructed." The London Review of Books called it "an unintentionally hilarious emulsion of bombast and bathos", The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
described it as "part lecture, part satire and mostly freak show", and Dave Itzkoff in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
′s Sunday Book Review called it "a barrage of truths, half-truths and untruths".
Maslin pointed out how many of the plot incidents and fictitious news reports were "replays of real events", giving the book a "scary legitimacy". Award-winning science journalist Matt Ridley
Matt Ridley
Matthew White Ridley, FRSL, FMedSci is an English journalist, writer, biologist, and businessman.-Career:...
, writing in The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
, often could not spot the boundary between fact and fiction in the scientific aspects, although he found the almost immediate effects of the "maturity" gene implausible. He also thought that Crichton's "uncanny prescience in choosing subjects where fact will soon catch up with his fiction" was on target again, as the early hype over biotechnology has subsided and recent advances offer credible benefits.
In The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper.The Sunday Times may also refer to:*The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times...
Joby Williams called the book "more a satiric
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
polemic
Polemic
A polemic is a variety of arguments or controversies made against one opinion, doctrine, or person. Other variations of argument are debate and discussion...
than the thriller we have come to expect from Crichton", and notes that there is no central character and the story is told as a collection of distinct episodes. Ridley described the plot as "a collection of short horror stories from the biotechnology industry," and The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
′s view was similar. The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
and The Onion A.V. Club concluded that Crichton tried to cram too much into the book and would have preferred a storyline that focussed on Dave the chimp-boy and Gerard the talkative parrot. Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
complained that it was hard to track over 30 named characters through intersecting sub-plots. However USA Today
USA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
′s reviewer liked the story's brisk pace and thought the interleaved plot threads came together well at the end.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, also known simply as the "PG," is the largest daily newspaper serving metropolitan Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.-Early history:...
s Karen Carlin enjoyed the novel highly and said "You realize what he's fictionalizing could be happening now, not "Next." And that's what makes it all so terrifying."
Opinions about the characters ranged from "dislikable and indistinguishable" to "deliciously vivid". The Onion A.V. Club thought the characters were barely developed enough to support the dialog and plot, and Ridley commented that in real life "most biotech executives are stressed and insecure people with mortgages" rather than sybaritic super-villains. However reviewers liked Gerard and Dave.
Some reviewers welcomed the injection of humor into the book, noting the parodies
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
of stereotypes, and Ridley regarded much of the story as a farce
Farce
In theatre, a farce is a comedy which aims at entertaining the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include word play, and a fast-paced plot whose speed usually increases,...
. However others thought most of the humor was unintentional.
The novel has also attracted (mostly negative) commentary from legal reviewers.
Sales
Next placed 4th in Publishers WeeklyPublishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
′s hardback fiction bestseller list for the year 2006, and in December 2007 it reached 3rd place in Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
′s weekly paperback fiction bestseller list.
In mid-December 2006 Next reached 9th place in a United Kingdom hardback fiction bestseller list.
Political impact
The biotechnology industry magazine Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News complained about the array of stereotyped corporate villains, and described Crichton's arguments against gene patents and commercial ownership of genes as "the usual suspects". Although it hoped poor reviews would reduce the book's impact, it noted that two Congressmen introduced a billBill (proposed law)
A bill is a proposed law under consideration by a legislature. A bill does not become law until it is passed by the legislature and, in most cases, approved by the executive. Once a bill has been enacted into law, it is called an act or a statute....
to ban future gene patents and abolish existing ones. Writers on technology-related law suggested Next and Crichton's opinion article in The New York Times may have been partly responsible for this bill. Public interest in gene patents had previously been declining, and gene-only patent applications were becoming less frequent as the industry realized how much work is needed to turn a gene into a salable product.
Film adaptation
According to the Internet Movie DatabaseInternet Movie Database
Internet Movie Database is an online database of information related to movies, television shows, actors, production crew personnel, video games and fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. It is one of the most popular online entertainment destinations, with over 100 million...
(IMDb), a film based on Next has been announced. As of June 21, 2010 no actors have been officially confirmed for any of the roles. The film is set to be released some time in 2011. (The 2007 science-fiction thriller Next is not related to the Crichton novel.)
Character name controversy
Michael CrowleyMichael Crowley
Michael Crowley is a senior correspondent and deputy Washington bureau chief for . From 2000 to 2010 he was a writer for The New Republic. His work has also been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, GQ, New York and Slate. Michael Crichton allegedly based a minor character on him in his...
of The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
alleged that, in retaliation for his having written a negative review of Crichton's previous novel State of Fear
State of Fear
State of Fear is a 2004 techno-thriller novel by Michael Crichton concerning eco-terrorists who attempt mass murder to support their views. The novel had an initial print run of 1.5 million copies and reached the #1 bestseller position at Amazon.com and #2 on the New York Times Best Seller list for...
, Crichton named a character with a mercifully small penis
Small penis rule
The "small penis rule" is an informal strategy used by authors to evade libel lawsuits. It was described in a New York Times article in 1998:...
who rapes a baby after him. From page 227: "Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers." Both Crowleys were Washington-based political columnists who had graduated from Yale.