Re: The death and destruction is not our fault. I repeat, it's not our fault.
Are you sure? Check again:
Underwater Explosions
Nuclear testing by the United States in the Marshall Islands in the 1940s and 1950s generated tsunami.
tulane.edu
BTW, the threat of man-made tsunamis triggered by underwater explosions is featured in Michael Crichton's latest novel. Crichton, however, is too politically correct to smear the US government or military --his storyline casts the eco-terrorist underground as the villain....
I've just finished reading State of Fear and, although I don't think it's Crichton's best (Jurassic Park and its sequel Lost World rank #1, imo), it's certainly Crichton's timeliest novel so far:
A tsunami of silliness
(Filed: 19/12/2004)
Sam Leith reviews State of Fear by Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton writes thrillers that are like Hollywood movies, full of jump-cuts, far-flung locations, expensive stunts and cool gadgets. Sensible, really, since the ridiculously wealthy fellow gazing handsomely at you from the dust-jacket knows that anything he sets down on paper will be a Hollywood movie faster than you can stab his image with a pair of compasses.
His new novel, State of Fear, has environmental catastrophe as its theme. With The Day After Tomorrow - the film where global warming caused a glacier to eat New York - still fresh in the public mind, it's a theme of the moment. State of Fear is set the day before tomorrow, and Crichton puts a provocative and enjoyable twist on it: here, it's the anti-global-warming brigade who are the baddies.
The premise is that an enormous industry of lawyers and fundraisers and lobbyists has grown rich by playing on public fears about environmental catastrophe, and rubbishing the more sober findings of peer-reviewed scientists. The media is encouraged to treat what is contentious (global warming, the value of Kyoto, and so on) as axiomatic, and everyone cashes in.
Now a sinister environmental charity, in league with a network of eco-terrorists, seeks to really scare up public support by orchestrating a series of man-made catastrophes. All that stands between them and success is John Kenner: secret agent, Olympic quality skier, special forces soldier, supergenius, and a man with top-of-the-head recall of the contents of every academic paper on climate change published anywhere, ever. His reluctant sidekick, and our hero, is a dim and wimpy lawyer called Evans.
The story, of course, is dazzlingly silly: there are masked assassins wielding tiny octopuses; senior government agents who invariably decide that, rather than call in a SWAT team, they'll rush the heavily armed bad guys themselves with the help of a couple of civilians; crocodiles; cannibals; lightning bolts chasing pedestrians; eccentric millionaire philanthropists; dastardly Bond-villain plots to cleave glaciers and launch tidal waves. It is, for anyone who cares not a fig for logic or proportion or coherence - and, if you do, why on earth are you reading a Michael Crichton novel - terrific fun.
The pages whip by. Our heroes zip from exotic location to exotic location in a dead billionaire's private jet, thwarting evil in the nick of time. Practically none of the main characters is allowed to cheat death - in a crevasse, on the brink of a waterfall, in a lightning-chamber and so on - less than twice. Crichton's is a world where men are men, and are called by their second names. Women are women - attractive, feisty, incidental to the plot, and always referred to by their first names, bless their pretty little heads.
Some find Crichton's writing objectionable. I don't. It's a bit windy, but it doesn't draw attention to itself and does exactly what you want the prose in a thriller to do: be bombastic and advance the plot. Crichton's love of technical detail produces a whole host of clunky expository sentences such as: "The geoid is the equipotential surface of the earth's gravitational field that approximates the mean sea surface", but these are more endearing than otherwise. Elsewhere you find the traditional one-sentence paragraphs: "The world was not how you wanted it to be./ The world was how it was./ There were bad people in the world. They had to be stopped." (That's poor old Evans, having an epiphany.)
What's curious about this book - and what occasionally hobbles it - is Crichton's determination to write not just a thriller but a thesis novel. He has spent three years researching it, we read in one of his appendices (appendices!), and he includes a 20-page bibliography (bibliography!). The plot may be fantasy, he insists, but the science in the footnotes (footnotes!) is true. Several long conversations, then, are only there to allow Crichton's proxy, the omniscient Kenner, to make some global-warming true believer look stupid by citing a stream of statistics. I can't vouch for or against the science, but these conversations are pretty tendentious: Kenner talks like a philosopher king and his opponents are always given lines of such unselfconscious dimness that the result is not so much Socratic dialogue as turkey shoot.
Nevertheless, the facts and figures Crichton brings up are, however ill-digested artistically, in themselves interesting enough to justify their presence. And a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. By yoking his environmental hobby-horse to a 1970s-style blockbuster thriller, I dare say Michael Crichton will do more to popularise contrarian views of ecology than Bjørn Lomborg, as a proper scientist, could ever manage.
telegraph.co.uk |
