jstlawrence's Full Review: Michael Crichton - State of Fear
I just read Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear, because I've enjoyed some of his other work, most recently "Prey." Well, okay, "Prey" wasn't that good, but it passed the time.
Little did I suspect, however, that this book was not a novel at all, but rather an excruciatingly tedious, grinding, self-congratulatory diatribe against global warming and environmentalism in general, forced into a poorly-cobbled together plot that glibly generalizes environmentalists as either greedy lawyers, fatuous rich celebrities, or murderous hippies.
The whole point of "State of Fear" is to set up one-sided conversations with Crichton's MIT scientist / super-spy character, who always has charts handy showing that someplace or another has gotten colder, instead of warmer, to the surprise / disgust of other hopelessly outclassed characters who "believe the myth" of global warming and environmentalism in general.
Crichton's character, among other windy speeches, also suggests that "Old-growth forests suck" and that glaciers are growing. He repetitiously sets this "hero" up against fatuous, one-dimensional characters like a handsome, conceited actor who "once played the President on television" (hmmm) and a homicidal lawyer who explains that environmental groups are all just "law firms," who simply want to scare people into giving them money. He decides that blowing up Antarctica and causing a tsunami to destroy Los Angeles is the best way to go about this. Seriously. It's a horrible read.
Crichton does have a few valid points to make about scientific uncertainty and the need to avoid doomsday hysteria, which he makes well in his Author's Note, but his thesis that because we don't know *everything* about what influences the environment, we should just not worry about it at all is just silly, particularly coming from Crichton, himself a scientist trained in medicine, who should know that science must always work with incomplete data and an imperfect ability to predict results.
The science Crichton references in the book, while interesting to note, is used disingenuously, to mislead instead of inform. Those charts and graphs the intellectual super-spy character tosses around with such airy certainty in the story have been roundly excoriated by actual climate scientists, including those whose work Crichton cites (yes, there are copious footnotes and a bibliography) who also apparently don't agree with his assertion that scientists are merely the paid stooges of the powerful "political legal media complex."
Crichton apparently cherry-picked and re-interpreted data (most glaciers ARE receding, except the ones he mentioned in Scandanavia, which is still recovering from an Ice Age, he ignores ocean temperatures, predictions he said were off by 400% were far more accurate, etc.).
The book also goes far beyond critiquing environmentalism, and has the insipid strawman not-quite-Martin-Sheen character adopt all kinds of additional lame points of view to be pounced upon, like imagining that pre-industrial societies were all ideal uptopias of gentle primitives. He is, of course, eaten by cannibals.
The book is insultingly pedantic, whether the reader agrees with Crichton's ham-handed political yammering or not, and insulting again in its half-hearted attempt to even tell a story, which is so infantalized, tortured, and stretched in order to accomodate Crichton's bad-faith soapboxing as to be nearly nonexistent.
What's more, Crichton is guilty of exactly what he accuses environmentalists, scientists, and the media of doing -- he's essentially selling fear himself by describing a laughably unlikely worldwide conspiracy which is so downright silly as to defeat its own argument.
Things are no better viewing the book purely as a novel, for largely the same reasons. The plot is a tepid chase routine told in ragged gasps between supercilious rants from the "expert," and the characterizations consist mainly of silly one-dimensional depictions of the various environmental bad guy / idiots.
It's REALLY not a good story. Assuming any reader could trudge through all the ham-handed political bombast, what you have here is a ridiculous plot amounting to nothing but a 20-minute chase sequence of unlikely villians by an unlikely hero, with ludicrous results, padded to the point of hair-pulling insanity with Crichton's exhausting, factually disingenous tirades on every environmental issue from DDT to deforestation -- "Old growth forests suck?" "Banning DDT has killed more people than Hitler?" Really? This is not dialogue in an "action / adventure" saga; it's a slavering, venom-filled screed lightly leavened with an anonymous short story a poodle could write.
Crichton and his publisher are frankly guilty of consumer fraud in even purveying this pile of nonsense as a "novel" at all. If he wanted to write a poorly-researched, politically motivated diatribe, Crichton should have called it that and titled it "Crichton's Lament," instead of hawking it as entertainment.
State of Fear is, ironically, a book decrying intellectual dishonesty in an intellectually dishonest way.
One star.
Update: I came across this book again recently when painting. I considered donating it to a Veteran's group, but then thought that it would be cruel to allow someone else to be fooled into thinking that "State of Fear" might actually be a novel. Click-swish-clunk it went -- perhaps it will actually do the environment some good in its new role as landfill.
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