"the more speculative genres"

(via Information Is Beautiful)

All of the front matter in State of Fear is extremely loaded, but the excerpt from the Wall Street Journal review struck me. It called State of Fear, “The Da Vinci Code with real facts, violent storms, and a different kind of faith altogether. . . . Every bit as informative as it is entertaining.” Over 300 pages into State of Fear, I only remember seeing those promised footnotes (according to the disclaimer, the only parts of State of Fear that are accurate and not fiction) maybe three times. That’s, what, 1% fact? How is this “informative”? This is a work of fiction with no more reference to contemporary fact than Twilight (though, I’ll bite, it’s a little better written).

This leads me to genre conventions. In Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, our lovingly geeky protagonist, Oscar, repeatedly refers to science fiction as “the more speculative genres”—and that is what I like about science fiction, the little I have read. The ideas it presents to me are often far-reaching, philosophical fears and beliefs. Aside from that, very generally, science fiction is defined by “WHAT IF” with its factual basis revolving mostly around allegory—around history’s tendency to repeat itself thanks to humanity’s continuing flaws.

I don’t get the same feeling from Crichton (in this specific novel) as I do from other science fiction writers. Crichton isn’t alone in having his beliefs shape his writing—H.G. Wells filled his work with socialism, Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming Saga is patterned on The Book of Mormon, etc. The thing that sets Crichton apart from these writers (well, one thing) is that his work takes place in the present and is “grounded in fact.” This book got President George W. Bush to call Crichton to the White House to discuss how they agree on every point. I somehow don’t think Bush would have read Ender’s Game and got started on training children to kill the insect aliens threatening Earth. Disclaimer aside, State of Fear sells itself as embellished truth for the general public. And it works.

Pages 305-311 reframe the climatology paradigm, essentially stating that climate-prediction is driven by grants from people who want to hear that carbon dioxide emissions are harming the planet and won’t hear otherwise. Kenner—a Crichton Gary Stu if I ever saw one (though I’ve heard Peter Evans is supposed to fill this role)—states that despite the earth warming, the margin of error in prediction is so great that we best not listen to climatologists—or indeed scientists—ever. While it does highlight the shakiness of climate-prediction, it can’t refute past climate trends nor can it refute that global temperatures are rising. The fact that Evans buys it blows my mind. Just pages before this Kenner was disproving the conviction that climatology studies funded by coal companies are going to deny global warming. And if climatology is whack, are we really supposed to believe in Kenner’s cooling trends? Who the hell do we trust? And why does an educated lawyer like Evans fail to see that the polemic’s pieces won’t fit together?

I guess that’s another failing on Crichton’s part, and one that permeates all his work—his characters are just there to add dialogue and keep the story moving. I feel no attachment to anyone mentioned thus far. I was vaguely charmed by George Morton, but mostly because I equated him with Ludo Bagman, a character from a children’s series with more depth than this slop. When it looked like Evans was done for, I didn’t care. When it turned out he was alive, I didn’t care. When both Sarah and Evans were freezing to death, I didn’t care.

Poor Michael Crichton. The literary community spurns him for his writing failures and scientists and diplomats fought to keep him away from testifying about scientific facts due to his status as a science fiction writer (disregarding his BS in anthropological biology and his MD from Harvard). It’s like the story of Romantic poet, John Keats. Except that John Keats was actually quite the lyricist and the only reason no one appreciated him was because he was working class. So, in a couple years, maybe Michael Crichton will be taken seriously by scientific and literary authorities. Maybe.