We are here to review the book Jurassic Park
Paleontologist Alan Grant is whisked away with his assistant Ellie by a mysterious billionaire John Hammond to consult on a project in their area of expertise dinosaurs. Hammond and his company have used the latest techniques to pull dinosaur DNA out of amber and grow dinosaurs from eggs. The idea is to have the dinosaurs in a theme park that is scheduled to open soon. Also invited is a lawyer from the investment group and a mathematician/chaos specialist Ian Malcolm. Malcolm feels that the laws of chaos predict that the park will experience disaster. Hammond believes that there are enough precautions (cages, electrified fences, computer controlled zoo and only female dinosaurs) to prevent any problems from happening.
Grant and Ellie are amazed by being able to see real dinosaurs up close. And Hammond is so confident that he invited his grand kids over as well. A huge thunderstorm happens at the same time that the computer contractor decides to cut alarms so he can do some industrial espionage. The combination starts the chaos is motion and the caged in dinosaurs start becoming uncaged and Ian Malcolm starts explaining why this disaster had to happen.
Crichton does two cool things here. The first is to show how it might be possible to recreate extinct animals and the second is to show how chaotic nature is. The science behind the extinct animals is (mostly) real, but also pretty much impossible. The possibility of retrieving some of the DNA is possible, but the possibility of recreating the exact DNA (or enough to make a realistic dinosaur) is very slim. But the techniques could possibly be used for other animals.
The chaos of nature is the real star of the book. Ian Malcolm gives many lectures (and since he is injured early on, he has plenty of time to lecture) about how complex systems are…well complex. And in complex situations, it is almost impossible to account for every scenario. In the book, the big issues are the industrial espionage, but that is just the tipping point. Once that sets everything in motion, they start finding every other hole that exists but hadn’t been seen before. The all female dinosaurs (to prevent mating) had enough frog DNA to change gender and babies were created. Bad decisions on the computer monitoring made finding the issues difficult. The decision to have only computer control of the park also made it a lot more difficult to restore the park. The basic idea of the chaos theory ties into the complexity and makes a problem a lot more likely.
This is arguably Crichton’s best book and his most well known (due to the movie) for a good reason. The mixture of dinosaurs, genetics and chaos theory create a powerful mixture and Crichton is a a master at creating suspense and explaining enough of the science to make sure the reader understands what is happening and why.