Posted on 01/30/2005 6:42:45 AM PST by ml/nj
There's a problem with Michael Crichton's new thriller, and it shows up before the narrative even begins. In a disclaimer that follows the copyright page, Crichton writes: ''This is a work of fiction. Characters, corporations, institutions and organizations in this novel are the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, are used fictitiously without any intent to describe their actual conduct. However, references to real people, institutions and organizations that are documented in footnotes are accurate. Footnotes are real.''
Footnotes?
Yes, there will be footnotes. Although ''State of Fear'' comes dressed as an airport-bookstore thriller, Crichton's readers will discover halfway through their flight that the novel more closely resembles one of those Ann Coulter ''Liberals Are Stupid'' jobs. Liberals, environmentalists and many other straw men endure a stern thrashing in ''State of Fear,'' but Crichton's primary target is the theory of global warming, which he believes is a scientific delusion. In his zeal to expose the emperor's nudity the author cites, ad nauseam, actual studies that seem to contradict the conventional wisdom on global warming. Hence, footnotes.
Scholarly trappings aside, ''State of Fear'' does follow the basic conventions of the mass-market thriller. There are villains, there are heroes and there is an evil plot to be foiled. Chief among the baddies is Nicholas Drake, head of an environmental group called the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF), who has conspired with radical eco-terrorists to trigger a series of climate-related catastrophes. Drake believes the disasters will convince the public that global warming is an imminent crisis that can be averted only by writing big fat checks to NERF. As Drake explains to a P.R. man, John Henley, global warming simply isn't scary enough. ''You can't raise a dime with it, especially in winter,'' he says. ''Every time it snows people forget all about global warming. Or else they decide some warming might be a good thing after all. They're trudging through the snow, hoping for a little global warming. It's not like pollution, John. Pollution worked. It still works. . . . You tell 'em they'll get cancer, and the money rolls in. But nobody is scared of a little warming.''
Opposing Drake is John Kenner, an M.I.T. professor who moonlights as a 007-style agent for the National Security Intelligence Agency. When he's not dispatching thugs, Kenner spends most of his time disabusing new acquaintances of the wrongheaded scientific notions they've absorbed from the news media. Global warming, he says, was ''a setup from the beginning,'' a wrongheaded theory foisted upon the public by unscrupulous scientists and fear-mongering environmental leaders.
Between Kenner and Drake stands Peter Evans, a mild-mannered attorney for NERF whose loyalty to the do-gooding tree huggers melts away in the heat of Kenner's relentless climatology lectures. In the cartoonish political world Crichton creates in ''State of Fear,'' Kenner and Drake exist as extreme symbols of a good red conservative and an evil blue liberal struggling to win a swing state. Peter Evans is Ohio.
Crichton clearly enjoys drawing the line between fact and fiction exceedingly fine. Nicholas Drake's fellow travelers include George Morton, a billionaire philanthropist who's pledged $10 million to NERF; Ted Bradley, an actor and environmental activist who plays the United States president on a popular TV drama; and a shadowy band of eco-terrorists known as the Environmental Liberation Front (ELF). The author's disclaimer notwithstanding, it's impossible not to identify these folks as stand-ins for the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, the ''West Wing'' star Martin Sheen and the real-life Earth Liberation Front. The nonfictional N.R.D.C. finds itself burdened with an acronym, NERF, symbolizing all that is soft, squishy and childish. Sheen's doppelgänger comes in for portraiture so villainous -- a drunken lecherous crybaby blowhard, he suffers the novel's most gruesome demise -- that one wonders what the poor actor did to earn such emnity.
''State of Fear'' is so over-the-top, in fact, that it wouldn't take much to turn it into a satiric parable of a liberal coming to his conservative senses. Take the scene where Kenner, Evans and Sarah Jones, George Morton's plucky assistant, arm themselves to confront the eco-terrorists: ''When was the last time you were on a range?'' Kenner asks Evans. ''Uh, it's been a while,'' answers Evans, whose lack of military training and anti-gun politics instantly put his manhood in doubt. ''In the passenger seat, Sarah looked at Peter. He was good-looking, and he had the strong physique of an athlete. But sometimes he behaved like such a wimp.''
Her suspicions aroused by Evans's metrosexual gunslinging, she presses him further. ''You ever do any sports?'' she asks. Sure, he says. ''Squash. A little soccer.''
Wrong answer, blue boy.
''She was disappointed with him and not even sure why. Probably, she thought, because she was nervous and wanted somebody competent to be with her. She liked being around Kenner. He was so knowledgeable, so skilled. He knew what was going on. He was quick to respond to any situation. Whereas Peter was a nice guy, but. . . .''
But she'll be voting red this year. Sarah -- for some reason the author refers to Peter Evans as Evans and John Kenner as Kenner, but Sarah Jones, well, she's just Sarah -- functions as Crichton's own Dame Commonsense. She sees through Ted Bradley's self-righteous bluster: ''Sarah thought: Ted really is a fool. He has a severely limited understanding of what he is talking about.'' She appreciates the road clearance of a good gas-guzzler: ''The vehicle was bouncing over the dirt road, but it was an S.U.V. and it rode high so Sarah knew they would be all right.'' Thank God they didn't take Evans's hybrid wimpmobile. Really -- the guy drives a Prius.
This might all be good if not screamingly clever fun -- but for the footnotes. The annoying citations make it apparent that the author desperately wants to be taken seriously on the global warming stuff. That would be perfectly fine in a Weekly Standard cover story. In a thriller, it's a little like having the author interrupt the story to insist that Dr. Evil actually has a death ray. Crichton's proof is itself laughably rigged. Kenner cites study after study but Drake, the scheming NERF leader, is allowed no evidence. ''Just trust me, it's happening,'' Drake says of global warming. ''Count on it.'' There are, of course, thousands of scientific studies that raise disturbing questions about climate change and the human role in its cause. To claim that it's a hoax is every novelist's right. To criticize the assumptions and research gaps in global warming theory is any scientist's prerogative. Citing real studies to support the idea of a hoax is ludicrous.
In case anybody misses his point, Crichton tacks a bibliography and two ''author's message'' essays to the end of the book. In these the author compares global warming to the early 20th-century belief in the ridiculous theory of eugenics, and treats us to a bullet-point presentation of his thoughts about science and the environment. One of those thoughts bemoans the lack of ''rational'' and ''systematic'' research on wilderness preservation. For this sorry state of affairs, he writes, ''I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners.'' Crichton thus leads his readers to one of two possible conclusions: one, there exists a world yet unrevealed in which strip miners wrestle with the issue of proper wilderness management; or two, this fellow has completely lost all sense of perspective. The evidence in ''State of Fear'' forces this reader to embrace the latter.
Bruce Barcott is a contributing editor for Outside magazine.
Par for the course for the NY Times. For a silly book pushing the anti-American global warming mantra of fear, Ross Gelbspan's "Boiling Point", they had fellow traveler and environmental extremist Al Gore write the puffball review. For a book that challenges the conventional global warming "wisdom", they chose another greenie. Sounds balanced and objective to me...
I wish I could write as "bad" as Michael Crichton, who was laughing his way to the bank before many of us could walk.
Follows naturally because liberalism is a mental disorder.
BWAAAHHHAAAA!
Check this out-I did a random google of this guy Barcott, and I got this on the first hit:
"Having long flouted the new-source review law, many of the nation's biggest power companies were facing, in the last months of the 1990's, an expensive day of reckoning. E.P.A. investigators had caught them breaking the law. To make amends, the power companies were on the verge of signing agreements to clean up their plants, which would have delivered one of the greatest advances in clean air in the nation's history. Then George W. Bush took office, and everything changed."
LOL! Sorry, I think Ann Coulter is much more intellectually honest than this POS who writes for the New York Times. But, there was no surprise there, was there?
I liked the movie The Andromeda Strain and that was more than 30 years ago now.
And don't forget the ka-ching, ka-ching of ER. Isn't he the creator and producer of it?
LOL, the lamestream media has a problem with fiction that contains grains of truth.
However, they have no such problem with non-fiction documentaries like Michael Moore's that are complete fabrications.
They really do exist in a Bizarro World
It is amazing how timely the book is, tsunami, giant iceberg as such. And of course, the latest dire claim that the Earth will heat up 11 deg C.
Current events play right into his novel's theme.
On the other hand, the 'Authors Message' at the end of the book somewhat tempers the novel's message.
( do hypersonic cavitation generators actually exist?)
Great read.....Read this book!!!!
then give copies away to all your fence stradling middle of the road friends who actually believe the global warming myth.
In the screenplay version, Crichton should work in the Tsunami of 2004.
I highly recommend anyone with the book be sure to read Appendix I ( "Why Politicized Science is Dangerous") as a prologue to reading the novel. His presentation of the rise and fall of eugenics is excellent.
FMCDH(BITS)
" I wish I could write as "bad" as Michael Crichton, who was laughing his way to the bank before many of us could walk."
Here here! THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, TERMINAL MAN, and TIMELINE are some of my favorites. The science is supportable, the storys keep one engaged, and Chriton's characteristic layering and stacking of the plotlines is very exciting.
Top sends
I totally agree!! He is one of my all time favorite writers!
His books are not great literature I'll agree, but they are very enjoyable and the fact that he always injects medical science, scientific theories and ideas, etc that are well documented into his books make them that much more engaging in my opinion.
I also loved Coma, Shere, Congo, and Eaters of the Dead(made into a movie called The 13th Warrior).
Many of the movies made from his books are trash but their are a notable few that I really enjoyed.
Btw, did anyone see Westworld with Yul Brynner from 1973? Yup, that was Michael Crichton too! :o)
It's pretty obvious that Mr. Barcott's religion has been insulted by Dr. Crichton's novel. I thought it was, like all Crichton novels, a great read.
The book is a fun read, although a bit preachy to the choir if you've already joined the "Global warming is a hoax to raise money" crowd. Crichton's mainstream audience however, may be quite shaken by this read. About time, they reviewed it...it's climbing up on the fiction charts as we all type.
Barcott has led a mucfh too sheltered life. Any SciFi fan knows that many novels have footnotes. Who wants to explain complex scientific theories or principles as part of the text of the story? It's call literature.
Sadly, we have all had such dreams.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.