- Crichton, Michael.
State of Fear.
New York: HarperCollins, 2004. ISBN 0-06-621413-0.
-
Ever since I read his 2003
Commonwealth Club speech, I've admired
Michael Crichton's outspoken defence of rationality against the junk science,
elitist politics, and immoral anti-human policies of present-day Big Environmentalism.
In State of Fear, he enlists his talent as a techno-thriller writer
in the cause, debunking the bogus fear-mongering of the
political/legal/media/academic complex which is
increasingly turning the United States into a nation of safety-obsessed
sheeple, easily manipulated by the elite which constructs the fact-free
virtual reality they inhabit.
To the extent this book causes people to look behind the green curtain of
environmentalism, it will no doubt do a world of good. Scientific integrity is
something which matters a great deal to Crichton—when's the last time you read a
thriller which included dozens of citations of peer-reviewed scientific
papers, charts based on public domain climate data, a list of data sources for
independent investigation, a twenty page annotated bibliography, and an
explicit statement of the author's point of view on the issues discussed in the
novel?
The story is a compelling page-turner, but like other recent Crichton efforts,
requires somewhat more suspension of disbelief than I'm comfortable with. I don't
disagree with the scientific message—I applaud it—but I found myself less
than satisfied with how the thing worked as a thriller. As in
Prey
(January 2003),
the characters often seemed to do things which simply weren't the way
real people would actually behave. It is plausible that
James Bond like secret agent John Kenner would entrust a raid on an
eco-terrorist camp to a millionaire's administrative assistant and a
lawyer who'd never fired a gun, or that he'd include these two, along
with an actor who played a U.S. president on television, sent to spy
for the bad guys, on an expedition to avert a horrific terrorist
strike? These naïve, well-intentioned, but clueless characters provide
convenient foils for Crichton's scientific arguments and come to
deliciously appropriate ends, at least in one case, but all the time
you can't help but thinking they're just story devices who don't
really belong there. The villains' grand schemes also make this
engineer's reality detector go bzzzt! In each case, they're
trying to do something on an unprecedented scale, involving
unconfirmed theories and huge uncertainties in real-world data, and
counting on it working the very first time, with no
prior prototyping or reduced-scale tests. In the real world, heroics
wouldn't be necessary—you could just sit back and wait for something
to go wrong, as it always does in such circumstances.
January 2005 