Sphere
Sphere is a frustrating book (not as good as Jurassic Park, better than Congo). I really liked the premise behind it, and even the way it all played out, but it dragged out a bit too long, and the real kicker, I didn't care a thing about any of the characters. You'd think I'd care after spending 371 pages with them, but nope. Didn't care at all.
A handpicked team trained to deal with the threat of first contact with alien life heads to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to examine a spaceship that appears to have crash landed there at least three hundred years before. But when they get there, the ship is empty, and it doesn't appear to be alien after all . . . except for a large black sphere found in a robotic arm deep in the bowels of the ship. With the team stuck at the bottom of the ocean, the threat the sphere poses becomes very, very real.
My favorite thing about Michael Crichton books is all that applied technobabble he's so good at, and there's plenty of that to be found in Sphere. Black holes, submarines, time travel, a three hundred plus year old ship buried at sea, a mysterious sphere that won't open, and psychology psychobabble on top of all that . . . it's all good. And the more he technobabbles about it, the more I like it. Good premise and technobabble aside, meh. It's not good when the best part about a book is the technobabble, is what I'm saying. The characters are more like cardboard cutouts than people, and while I enjoyed reading it at the time, it's not something I can ever see myself revisiting.