Crichton, Michael: State of Fear

[Dave]

Is anyone reading this?

Please tell me what you think of it. I heard a BBC Radio 4 review programme last week that slated it. They said it read like a scientific paper with real references, with a car chase every so often, just because he thought he hadn't had one for a while. No character development, and a poor read.

It seems to be firmly in the anti-global warming camp - diametrically opposed to the film 'The Day After Tomorrow'. Considering the furore that caused, I'm surprised that there hasn't been more about this.

from SciFi Wire

Crichton Attacks Global Warming

Michael Crichton, whose new SF-tinged novel State of Fear takes on the issue of global warming, told the Associated Press that it took him a while to come to the conclusion that the phenomenon may not be real. "It was very difficult to get my head around the idea that this widely held belief may not be true, and I thought, 'If I'm going to do a book, how would I structure it so that someone could even hear it a little bit?'" Crichton told the AP.

State of Fear centers on a group of eco-terrorists who plot a series of natural disasters to prove that global warming is a threat to humanity. A ragtag band of scientists and lawyers uncovers the scheme. Along the way, Crichton attacks the assumptions behind global warming and even tacks on a five-page message stating his notion that the theory of global warming is speculative at best, as well as a 14-page bibliography of works supporting his views, the AP reported.

"I have a lot of trouble with things that don't seem true to me," Crichton said. "I'm very uncomfortable just accepting. There's something in me that wants to pound the table and say, 'That's not true.'"

Crichton's author's statement is new even for Crichton. In it, he argued that a political agenda, not scientific evidence, is the foundation for predictions that the planet's climate will warm by 4 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. World powers, he said, use global warming to keep citizens in a state of fear, just as they did with the Cold War. But Crichton is noticeably vague about who these powers are, the AP reported. Crichton, who was trained as a physician, considers himself an environmentalist, no matter what. "Why are we not feeding people in this world who are hungry? Why are we not giving clean water to the almost billion people who don't have clean water? The greatest sources of environmental degradation is poverty. Why aren't we cleaning up poverty?" State of Fear is now on sale.

I think I gave my own views on this in the 'The Day After Tomorrow' film forum thread.

I'm not sure that the research has been good enough either. I don't think anyone can state 1°C, 9°C or 30°C warming. They have the largest computers in the world modelling weather, and they still can't tell you with certainty that it will rain in 4 days time, so how can they do more?

I'm sure that fluctuations in the Sun's output, interstellar dust, wobbles of the Earth's axis, outgassing from the Earth -- they all play a part.

But the greenhouse effect is real, and continuing to pump out CO2 is just a great experiment too far. By the time we know how much it effects the temperature, it might be too late to change it. And the rise in CO2 with Time is exponential, it is not a little insignificant increase.

Also I see Oil Companies and people who stand to gain financially lined up against 'Global Warming due to the greenhouse effect'. I don't see what these other "world powers" Crichton describes have to gain by promoting it. I've read elsewhere that it is to bring in communism and central planning by the back door, but that sounds to me like someone who has been asleep since the McCarthy era.

I won't be buying this in hardback, and I'm not sure about paperback. Not because I disagree with it, but because it doesn't sound like a very good read. I like Michael Crichton's work, but all the reviewers say that it is far from his best book, and it seems to be more of a rant than a novel.

 

[ray gower]

Oh dear, it sounds like a Greg Egan novel.
And it is so rare BBC Radio 4 reviews anything mildly science fiction.

It strikes me that the likes of Heinlein, Asimov and Dicks all managed to carry their anti-nuclear proliferation message very clearly with well written stories that made sense to most of those that read them. It cannot say much for Crichton's story that what he has written needs so much extra twaddle to try and make it clear.

It might be interesting to see how the eco-terrorists intend to create a 'Natural' disaster though. You can't simply go to the North Pole armed with your little blowlamp and somebody would notice the odd nuclear bomb going off in an attempt to knock off a large lump of the polar cap. It needs more than burning down a few oil wells and tropical rain forests too!

The other side of course is how would you undo the effects of the man made 'natural global warming disaster'?

I suspect I will wait for the paperback to appear in the secondhand shop

 

[Dave]

Another review

I haven't yet read a reviewer who likes this book. Someone please correct me!

I really think Michael Crichton has come off the rails with this one. It is one thing to personally believe global warming is an invented phenomena, quite another to write a story with such an unbelievable preposterous plot in order to disprove it, and then to patronise us with "Everybody has an agenda. Except me."

Fiction review: 'State of Fear' by Michael Crichton
Reviewed By Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
January 2, 2005 FEAR0102


The odious villains in Michael Crichton's new thriller, the folks (as President Bush might put it) who kill, maim and terrorize, aren't members of al-Qaida or any other jihadi movement. They aren't Bondian bad guys like Goldfinger, Dr. No or Scaramanga. They aren't drug lords or gang members or associates of Tony Soprano's.

No, the evil ones in "State of Fear" are tree-hugging environmentalists, believers in global warming, proponents of the Kyoto Protocol. Their surveillance operatives drive politically correct, hybrid Priuses; their hit men use an exotic, poisonous Australian octopus as their weapon of choice. Their unwitting (and sometimes, witting) allies are -- natch! -- the liberal media, trial lawyers, Hollywood celebrities, mainstream environmental groups (such as the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society) and other blue-state apparatchiks.

This might all be very amusing as a "Saturday Night Live" sketch, but Crichton doesn't seem to have amusement on his mind. This thriller comes equipped with footnotes, charts, an authorial manifesto and two appendixes ("Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous" and "Sources of Data for Graphs").

The novel itself reads like a shrill, preposterous right-wing answer to this year's shrill, preposterous but campily entertaining global-warming disaster movie "The Day After Tomorrow." In that special-effects extravaganza, global warming (its dangers ignored by a Dick Cheneyesque vice president) is the enemy, leading to deadly climate changes and disturbances in the weather that leave New York City flooded and frozen and Los Angeles beset by swarms of killer tornadoes.

In Crichton's ham-handed novel, the dangers of global warming are nothing but a lot of hype: scare scenarios, promoted by shameless environmentalists eager to use bad science to raise money and draw attention to their cause. For that matter, the ludicrous plot revolves around efforts by radical members of an environmental group called NERF (National Environmental Resource Fund) to surreptitiously trigger a series of natural disasters, including a supersize hurricane and a giant tsunami that would hit California with 60-foot waves. These disasters would be timed to coincide with the group's big media conference, thereby awakening the public to the dangers of climate change wrought by global warming.

As in earlier Crichton books, the characters in this novel practically come with Post-it notes on their foreheads indicating whether they are good guys or bad guys. The radical leaders of the environmentalists -- including the head of NERF, Nicholas Drake, an ascetic Ralph Nader type -- are ruthless control freaks (in another novel, they might well have been greedy corporate tycoons or power-mad politicians). Their followers are a bunch of self-righteous bubble-headed Gulfstream liberals, Hollywood types who drive sport-utility vehicles while preaching the virtues of gasoline conservation. One tree-hugger, who will meet a particularly horrifying fate, shares the résumé of the real-life actor and activist Martin Sheen: He is best known for having played the president of the United States in a once-popular television show.

As for Crichton's good guys -- the people trying to thwart the nefarious NERF plot to wreak natural destruction in the name of saving the planet -- they are led by a brainy former MIT professor named John Kenner, who, it's suggested, knows everything about everything. Kenner is accompanied on his global peregrinations by a "Jurassic Park"-like crew of handsome young people, who prove adept at surviving all manner of perils, from frostbite in Antarctica to multiple lightning strikes to captivity by cannibals in the South Pacific.

People say such standard-issue thriller things as "Time is short, Sarah. Very short." That is, when they aren't dropping scientific terms such as "cavitation units" and "propagation time."

Half movie treatment, half ideological screed, "State of Fear" careers between action set pieces (the requisite car chases, shootouts and narrow escapes from grisly ends) and talky disquisitions full of technical language and cherry-picked facts meant to hammer home the author's points.

And Crichton does indeed have a message, as an afterword titled "Author's Message" attests. Among his stated beliefs: "I suspect the people of 2100 will be much richer than we are, consume more energy, have a smaller global population and enjoy more wilderness than we have today. I don't think we have to worry about them." And: "I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners" for current failures in wilderness management.

In an appendix, he goes on to draw parallels between global-warming theories and the notorious theory of eugenics floated a century ago: "I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed." Given these dogmatic assertions and his lumbering efforts to make the novel's story line illustrate these theories, it seems disingenuous in the extreme of Crichton to claim: "Everybody has an agenda. Except me."

Of course, he could simply be trying (like some of the characters in the novel) to drum up publicity for himself by being provocative and contrarian.

After all, it's hard to imagine people buying this sorry excuse for a thriller on its storytelling merits alone.