Jurassic Park

I often love the premise of a technotrhiller but don't enjoy the actual story as much. However this one was a winner! Loved the plot and dinosaurs and having seen the movies first didn't ruin anything

"Who ever got a major computer system up and running on schedule? Nobody I know."

Arm chair grippingly exciting story that keeps you up way past your bed time as you eagerly read the next page and the next page to find out what is going to happen. Wow.

Dino-DNA

Science-at-the-brink-of-chaos fiction. Nonlinear dynamics had barely been invented, and yet here it was, gracing each chapter with a foreboding message of disintegration.

Not literature, not amazing prose, but a true edge-of-your-seat thriller.

Review to come

Five star idea, three star execution: four star overall rating.

I was traumatized by the movie as a child (I still have nightmares as a grown woman) and thought I'd try to recapture that terror as an adult by reading the book, which I'd been assured would still be worth a read. And it was... with some caveats.

The Good: The idea behind this story is absolutely fantastic, and the plotting is excellent. It's definitely a page-turner despite my remembering the basic shape of the plot (along with some of the iconic dinosaur shots). Crichton does an excellent job of integrating science into the fiction (including math, by the way, which was the most interesting addition to me—I would not have expected fractals and chaos theory to make appearances in a book about genetically engineered dinosaurs) without seeming either overly pretentious and hard to understand or dumbed-down and patronizing. The book definitely fleshes out the details more and does an excellent job building tension.

One thing I especially appreciate is that the characters are

smart: while they make mistakes, they don't behave like idiots for the sake of the plot. Hammond thinks there are enough safety measures in place, and even though he knows he's cutting corners he believes everything will be fine (his character flaw is hubris and greed, not straight-up idiocy). Nedry takes what he knows is a calculated risk because, like Hammond, he believes everything will be fine (again, driven by hubris and greed). Other characters are highly intelligent, but lack the extremely specific knowledge or tools they need to solve the problems they face and so are limited in their ability to respond. The park's primary safety measures fail, then the redundancies fail, but not for reasons that should have been obvious to the park's creators. (Now, they likely

would have become obvious if Hammond had hired a more robust staff and taken his time...but these weren't basic mistakes.) Some of the characters may have been criminally negligent, but they weren't bumbling fools.

The Bad: So. Many. Names. I could barely keep the characters straight, and was hanging on to their individual motivations by a thread. And personalities? Forget it. (Except for the little girl, whom Crichton has written as

the most annoying, dumb child in existence.) A character study this is not, which is a shame: I wish Crichton had picked just one or two (or, at this point, I would have settled for even three or four) point-of-view characters and had dug into them a little more. Usually, I prefer books to movies because of the greater insight I get into the character's inner lives and the deeper connection that's created by seeing the story through someone else's eyes: in this case, those people have the rich inner life of a cardboard cutout, so the book isn't much of an improvement over the (admittedly excellent, so this isn't that much of an insult) movie. I'm not sure if this is just a convention of the genre that I'm unfamiliar with or if it's just a Crichton thing, but I was disappointed on this front.

The Ugly: The blatant, unapologetic sexism leveled at Dr. Ellie Sattler by the male characters (who, I presume, we are supposed to like) was a little surprising and very disappointing. Why did that need to be included? The astute reader might also notice that Crichton refers to each male adult character by his last name...but to the children and "Ellie" by their first. (Is this the worst example of sexism in popular literature? Not by a long shot. But still: surprising and disappointing.)

Overall: The originality and intrigue of the premise and quick pace of the plot makes up for prose that's only passable and characters that are milquetoast at best and hard to keep straight. I don't plan on reading the sequel, but enjoyed this for what it was. Four stars, but barely.

"A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there.… And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day. […] You see, the fractal idea of sameness carries within it an aspect of recursion, a kind of doubling back on itself, which means that events are unpredictable. That they can change suddenly, and without warning [.…] But we have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us," Malcolm said, "that straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn’t a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way."

Action and verisimilitude

I did not expect that I would like this book so much. But I should have predicted it, since I've read one of Crichton's books before and I really liked his writing style. Even so, I am a bit surprised at how much interested I was in this story. I kind of knew what it was going to be about. I'm pretty sure I saw the movie at some point in my life, although I admit that I've never really been a fan and don't remember that much of it.

But one of the things that surprised me is that some of the iconic scenes from the movie that I thought were examples of good director’s work are taken straight from the book. They weren't just made for the movie. It just shows how good Crichton is at building tension and scenes that will be remembered for years.

The story is told from many perspectives in a specific Crichton style. The reader, who is able to put together a much more complete picture of the situation out of small details than the characters, knows much more than they do. In some book it annoys me when I have to wait for the characters to catch up with me, but Crichton can do it so well that I consider it only an example of great tension building.

There are quite a few characters with strong personalities in this book. We observe how their life views and personalities clash with each other in a difficult situation. There are also two children. Tim and his little sister Lex. It's been a long time since I read about such an annoying child character as Lex. Seriously, this spoiled brat was driving me crazy. She is so snooty and trying. It's cruel, but somewhere in the middle of the book, I sincerely hoped she would die. If she were an adult character, it probably would have happened. Luckily, that brat was the only character that really annoyed me. The rest, even if they weren't often positive characters, was okay.

This book proves that I should definitely read more of Crichton's books. I recommend this book to all who are looking for good entertainment. Crichton is doing a decent research as you can see in his books. Even if the plot is straight out of a science fiction, everything looks very believable and realistic.