Finishing the story that Crichton started

NEW YORK - A new, posthumous story of science gone wrong is coming in November from the late Michael Crichton, with help by Richard Preston.

Crichton, author of such blockbusters as Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, died in 2008 having written one-third of Micro, a thriller about a biotech company in Hawaii and the graduate students who end up stranded and endangered in a rain forest.

Preston, known for his best-selling nonfiction work about the Ebola virus, The Hot Zone, used Crichton's outline, reference materials, and notes to finish the book.

Publisher HarperCollins announced recently that Micro would be "a high concept thriller in the vein of Jurassic Park." In a statement released by HarperCollins, Preston said he was immediately captivated by Crichton's manuscript.

"Michael was writing at the top of his game, with a grand sense of adventure, into an eerie world that seems almost beyond imagining," Preston said. "For me, it was an irresistible challenge to finish the novel, and I was driven by a desire to honor the work and imagination of one of our time's most visionary and creative authors."

"Michael was exhilarated by his concept for this novel," Crichton's agent, Lynn Nesbit, said in a statement. "He felt he was breaking new ground by introducing his readers to a fascinating, almost unimaginable landscape with real scientific underpinnings."

Crichton is one of many authors whose publishing output has continued after death. David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, a novel assembled from notes the author left behind after his suicide in 2008, came out last month. The Wheel of Time fantasy series by Robert Jordan, who died in 2007, is being completed by Brandon Sanderson. Crichton's Pirate Latitudes, a novel he had finished before his death, was released in 2009.