454 pages
Published 1990
Read June 1
Rating: 2 out of 5 (maybe 2.5 if I'm generous)
* Denotes a reread.
Last weekend, when I visited my partner W, we happened to catch fragments of the movie Jurassic Park on basic cable in our hotel room. For months now I’ve been wishing that there were more good Jurassic movies — only the original and maybe half of JPIII are worth watching. I’ve also been craving additional books in this setting. The Evolution of Claire was abysmal, but if Universal cranked out more books like it, I have to admit that I’d read them. Not proudly, but I would.
So I guess it’s time to revisit the originals.
I first read Jurassic Park in 1993. The buildup to the movie was one of the first pop marketing barrages I can remember — it reached even me, despite the fact that I slept in motels, spent my days in a car, didn’t go to school, and wouldn’t be able to see the film in full until I was 20. I was a 10 year old dinosaur fanatic when I read the book, though, and it became an obsession of mine: I read it something like thirty times before I turned 16, wearing out my mass market paperback to the point where the corners were rounded smooth and the cover was held together with tape. It was my favorite book all through my tweens and early teens, until Raptor Red and, later, Dinosaur Summer elbowed it aside. Even after that, Crichton’s clipped, mechanical prose affected (or afflicted) my own writing for an embarrassing length of time.
I last reread Jurassic Park in 2011. It doesn’t feel that long ago, but the world and I both have changed so much since then. How does the book hold up after all the personal growth and ideological refinement I’ve undergone since then?
Most pertinently, I’m aware now of Crichton’s general shittiness. He followed up Park with Rising Sun, his novel of Yellow Peril in the business world, and Disclosure, his fantasy of perfidious women accusing poor innocent men of sexual harassment in order to advance in the workplace. Years later, he was one of the first to popularize the myth that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by greedy scientists who frame the poor innocent petroleum industry; undaunted by humanity’s seeming inability to affect the climate, these scientists somehow build a machine to change the weather — a self-contradicting narrative that crops up to this day among the authoritarian / antisemitic Right. In that same novel, he caricatured a critic of his as a pedophile, another classic Right-wing tactic. Crichton did a lot to advance some of the worst takes you've ever seen.
In Jurassic Park, a holistically anti-science (and anti-scientist) attitude curdles through Ian Malcolm’s rants. Malcolm, Crichton's mouthpiece, blames scientists for most of the ills of the modern world, and even claims that becoming a scientist involves no period of training and discipline before attaining the "power" of science (ignoring that undergrad, grad school, and postdoc dues-paying are a thing, and also ignoring that scientists have no real power). As if that weren't absurd enough on its own, Crichton’s undisciplined and irresponsible scientists are directly contrasted with "becoming president of the company," which is somehow construed as a position that requires humble discipline and slow mastery, akin to becoming a "spiritual guru," instead of something won through nepotism and greed. This ideological throughline gets even worse by the time we reach The Lost World. We'll address it more when I read that book (or not). It's such bullshit.
Rereading Park now, one of my least favorite things about it was one of its big marketing points in the '90s: Crichton’s supposed attempts at science education. The introduction functions as a goddamn op-ed about the dangers of genetic technology. The digressions into chaos theory drag down the story; without Jeff Goldblum's charisma, Dr. Malcolm is just a conceited tool who happens to be the author's didactic mouthpiece. Explaining every step of the paleo-DNA reconstruction swamps us with outdated technobabble. Just get us to the dinosaurs already!
As a book, it’s fine, I guess? My teenage self would be horrified to hear this, but here in 2023, I think the movie version holds up better. The book is a solid example of its mediocre genre: a corporate espionage technothriller that takes too long to reach the thrills. Like most mass market books, it’s fiction with training wheels. The characters are thinner than newsprint and experience zero growth. One whole section is just a series of increasingly contrived incidents to ensure the folks in the control room don’t spot Grant and the kids through the cameras. It’s screwball comedy plotting, but they call it chaos theory.
There are plenty of memorable action sequences, though, and I think Isla Nublar shines as a central character in the book more so than it does in the movie. Plus, many of my childhood favorite scenes never made it into the film: Lex playing catch in the stegosaur meadow, the night walk to the shed, the raft ride, the raptor fight in the hatchery, the waterfall (though that one was reworked into the Lost World movie). Those were nice to revisit.
One last note: I had the misfortune of getting the Ballantine tall mass market paperback, 2012 edition. When the press redid the typesetting to fit the new dimensions, they added an astounding number of typos that weren’t present in the original mass market paperback in the early ’90s. (Presumably they scanned the older text into transcription software and just didn't care about how many letters were misread.) I know it’s all part of modern day capitalism, and to be expected, but goddamn, that’s some nonexistent quality control.
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