422 pages
Published 1995
Read from June 21 to June 22
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
* Denotes a reread.
Oh boy. This book is not good.
Crichton was never a good author. Jurassic Park was competent enough as an airport thriller with sci-fi flavor, but that’s where his career peaked. The Lost World was a mercenary cash-grab, cranked out mostly for the movie rights. It was manufactured with such haste that I hypothesize you can find traces of an earlier draft, hewing closer to the original Lost World of Arthur Conan Doyle, lingering where Crichton never bothered to edit them out. (That's just my speculation, though, based on a mere handful of lines.)
Even the movie it led to barely used any characters or set-pieces from the novel. The concept of a second InGen island; the outline of a rescue mission; bringing the injured baby rex back to the trailer (and its aftermath); a fragment of the motorcycle-in-a-dino-herd scene — that’s about it. Julianne Moore’s Dr. Harding shares nothing more than a name with the body-building ethologist of the book; most of the film’s other characters are David Koepp’s wholesale inventions, possibly because most of Crichton’s are either assholes or cardboard cutouts brought along to round out the body count (or both). Hell, the movie’s T. rex at the waterfall scene gets recycled from the original Jurassic Park novel, not this one. The book is so bad that even Universal Studios scrapped everything else. (Though I must admit that The Lost World: Jurassic Park isn’t that good of a film, either.)
The unnecessary “educates you while you read” aspect of Jurassic Park feels especially half-baked here, with vague ruminations on extinction, chaos theory, self-organizing behaviors, and then-fashionable prions building up to new author-mouthpiece Thorne declaring that science is just bullshitting you about anything you can’t directly verify with your senses, and by the way, humans won’t destroy the natural world, so don’t worry about it! (Get it? He’s a “Thorne” in the side of scientific orthodoxy? Yeah, that’s the level of genius we’re dealing with here.)
Making his mouthpiece an engineer and startup capitalist (who was beloved by his old engineering students and also is like totally strong, you guys) instead of a mathematician shows the trajectory of Crichton’s evolution into the tool who would publish State of Fear just a few years later. The fact that Koepp and Spielberg filled Thorne's narrative role with a balding, mumbly man whose gun gets caught in a net before he gets double-crunched by rexes pleases me.
What did I like about this book? Obviously I have a ton of tweenage nostalgia surrounding it, which is reason enough to reread it, I think. This was the first book I wanted so desperately that I whined and whined until my abusive, narcissistic father (at a time when he and I were living in a car together) broke down and bought me the hardback before the soft-cover could even come out. I remember studying the lovely map as a tween, filling it with my own fanfic plans: here's where a school trip’s chartered airplane could crash-land, here's where a safe hideout could be, and of course my survivors would take advantage of the bungalows... Actually, I'm pretty sure that I came up with better JP sequels at 12 than this one turned out to be.
Anyway. The aforementioned motorcycle chase remains a favorite set-piece, one I wish the later JP movies had incorporated in full. Diego and Levine's initial exploration of Isla Sorna, brief as it is, inspired many of the time travel stories I would write in my teens. The details of the field lab and RV led to countless designs I sketched out for yet more stories. The general vibe of an island full of free-range dinosaurs (and the occasional dino washing up, dead or alive, on the mainland) was one all the movie sequels failed to capture.
But honestly, there isn't much else worth salvaging from this book. As Universal could have told you.
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