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Rating: 
Summary: Face it -- a lot of Asimov's writing was junk.
Review: And this book is an example. In the intro, Asimov says he was never satisfied with the original Fantastic Voyage novel, because it wasn't his story. So he was thrilled to have a chance to write his own story on the theme.Too bad his own story wasn't any good. It is illustrative of an often-overlooked fact: Asimov was mostly about quantity, not quality. It's well known that he was a prolific writer. It's less well known that most of what he wrote wasn't really worth reading.
Rating: 
Summary: lame science,unbelievable behavior
Review: Okay, it wasn't as bad as Clarke's Richter 10 or Heinlein's To Sail Into the Sunset, but this definitely falls in the category of Hurtin' Efforts by Aging Science Fiction Masters. It's ironic that Asimov says in his intro that his main reason for writing a sequel was to get the science right. It's usually a pleasure to read his characters' long rambling dialogs about science, but here it feels like a waste of time, since the science is all made-up psuedo-science. The cold war setting actually feels more dated than the original. I also had a hard time buying the protagonist's willingness to throw in his lot with his kidnappers, and even to fall in love with one of them.
Rating:
Summary: Face it -- a lot of Asimov's writing was junk.
Review: Plot summary: A dying Russian scientist has the key to making miniaturization much more practical. Unfortunately he is in a coma and the Russians have no way to extract the information from his brain. In desperation they kidnap an American scientist, Morrison, who labors in obscurity on his discredited theory of brainwave resonance and decoding. The Russians hope they can use Morrison and his methods to extract some information out of the dying scientist's brain before it is too late. They hope to get better results than Morrison has in the past by miniaturizing themselves and a small submarine and going inside the comatose scientist's brain. I was pleased with the Asimov's retreatment of the miniaturization theme. The science in the original Fantastic Voyage story was flawed in some obvious ways that would have killed off the main characters in short order. Asimov fixes these problems in this story and makes the journey into the human body as interesting and fun as the original story. The biggest problem with the new story is the brainwave resonance and decoding idea which, try as I might, I just could not believe would work under any circumstances. I was willing to keep reading for Asimov's treatment of miniaturization and his meshing of it with quantum theory, which I found intriguing. Of the novels on the miniaturization theme that I know of (Fantastic Voyage I & II and Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man), this novel is the only one that tries to deal credibly with the science. The characters were a bit annoying, with their seemingly endless squabbles. But I liked the fact that they were all very driven and dedicated people. I had no trouble believing their motivations, even where Morrison agrees to work with his kidnappers. The damned will always jump at a chance for redemption. The character that kept me laughing was Arkady Deshnev and his pithy sayings. "Apes were invented because politicians were needed" still brings a smile to my face over a decade after I first read it. Four stars for a slightly flawed book, that nonetheless kept me interested and reading.
Rating: 
Summary: best novel on miniaturization theme, other SF parts iffy
Review: Plot summary: A dying Russian scientist has the key to making miniaturization much more practical. Unfortunately he is in a coma and the Russians have no way to extract the information from his brain. In desperation they kidnap an American scientist, Morrison, who labors in obscurity on his discredited theory of brainwave resonance and decoding. The Russians hope they can use Morrison and his methods to extract some information out of the dying scientist's brain before it is too late. They hope to get better results than Morrison has in the past by miniaturizing themselves and a small submarine and going inside the comatose scientist's brain. I was pleased with the Asimov's retreatment of the miniaturization theme. The science in the original Fantastic Voyage story was flawed in some obvious ways that would have killed off the main characters in short order. Asimov fixes these problems in this story and makes the journey into the human body as interesting and fun as the original story. The biggest problem with the new story is the brainwave resonance and decoding idea which, try as I might, I just could not believe would work under any circumstances. I was willing to keep reading for Asimov's treatment of miniaturization and his meshing of it with quantum theory, which I found intriguing. Of the novels on the miniaturization theme that I know of (Fantastic Voyage I & II and Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man), this novel is the only one that tries to deal credibly with the science. The characters were a bit annoying, with their seemingly endless squabbles. But I liked the fact that they were all very driven and dedicated people. I had no trouble believing their motivations, even where Morrison agrees to work with his kidnappers. The damned will always jump at a chance for redemption. The character that kept me laughing was Arkady Deshnev and his pithy sayings. "Apes were invented because politicians were needed" still brings a smile to my face over a decade after I first read it. Four stars for a slightly flawed book, that nonetheless kept me interested and reading.
Rating:
Summary: Are you miniaturizing again?
Review: The Good Doctor never felt good about Fantastic Voyage because it wasn't his novel. Here he takes a winning plot and only does average with it. Mildly interesting, but to compared some of his other novels, it just doesn't make the grade
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