State of Fear, Michael Crichton’s latest, wraps a thriller around two related themes: global warming and the use of fear to maintain power.
Crichton paints global warming as a bogeyman, throwing statistics, charts and citations in the midst of his storytelling as if he were Al Gore’s evil twin. Crichton’s most compelling point about global warming is that we still do not know about weather trends, and what they mean. Since Crichton has achieved global success with films and movies, not just books, maybe we’ll see a visual counterpoint to An Inconvenient Truth in the future.
The second theme connects some large dots. Government needs to maintain a state of fear for the status quo in power relations to continue. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a character in the book says, the environment has become the cudgel with which politicians and policy-makers keep both the developed world and the rising development around the world under control. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to consider it so planned. Still, I do think that keeping everyone on edge all over the world, even while (by most measures) life improves for most people, becomes easier when we fear the future, and each other. If you fear the future (it’s unknown, after all), then you’ll listen willingly to efforts to “protect” what you have…even if it’s not so grand.
I haven’t focused much on the story. Neither does Crichton, really. It’s an excuse to make his points in a more palatable fashion. I suppose a spoonful of honey makes the medicine go down, after all.
The race is to stop an environmental group gone amok, preventing them from precipitating (sometimes literally) weather-related crises to coincide with media coverage. Our gun-toting, Nature-citating hero drags along the Los Angeles lawyer who has previous represented a large donor to environmental causes. They jet about from Antarctica to New Mexico to the Solomon Islands, and several other distributed points.
Oh, never mind. If you can get past the preaching, it’s an airplane book. I whipped through it this weekend and left it sitting in Logan Airport to save someone the expense of picking it up themselves. Not going on our overflowing shelves.