HarperCollins to Publish New Michael Crichton Novel

HarperCollins announced yesterday that it will posthumously publish a new Michael Crichton novel this November.

Before his death in 2008, Crichton was working on a high-concept, technological thriller about a biotech company in Hawaii and a group graduate students who become stranded in a rainforest.

Now, bestselling author Richard Preston -- whose fiction books include The Cobra Event, and whose non-fiction books include The Hot Zone, which was the basis for the film Outbreak, and a trio of books about viruses collectively known as "Dark Biology" -- has finished the book, which will be published as Micro.

"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 says in a statement. "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."

Writer, screenwriter, and director Michael Crichton is possibly best known for his "Jurassic Park" novels but he is also wrote many other thrillers, some of which have been adapted for film, including Rising Sun, Sphere, and Congo.