Michael Crichton on 'global warming'.(State of Fear)(Book Review)

• Author: Stone, John
• Position: 132189658
• Pages: 25(10)

Occasionally I am asked to write book reviews (most recently, of Dr. Paul Strangio's biography of the late Dr. Jim Cairns, Keeper of the Faith). (1) Less frequently I may submit for publication an article reviewing some book which has caught my attention, and which I have thought sufficiently important to be worth drawing to the attention of a wider audience. Books in that rare category have invariably been serious non-fiction works of one kind or another, such as William Coleman's and Alf Hagger's excellent book, Exasperating Calculators. (2) I cannot however recall when I last chose to review a work of fiction.

State of Fear, (3) by Michael Crichton, is in fact much more than a work of fiction. Larded throughout the 567 pages of the novel proper (there are another 36 pages I shall come to later) are several serious messages which reverberate with me so strongly that I think it worth drawing to the attention of National Observer readers.

I should say that I am not a particular fan of Crichton's. I do not read much science fiction, although I would readily acknowledge that at its best (for example, John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids) it can be enthralling. Viewed purely as a literary stylist, Crichton would not, in my respectful judgment, score highly (unlike John Wyndham). His real strength lies in his capacity to combine the characteristics of a fast-paced, action-packed thriller (the sort of thing you pick up at the airport bookshop to engage your attention, but not your mind, on a long overseas flight) with a strong command of real scientific knowledge of the kind required for his books.

It was that combination of qualities which, years ago, sustained me in reading an earlier Crichton work, The Andromeda Strain (1969), a science fiction novel about a new and deadly biological agent threatening the world with a latter day Black Death. And although I have neither read the book nor viewed the subsequent movie, it was no doubt that combination of qualities which endowed Crichton's best-known work, Jurassic Park, with its best-seller status and subsequent enormous box office success.

As that latter reference may indicate, Crichton has become a hugely successful author and, at the age of 62, doubtless a very rich man. Beginning life with a Harvard degree in anthropology, he then graduated from Harvard Medical School, and was about to take up a doctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute for Biological Science when the best-seller success of The Andromeda Strain led him, at the age of 27, to focus on a career as a writer, and a writer of science fiction in particular. I mention these facts not merely to illustrate his admirable versatility, but also to suggest that his scientific training equips him to address scientific and technological issues going well beyond the competence of most members of the literati.

A prefatory note to State of Fear says that it "is a work of fiction ... Characters, corporations, institutions, and organisations ... are the products of the author's imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously without any attempt to describe their actual conduct". This disclaimer, and particularly that part of it I have italicised, would seem to have been particularly necessary (even in the United States, where the defamation laws are much less hostile to free speech than in Australia) given the harshness of Crichton's condemnations of some U.S. individuals and institutions who are, apparently, readily recognisable.

The plot, and some of the principal characters, may perhaps be best described as falling within the James Bond category. That is, on any cool post-reading analysis they are (like much science fiction) far-fetched, but the pace of the story and the ease of reading combine to engender a sufficient suspension of disbelief to get over that hurdle while actually reading. In other words, like all good airport bookshop thrillers, once embarked upon it is hard to put down.

Ranged on one side are the villains, chief among them the National Environmental Resource Fund (N.E.R.F.). (This, it seems, is a thinly disguised stand-in for a real-life U.S. institution, the Natural Resources Defense Council, which within days of the novel appearing published an ad hominem review consigning it to perdition for all right-minded people.) N.E.R.F. promotes itself, and the personal fortunes of its chief operatives, through unprincipled but technically skilful manipulation of an ever-willing-to-be-credulous-where-good-environmental-causes-are-concerned media. And through its links with the much more violently sinister Environmental Liberation Front, it seeks to initiate a series of climatic or other environmentally-related events (a massive hurricane in the West Indies; an enormous flash flood in Arizona; breaking off a massive iceberg from the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica). The last such event involves triggering a huge tsunami off the Solomons whose wave, racing across the Pacific, will be timed to strike the shores of California just as N.E.R.F.'s latest huge conference on "abrupt climate change", directed to whipping up more media hysteria about the damage Man is doing to Planet Earth, is winding up in Los Angeles.

The objectives of all this manipulation, of course, are money and power...