& 17 users
Type: fiction
Status: disliked
Author: Michael Crichton
Description: Whatever his protestations to the contrary, this book reads to me like a full-on attack onWhatever his protestations to the contrary, this book reads to me like a full-on attack on the very notion of climate change and is an even more hostile broadside against environmentalists. Crichton makes some good and valid points (for example, western societies today are fantastically safe, at least for the rich; excessive risk aversion is practically a disease; we understand properly remarkably little about our environment.) But his wildly unbalanced reading of the evidence on climate change and his gross caricatures of environmentalists seem to me to undermine his more serious points.
One particularly strange part of the book has Crichton attacking climate change as "just a theory"---about as bizarre an attack from someone supposedly championing science as is imaginable. I wonder if he would ridicule engineers for their reliance on mere "theories" of gravity, the laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics etc.---theories all.
Even as a work of pure fiction, I found this less than satisfying, but then for me the plot and caricature characters didn't really work. Maybe for someone more in tune with his views it would work better....
2005-10-10
