The first section, “First Iteration” is all set up, all creating tension and realism. Little dinosaurs have escaped and we follow a girl who is attacked. We see that there are global stakes to dinosaurs existing and being introduced to the world. We meet no major characters, all we learn about is how this fantastical situation could actually occur, how it could actually come to be real. Re-reading the book now, 35 years later with multiple movies now in the public consciousness, the narrative begins in earnest here in the second iteration.
“Second Iteration” brings us into the world in more detail, and serves as a transfer to the rest of the book. We exit this section 20% of the way through the book and will remain on the island until closing. One fifth of the text has been bringing the characters to the event and establishing that this is a real place with real consequences not just for the characters, but for the world. Crichton’s goals in this chapter appear to be:
- Create a sense of danger.
- Create a sense of feasibility of technical plausibility.
- Build the character list, the people through whom we will experience the plot.
- Build the list of risks.
- Get them to the set piece, the island.
Locations
- Grant’s paleontology dig site, where he is sponsored by Hammond.
- Corporate offices – those of law offices, competitors, etc.
- Travel to the island – plane, helicopter, etc.
Why Re-Evaluate Jurassic Park?
- Financial impact
- Popularization and capitalistic capture of ‘Dinosaurs’
- Warnings of technology use
- Warnings of danger in technology
- ‘Systems’ level evaluation of society
Crichton Writing Techniques
- World-building is big and up front.
- Risk-piling to create tension and pacing.
- Trope use – ‘Real, real, fake’ (link); ‘Avengers Assemble’; etc.
- Technical concept introduction; mass popularization.
- Personal consequences to scenarios with global importance.
- He reveals his method as he writes – “it wasn’t a real island” – and yet, the island is a real character with essential realistic characteristics that are vital to the plot. Isla Nublar must be plausible to be visited, and simultaneously remote to come into existence.
- Cast-building, character development – we’re meeting the characters early so that we know their motivations when we encounter them later in the book.
Paleontologist Alan Grant, his assistant Ellie Satler, and Jeff Goldblum’s iconic character Ian Malcolm all enter the scene. Malcolm is the source for the quotes on all of the ‘Iteration’ cover pages, and in chapter six he is referenced in the story for the first time – although we don’t yet meet him.
“The modern world was changing fast, and urgent questions about the weather, deforestation, global warming, or the ozone layer often seemed unanswerable, at least in part, with information from the past.”
Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Page 35
Chapter 6, the first chapter of Iteration 2 introduces us to the team, and now Crichton takes us into the plot. There are dinosaurs because of a shady company, InGen. InGen has a plan to launch a Jurassic Park to show people dinosaurs, and now we’re getting the main characters to the island. While the book is written 22 years before the 2012 release of Marvel’s The Avengers, Crichton is following the trope of, ‘Avengers Assemble’.
“I’ll tell you frankly, Dr. Grant, I’m having a little problem about this island.”
Dr. John Hammond in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Page 55
The book’s Introduction is a pseudo-epistle of a legal memo, Chapter 8 brings us back to the lawyer’s office where we hear counsel discuss their client, Ingen and their plans for Jurassic Park. Counsel will be sending an attendee along with the audit that is bringing Alan Grant and Ian Malcolm to the island.
A common author method is to introduce a major character, or major plot point, in a belittling, condescending way. Nedry brings down the park while attempting to steal dinosaur DNA in camouflaged shaving cream cannisters. His faulty designs are at the heart of the chaos that Ian Malcolm predicts will emerge from this effort. His designs are faulty because he’s the low bidder – because his requests for more funding are denied, Ingen drives him to sell their secrets.
Nedry – an obvious anagram for ‘N E R D Y’ – is obviously not a ‘just’ anything. He’s the lynchpin for Crichton’s warnings about technology and the heart of multiple plot mechanisms that lead to the horrors on Isla Nubar. However, neither Crichton nor the movie directors attempt to make him sympathetic – he’s simply a cog in the wheel of a machine, and the readers can immediately tell that this is the cog that will fail.
“Just a technical person: the computer system analyst [Nedry]. Review the park’s computers and fix some bugs.”
Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Page 58
Chapter 9 returns us to Alan Grant’s velociraptor excavation site where he is provided information about Isla Nubar that lacks any context or clarity. He imagines the velociraptor they excavate as a living organism, hunting in packs and deadly to all. Humorously, he explains that they are likely pack animals and wonders if they will be led by an alpha male. Ingen, we learn later, has engineered all of their animals to be female to control the population.
“The cover was marked: ISLA NUBLAR RESORT GUEST FACILITIES (FULL SET: SAFARI, LODGE).”
Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Page 59
This book is full of epistles, and this is a great example – it is referenced, but not part of the text. Also, Grant has no context for the document, it is simply a set of plans. How can Grant be any use auditing a site about which he knows nothing? It is also a lesson in human conceptualization and imagination – this idea is so foreign, how could anyone possibly imagine what InGen is doing, if one of their ‘trusted experts’ is himself totally unfamiliar with their plans?
How could anyone expect such activity to be safe, or to be vetted for ‘safety’ – if nobody outside of the set of people who profit from the idea – are even able to conceptualize what they’re attempting to do?
We’ve met Hammond three chapters earlier, and his surname will also serve as the title of Chapter 56 in the ‘7th Iteration’ towards the close of the book. Donald Gennaro, who works for InGen’s counsel, prepares to skip his daughter’s birthday party to join the emergency ‘safety audit’ of the park and is debriefed by John Hammond about what to expect. The chapter takes place in the InGen offices and on the flight to Choteau.
Crichton has an elaborate and thorough back story for InGen, the funds they’ve raised, the holes in their business plan, and the deceptive practices used to procure funding. Hammond uses a miniature elephant (a miniature dinosaur is used in a similar fashion as an homage to Crichton by Zebrowski in 1994’s The Killing Star) as a marketing tool. Crichton bombards the reader with specifics to make the story real from the get go. Behind every fact lies pages of documentation. Every turn of the car leads to a boulevard, we find no dead-ends, no cul-de-sacs.
The reader is still in the ‘team-building’ phase of the book, the trope we’re following is “Avengers Assemble.“
“Hammond also concealed from prospective investors the fact that the elephant’s behavior had changed substantially in the process of miniaturization.”
Crichton’s Jurassic Park Page 69
Investors assume that because it looks like an elephant, that it acts like an elephant, which Hammond doesn’t correct. Hammond allows a lie of omission – one of at least three that Crichton uses to show his slippery behavior. However, by changing the form of the beast, the animals temperament is also different.
Dr. Grant and Dr. Ellie Satler wait for John Hammond’s jet and then join him to travel to Costa Rica with a stop off in Dallas. Hammond claims the trip will be short and simple.
“Although many fields of science, such as physics and chemistry, had become federally funded, paleontology remained strongly dependent on private patrons. Quite apart from his own curiosity abou the island in Costa Rica, Grant understood that, if John Hammond asked for his help, he would give it. That was how patronage wroked – how it had alwasy worked.”
Crichton’s Jurassic Park Page 69
The reason this book is worth re-evaluating from a literature and societal impact is not because it is a successful movie franchise about dinosaurs – it is because it best exemplifies concerns about technology that are present in all of Crichton’s works. Crichton’s description of patronage, through the eyes of the character who becomes the franchise protagonist shows how aware he is of; (i) the corrupting influence of federal investment, and (ii) the quid pro quo that scientists know they must participate in in order to be successful.
Companies almost never call emergency board meetings – the game of business occurs between board meetings. Board meetings are the whistle at the end of the quarter, or to close out the game and move to the next phase of a season. We find a sketchy geneticist, Lewis Dodgson, who has hired Nedry – the mole inside Jurassic Park. Crichton uses competitive intelligence to tell us more about InGen, rather than continuing with exposition.
From the outset, the reader has thought, “who are these madmen at InGen pursuing such a reckless plan?”
Here, Crichton shows us that they are relatively moderate compared to their competitors down the road. In fact, in a world without Biosyn, we never get the pending shutdown of the island’s IT systems which leads to the catastrophic failure. Were it not for corporate shenanigans, perhaps we create a universe where the park is peaceful and dinosaurs become a slow, incremental part of an alternate reality.
“What they have done,” Dodgson said, “is build the greatest single tourist attraction in the history of the world. … And then there is the merchandising. [Italics are Crichton’s.] The picture books, T-shirts, video games, caps, stuffed toys, comic books, and pets.” –
Crichton’s Jurassic Park Page 77
If Crichton was genre-blind to what he was creating with this book, he certainly was able to see the future with this quote. The franchise has brought in over $7 billion across movies, merchandise, video games and more.
Biosyn, the corporate nemesis to InGen, hangs around for at least one more chapter. So much of the modern franchise depicts the ‘evils of InGen’ and follows derivative corporate greed with future movies talking about weaponizing dinosaurs, world-devouring-locusts, etc. – that the fact that the primary plot device created in the first Jurassic Park comes from one company paying another company’s employee to sabotage their primary asset.
If you’re in a competitive supply chain – even if you are acting rationally, it takes only one aggressive, evil, and/or dimwitted opponent to turn things upside down.
“Also, Dodgson said “we think the island maintains constant radio contact with InGen corporate headquarters in California, so –”
Dodgson to Nedry, Page 81 from Crichton’s Jurassic Park
Here, Crichton has created another reason for the big power outage that kicks off the movie franchise. When this is written about today, so much of the debate goes to ‘system failures’ and other problems – but really this all kicks off with corporate-to-corporate capitalistic greed.
We first meet Ian Malcolm – the character Jeff Goldblum would make famous – on page 33, where he is quoted as the bridge between chapters. Here we find an entire chapter in his name.
“Chaos theory originally grew out of attempts to make computer models of weather in the 1960s.”
Page 85 – Ian explains his field of mathematics to Gennaro from Crichton’s Jurassic Park
In this one chapter, Ian Malcolm introduces two topics common in modern society: Chaos Theory and The Butterfly Effect. This is a disaster movie flashing multiple points of failure in its opening chapters. Biosyn and Dodgson are bribing an IT employee. The animals are dangerous. Even if they weren’t, Malcolm’s mathematics serve as another oracle to tell the reader “Danger Ahead!”
In the same way Crichton creates tension by layering tension on top of tension – he creates his origin in Jurassic Park by layering origin on origin on origin. The dinosaurs are born from novel eggs, found from DNA in amber. The characters are assembled. And then we follow them to a ‘magic island‘ – Isla Nublar, which is now as popular a fantasy setting as Brigadoon and Narnia.
“Isla Nublar, Hammond explained, was not a true island.”
Page 88 – Crichton introduces his ‘real’ island by immediately stating that it isn’t real
The whole chapter sets the scene – beginning with a foggy entrance by helicopter and closing with our protagonists seeing the long neck of a sauropod emerge from a forest of palm trees. Isla Nublar is a magical place where humanity can invent dinosaurs. Crichton throws his best descriptions at the island as it makes the entire book possible.
The setting accomplishes many things:
- Closest enough to the US to be a tourist destination.
- Large natural mountains to serve as a ‘zoo’ and keep the animals in.
- Close enough to have world class technology, but far enough to be done in total secret.
“Welcome to Jurassic Park.”
Are we being welcomed to the island? To the park? To the book that we’re already over 90 pages in to? It’s all of it. Crichton has arguably taken an obvious book idea – dinosaurs alive today – and introduced it in a way to make it immensely readable, immensely stick to the reader. It all starts with the great name, used for the great idea – a theme park, and then he had the wisdom to put it on the book’s cover.
“He hoped to God the island was safe.”
Page 91, Gennaro thinks about money first, safety last
Is Gennaro the bad guy? Is the book a tale about the evils of science, the evils of sponsored R&D, or the evils of capitalism? Is it a warning about all of it? Yes, yes, and yes. The movies give us the spectacular vision of Gennaro (imdb) later abandoning the kids alone in a vehicle to be eaten by a Tyrannosaurus rex, only to be eaten by the same dinosaur while sitting on a toilet.
Isn’t this a warning about all activities? Shouldn’t safety, for all those involved, for all those who could be impacted – be considered first, not as an after thought?
Fred Lybrand 
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