Saturday, January 28, 2012

Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov

We are at war with Them.  Both sides have developed the military technology of miniaturization, where things can be shrunk to any size.  The only catch is that the smaller someone is shrunk, the shorter they stay that way.  The only man who knows how to prolong miniaturization indefinitely is dying of a brain clot.  How will We ever win?

The answer is to miniaturize a bunch of people and a submarine and send them into the bloodstream to stop the clot.  Their pretty straightforward path gets sidetracked again and again as they end up exploring the heart, the lungs, and the brain, as well as many other parts of the body.

Now, in biology class, they had us play a similar video game to this, and this is a great case of me having a much better time reading a book than playing a video game.  The game's awkward controls didn't help the case.  I've also heard that Fantastic Voyage has been made into a movie, but I've never seen it.  I don't watch very many movies because they inevitably make everything look different from the way I imagined it, and whenever I think of the story thereafter, I always imagine the movie instead of the book.

The whole story seemed to me to involve a little too much of the author creating event after event to make a simple, straightforward journey last until the characters were running at the time.  Then I read the ending.  I don't want to give it away, but this is one of the only times where this is not the case. 

For somebody who doesn't know all of the technical details for the body, like me, Fantastic Voyage is filled with a new wonder around each page.  For somebody who does know all of those details, I imagine that it's a good read that proves that not everybody else is completely ignorant.  Either way, this book leads you on a suspenseful, scientific, and most of all, fantastic voyage.

No comments:

Post a Comment