Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park! – Classic Book Spotlight

Welcome… to Nerd News Social! (Cue John Williams score.)

What’s up, Readers? Today we’re going to be dealing with a blast from the past; both figuratively and literally. See, there are a lot of books that I love that are still nerdy as heck, great reading and I just want to experience them again. I figured, every so often, I’d look at one of these books and Spotlight them for you in case you yourself haven’t given then a look-over as of yet. I figured we’d call it Classic Book Spotlight and you can expect them every once in a while!

Today’s book is Jurassic Park, one of Michael Crichton’s best works and the only one that spawned a multibillion dollar media franchise. Mr. Crichton has a certain reputation for being a bit formulaic in his plots… something runs amok and a small group of people are isolated from the rest of the world and have to deal with it. I think this is the absolute best version of this and I say that as someone who has, for better and for worse, read most of his stuff.

A little story for you. Back in the mid 1990s I had a lot more time to read. As a child I was an avid reader who would pull out a book almost anywhere, including at the dinner table. At home, this was tolerated if not exactly beloved behavior. But when we went out to dinner or were spending time with relatives? I was expected to engage, interact and be on my best behavior… Blech.

I was elated to find that my public library had a copy of Jurassic Park available. I was dinosaur obsessed and didn’t see the movie till several years later. (Nearest movie theater was a 2 hour drive away and we didn’t make a habit of going.) I snagged it and could hardly put it down. Unfortunately, that same night, we were going out to dinner at a nice restaurant with extended family.

You see my dilemma.

I snuck the book in and set it on my lap, doing my best to read bit by bit in-between bites and slurps and surreptitious looks at everyone else’s plates to gauge how long I’d have to put up with socializing. (Eat faster! I want to go home!) I thought I was doing a pretty good job of keeping my dirty little secret until my mother leaned over:

“Close the book or take it out to the car. Your choice.”

Now, I know this was intended as an ultimatum. I know the correct choice was to close the book and talk to cousin Jane and Uncle in Law Barry and all those other wonderful people. I know this. Being sent to the car, unable to finish my meal was the punishment. I was being given a chance at redemption – a rare enough thing for us children of the 80s.

The only thing I said in response was ‘Gimme your keys.”

You see, dear reader, my Mother had made one mistake. She’d gone and parked right under a street light.

And now! If you’ll cast your mind back to the far-flung, ancient year that is 1990 (Last Millenium!) we can embark on the journey of a lifetime!

Book Stats

Author: Michael Crichton.
Formats: Library Binding, Paperback, Kindle, and Audible.
Price: $17.89 for Library Binding, $15.63 for Paperback, $9.99 for the Kindle and $21.88 for Audible, or one Credit on Audible.
Length: 466 pages or 15 hours 10 minutes in audio format.
Narrator: Scott Brick
Number of books in the series: 2!

Basic Premise

In Costa Rica, something strange is afoot. A newborn baby is eaten alive by strange lizards. The death goes incorrectly reported as SIDS because… well. Who would believe a story about multiple lizards chowing down on a baby? There seems to be a lot of that going around recently among the locals. The only real attention that’s given to these odd lizard sightings is when they endanger the life of an American tourist. (Of course.) A little girl who’s doing a report for school on all the wildlife she can find while she and her parents vacation in the tropics.

She’s following bird footprints in the sand near the undergrowth bordering the beach they’ve stopped at when she notices something odd. A lizard on its hind legs.

Once she starts screaming due to the thing trying to take a slab of flesh out of her hand, her parents sprint down the sand to save her.

The experts assert that it was a basilisk lizard and disregard her drawings of a bipedal creature entirely. Still, one man remains unsure and reconnoiters the area, just to be sure. He spots a monkey with something dead and green clasped in its jaws; one tranq dart later and this half-chewed specimen is on its way to America to be looked at by the experts.

And all this before we see a construction worker that’s been mauled by a very large animal and flown to the mainland for treatment. They say that he ran afoul of some heavy machinery… but the meat torn from his thigh was removed by way of teeth. That’s as clear as day.

So many questions to be answered.

Speaking of answering questions, John Hammond has one! When can he open his damned park!?

He assembles an array of specialists to give it the ol’ stamp of approval. Alan Grant – a Paleontologist who’s work Hammond has been funding for a long time, along with his assistant, a Paleobotanist by the name of Ellie Sattler. A rockstar mathematician by the name of Ian Malcolm, who’s guiding philosophy is chaos theory; the idea that once a system builds up to a certain size, the unpredictability of every minor element makes the end result entirely too variable to be accurately predicted and the system will therefore collapse. Oh, and a lawyer by the name of Donald Gennaro. This is not to genuinely try and prove that his park is safe, though… it’s mostly just to please his investors who are getting skittish over reports of girls and workers running afoul of weird animal attacks on shores not too terribly far from Isla Nublar, where the park is being set up. Oh, let’s bring in the grand kids while we’re at it. Tim, in the book, is the older and science obsessed kid while Lex is younger and just wants to play baseball.

Things go pear-shaped immediately. Grant finds an egg shell out in the wild. Too big to be a Costa Rican native bird. This challenges the idea that the dinosaurs on Isla Nublar can not breed. Ellie correctly diagnoses that the stegosaurus population is getting sick due to berries they’re eating accidentally when ingesting gizzard stones. These animals don’t belong here and keeping them alive and healthy is going to be a bigger challenge than Hammond is allowing for.

Of course, things get really, truly hairy when Dennis Nedry, an underpaid, under-appreciated and very smart programmer decides to do a bit of an espionage and steal some embryos for Lewis Dodgeson. He orchestrates a total system shut-down so he can snag embryos undetected and make his way off the island with them on the supply ship that’s due to drop off dinosaur feed and then return to the mainland.

So far, so similar to the movie, right? Does it stay that way? Absolutely not. Oh gosh no!

Folks, you need to read this one if you haven’t already.

My Take

So, there are a few properties that are really, truly touchstones of nerd culture. The heroes and villains of DC and Marvel, the Star Trek and Star Wars properties, Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings, etc. I believe Jurassic Park deserves a place in that pantheon of properties. Unfortunately, it’s been hijacked by the mainstream in a way that’s watered it down and made it much less niche than it really is. (A lot of the above mentioned properties have, I guess.) I actually like all the Jurassic Park and Jurassic world films for what they are but they’re definitely designed for a big audience of as many types of people as possible and are a lot more family friendly than this book. They’re for pop-corn scented afternoons at the theater filled with the sounds of raucous kids and barely invested adults. This book, on the other hand doesn’t shy away from violence and it doesn’t shy away from philosophy. The science is dated, but it’s there and presented in a way that’s believable. (Tim losing his mind over an actual touch-screen computer is adorable. You enjoy it, Kiddo. One day you won’t be able to escape them!)

I think that the key bitterness I feel at this watering down of the original premise is that every single time I see a new article talking about resurrecting extinct animals (Mammoths, Thylacine, the Dodo) or whenever something is unearthed from deep permafrost that comes back to life (Bacteria, several very small species of worm.) the first and most frequent comment I see is “Didn’t we learn anything from Jurassic Park!?” Like it’s some kind of educational film about the bringing back of extinct species. Like it’s supposed to be a textbook on screen. Didn’t we learn anything from Jurassic Park?

Nope! We absolutely did not! But here’s the kicker… dinosaurs and resurrecting them? Very, very little to do with the lesson we didn’t learn. You know the lesson we were actually supposed to learn from Jurassic Park? The lesson is very simple… Capitalism ruins everything.

John Hammond in the world of Jurassic Park’s novel isn’t the kindly old Scrooge McDuck-esque, grandfatherly flea-circus manager that he is in the movies. (He doesn’t even say “We spared no expense!” That’s Gennaro!) Oh no. He’s a bloodthirsty capitalist who wears his disdain for the world on his sleeve. He’s talking to Henry Wu at one point, giving a sermon on the evils of the world and he states that sure; he could have used his resources to create genetic cures for diseases instead of bringing back extinct animals. He could have helped mankind! He opted not to go that route – why? Because creating medicine comes with too much baggage. First of all, you can’t charge whatever you want for it as you would expect to be your right. Nope. As soon as people realize that your life-saving treatment is overpriced, there will be hell to pay. (Hey, he’s not wrong – remember Pharma Bro Martin Shkrelli?) Plus, the red-tape of dealing with the FDA, testing, re-testing, human trials, all the scrutiny applied during that process is so bothersome! Plus, if it doesn’t work or has side effects that are negative after all that, people will hold you liable! Helping mankind is a fool’s game. But entertainment? No-one NEEDS entertainment. And sure, if that entertainment is too pricey, people will complain but no-one absolutely HAS to have it. (He states bluntly that Jurassic Park is for children… but only those who’s parents can afford it.) Less oversight and pesky regulations! Charge whatever you want for the final product while cutting whatever costs you can to increase those margins!

Cutting corners like… oh. I don’t know. Severely underpaying and overworking your staff till they’ll happily do a little bit of backstabbing. A little espionage. A little theft of office supplies… or dinosaur embryos.

See, the movie paints Nedry as a completely unsympathetic character. What the novel lets us know is that this man basically single-handedly created a system for cataloging DNA for the Island. Now, keep in mind that this book is actually set in the late 80s so the technology at that time would have been vastly more limited than what we think of today. This is a system designed to catalog the DNA of 15 species of extinct animal. (Actually more if you count the plants and insect life they also bought back. Uh.. giant prehistoric dragonflies. Not locusts.) Spreadsheets with literally billions of fields that needed to be accessed quickly, accurately and correctly regularly. The book frames this as essentially an impossible task that this guy pulls off before being underpaid, asked to make modifications with no additional money or resources. And not only that, but he’s treated poorly by his coworkers because he’s young, overweight and a bit of a slob.

Now, I’m not saying he’s some kind of angel. You can tell he’s on the arrogant and pushy side. But still. I literally can’t blame the guy for taking a bunch of easy money when it’s offered and giving a big middle finger to his former employer. He didn’t intend for anyone to die – he wasn’t actively evil. He was just overworked and underpaid and who can’t empathize with that?

See, it’s the desire to cut corners and avoid regulation to chase the almighty dollar and the making of decisions to placate the investor class… those are Hammond’s sins. Not bringing back dinosaurs.

Don’t believe me that this is the core message? Let’s do a little contextual reading – Michael Crichton’s book Next, the last book of his to be published in his lifetime, also deals with genetic engineering. It’s not a linear story at all but folds several stories together. Some of them meet and mingle, some of them don’t. It’s a very uncharacteristic narrative for him but throughout, he talks about the commodification of the technology and material used in the field of genetic engineering. Patenting someone’s genes because they can be used in genetic therapies and your lab was the first to discover this. Doing so while ensuring that the person who’s genetic material you’re culturing doesn’t see a cent while your company rakes in millions. Or (And this one kind of makes me gag.) genetically altering and releasing fish into the wild with corporate logos grown biologically into the skin who will then breed to produce more fish with those same logos. Advertising to people snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef by ensuring that they see the Pepsi or Nike logos on wildlife. Whoever will pay to have it done. Very on the nose with a lot less room for interpretation than Jurassic Park offers, but it does tie back into all the themes I just discussed. (And you’ll never see it referenced on Facebook by someone’s weird uncle under a news story about resurrecting the Thylacine.)

So. Yeah. Bring back the mammoth and the dodo. Just don’t charge people to see them, that’s all.

Our narrator for the audio version is Scott Brick. He does a great job – everyone sounds pretty distinct though only a few characters get accents. His version of Robert Muldoon is a fun one… and remarkably longer lived than the movie.

All in all, if you like the Jurassic Park films, I think this is an absolute must-read!