Book Review: Jurassic Park
Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park is almost an underrated book. This might sound like a weird thing to say. Jurassic park is very famous. So how is it underrated? The answer is simple. The movie overshadows the book. Jurassic Park is famous as a movie more than a novel. And we associate Spielberg with it more than Crichton. Spielberg is famous for directing the movie. Crichton has almost been forgotten. So the book, which is very good, deserves a treatment of its own. Let’s get into it. First, I will tackle the characters. Then, I’ll take a look at the underlying ideas. Then, I’ll look at some of the flaws. Finally, we’ll have a wrap-up.
First, the characters. The main character, Dr. Alan Grant, is very compelling. He’s likeable. He remarks that he likes children because they have one thing in common: a love of dinosaurs. He’s unpretentious. He’s an academic, but not like other academics. He likes to dress casually and be down to Earth. And he enjoys getting his hands dirty. He’s not fond of computers. Remember that this was written back in the 90s when familiarity with computers was not taken for granted. We also have Ian Malcolm, who is egotistical and over-the-top but still likeable in his eccentricity. And we have Hammond, the owner of Jurassic Park, who is childish and petty.
The underlying idea of the book is chaos theory. The idea is that human reasoning can’t understand nature. The real world is too complex for our basic linear thinking to comprehend it fully. So our plans will always become messed up because we don’t appreciate complexity. The real world is always a step ahead of us. We might think we have it all figured out. But we don’t, and that will come back to bite us every time.
The big flaw in the book is how dated it is. I talked about the 90s feel of it earlier. The other part is the use of computers. Some parts are not very believable. There is a part where a pair of young children hack into a computer. This would have been believable in the 90s, when few people understood computers. Thirty years later, it’s not believable. We’re all familiar with computers now. And we all know they don’t work that way. But in the 90s, the average adult could almost believe that kids, who always seem to know how to use computers, might be able to do such a thing. So the book is a little dated in the final analysis.
Finally, to wrap it all up, I think that this is a book very much worth reading. It’s not as good as some of Crichton’s other books. Books like Sphere are more well-written and examine the limits of human reasoning more closely. And Crichton raises more challenging ideas in his other books. But Jurassic Park is still a great novel that raises some fascinating problems. There is a reason that people still wear Jurassic Park t shirts.
