(My rating's a 3.5/5, or 7/10.)
My response to Michael Crichton's best-known work was surprising: I was highly entertained. Despite its contentious science, half-formed characters and overly long sequences, Jurassic Park is a good read. The set-up is long yet interesting, as Crichton speculates about the details of bringing dinosaurs back to life, along with the tightly considered aspects of creating and running a dinosaur amusement park. Indeed the set-up is the stronger portion of the novel, since the latter half is burdened by the overly long chase and attack sequences, and the over-written, often annoying rantings of mathematician Ian Malcolm.
Malcolm comes across as Crichton in disguise. A raving chaos theorist, he is the antithesis to Jurassic Park's creator and mad corporate man, John Hammond (perhaps the first mad scientist who isn't actually a scientist at all, though corporatism is a form of modern science). Both characters are portrayed as narrow-minded in their obsessive world views (Malcolm unintentionally), though we see that Crichton's sympathies lie with the mathematician if only because his long-winded rants remain unchallenged by other characters, aside from Hammond's "I don't know what you're talking about."
What Malcolm and Crichton are talking about is the notion of responsibility.
For my full review, please visit Casual Debris.
My response to Michael Crichton's best-known work was surprising: I was highly entertained. Despite its contentious science, half-formed characters and overly long sequences, Jurassic Park is a good read. The set-up is long yet interesting, as Crichton speculates about the details of bringing dinosaurs back to life, along with the tightly considered aspects of creating and running a dinosaur amusement park. Indeed the set-up is the stronger portion of the novel, since the latter half is burdened by the overly long chase and attack sequences, and the over-written, often annoying rantings of mathematician Ian Malcolm.
Malcolm comes across as Crichton in disguise. A raving chaos theorist, he is the antithesis to Jurassic Park's creator and mad corporate man, John Hammond (perhaps the first mad scientist who isn't actually a scientist at all, though corporatism is a form of modern science). Both characters are portrayed as narrow-minded in their obsessive world views (Malcolm unintentionally), though we see that Crichton's sympathies lie with the mathematician if only because his long-winded rants remain unchallenged by other characters, aside from Hammond's "I don't know what you're talking about."
What Malcolm and Crichton are talking about is the notion of responsibility.
For my full review, please visit Casual Debris.
