State of Fear: Greetings From the New Flat Earth

I just finished Michael Crichton's book State of Fear (SoF). It's not well-written, but then Crichton has always been more about plot than character development. Most of his novels read like movie treatments: It's his way of making money from them twice. The characters in SoF are thin, but vaguely more appealing than the characters in say, Prey. (The contagonist in that was replicated from nano-bots.)

But SoF is irresponsible at best and opportunistic at worst. Global warming has been politicized, but so have any number of other more significant topics. My theory is that he started to research global warming and found it confusing. Then The Day After Tomorrow came out, he lost his head start and decided to write for the other side. [After all, Mel Gibson was able to buy his own island after The Passion of Christ.] Crichton is now out on speaking tours for the right-wing. Rush Limbaugh, Fox and other conservatives are using his book to bolster Bush's refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Crichton says he's prepared to be a martyr for this book, but it looks like he's planning to be a rich one. Cui bono?

A New York Times article "Michael Crichton? He's Just the Author" talks about Jane Friedman, the chief executive of HarperCollins, who invented the author tour.

One of the biggest contributors to its profitability in the last two years has been "The Purpose-Driven Life," the religious best seller by Rick Warren that has sold 22 million copies around the world. Even a new book by Mr. Crichton cannot top that, and the question of how much more growth the company can get from "The Purpose-Driven Life" looms large in its future.

HarperCollins is starting to market books through direct-to-consumer marketing -- and they already have this huge right-wing internet group from The Purpose-Driven Life and its spin-offs.

So now we'll be debunking SoF. (There are so many Americans who believe that works of fiction need to be refuted: Look at all the books debunking the DaVinci Code: I count 5 on Amazon. Hello. That was a novel, which is a work of fiction.) Here are some sites debunking the basis of SoF Greenhouse, and Real Climate.

And then in the book Crichton links the solid environmental groups with radical environmental groups. Sigh.

The plot line itself: First he sets up his protagonist as a straw man and proceeds to lecture him and convince him through the book that global warming is not real. Doh. I guess we're supposed to be that guy, huh? Then the female interest is given up for dead about four times. She's one tough lady. Her character development is entirely physical: dying, reviving, dying... The environmental disastors are the made-for-Hollywood parts. Towards the end of the book the good guys are captured by cannibals and one of the party is eaten. That was over the top for me. Come to think of it, it was the actor, the shallow representative from Hollywood, who got eaten alive. Maybe Crichton was feeling angry about the acting in his Timeline movie. Timeline was a pretty good book -- again an obvious a movie treatment -- but close enough to science fiction that it could have been a good movie.