Published in 1990, this book launches an entertainment franchise with the 1994 theatrical release of the blockbuster movie. The characters and plot are faithful to the source material. The book is broken down into seven sections, listed as ‘Iterations’. This first iteration, and I include both the introduction and the prologue, consists of 31 of the books 458 pages (~7%).

None of the major characters made famous in the film are introduced. We don’t see the island. Instead we learn that small dinosaurs have escaped the island and attacked a young girl, that other attacks have occurred, that people are trying – and failing – to identify the source of these attacks. Crichton has made a mundane, approachable – because it is small – dinosaur real and made it a threat. He hasn’t hit the reader in the head with a tyrannosaurus in the first scene, nor has he unleashed a pack of velociraptors into a major American city. He’s making the animals real by establishing the wild world of biotechnology and by showing how a company could come to exist that could create such animals. He’s creating realistic dinosaurs with his writing of their smell, their behavior, and referencing animals that the readers know are real.

If the threat is real, then the reader’s tension will be real. If the reader knows that the risk of Jurassic Park is real, and that the characters are walking into a trap, then they will build their own tension as they anticipate the characters learning the truth of the world that they’re already in.

Introduction (link)

The introduction is written almost as an epistle titled, “The InGen Incident” and closes by referencing ‘two days in 1989’. It is a lawyerly short story summary of what the reader is about to experience through the eyes of the participants in those fateful two days on the island that is Jurassic Park. Crichton uses similar methods in other books to pull the reader in and provide context. This method also adds a layer of realism to the encounter – it acts as a primer to introduce the reader to what they’re about to experience. It’s like the set up experienced while walking through a line at a theme park; we are brought into the world, shown artefacts, and may hear or see glimpses of the main characters.

Prologue: The Bite of the Raptor (link)

We’re thrust straight into the world in which Jurassic Park is under construction and a construction worker is attacked by a dinosaur, a raptor. He is flown to a hospital where he dies from his wounds.

Crichton establishes several major rules for the book right away;

• The dinosaurs are dangerous and not controlled.
• The island is remote – beyond the oversight of any kind of government, and too far away for anyone to readily get help.
• The corporate entity overseeing the dinosaurs will behave as any capitalist entity would be expected to behave. Deaths are sad, but don’t merit a full ‘safety stop’, and legal liability is important to minimize even if it requires theft of a camera to remove incriminating evidence.

These are important tenants for the ‘rules’ of the book. Crichton has established that biotech research is unsupervised and similar to the ‘wild west’ in the opening introduction. The dinosaur creators – Hammond and the InGen investors will also exhibit systemic overconfidence in their ability to control nature. Here we see a man die, fearing for his life and calling out monsters. The physicians around him have to go along with the corporate lie of a ‘construction accident’, even as they see that it is false.

Chapter 1: Almost Paradise (Pages 9 – 14)

Jurassic Park wasn’t the success it is because it was the first book to discuss dinosaurs – it was a hit because Crichton made the dinosaurs real and personal. Here we encounter the Bowman’s – a typical couple on vacation with their daughter, complete with travel tension, budget issues, and a hesitancy to ask for directions. And then their daughter is attacked by mysterious ‘lizards’ – which the reader knows are escaped dinosaurs.

The ‘escaped’ nature of the dinosaurs also starts a countdown clock which will be used later in the book as a mechanism to create urgency. The audience knows that somewhat benign dinosaurs escape from Jurassic Park, so this allows real concern that more dangerous and deadly dinosaurs – such as the raptors that killed the park worker in the prologue – must be kept from escaping. Crichton ups the stakes at every point in the book – he injures a child and uses it to show that much worse, much deadlier injuries are also possible should more dinosaurs escape.

Chapter 2: Puntarenas (Pages 16 – 21)

Crichton jams the second chapter with emotion and fear. The Bowmans have rushed their injured daughter to their hospital. They are simultaneously believing her story that she is attacked by lizards, and she is not being believed about the number of toes that the lizards have. If it is three toes – dinosaur, four toes – lizard. The physicians now frame the problem incorrectly – they can’t imagine what could attack her, so they assume that it wasn’t an attack. Rather than wonder what could create such an injury and leave open a sense of wonder, they force uncertainty from their minds.

As they remove a willingness to explore uncertainty their analytical capabilities are decreased. The reader is in suspense because we know the answer is “Dinosaurs!” and yet at every moment where the analytical tool kit imagined by Crichton in 1990 is not allowed to be used in a creative manner which could help them recognize that they’re dealing with biotech built reptilian Frankenstein.

Chapter 3: The Beach (Pages 22 – 24)

Crichton tells the reader that there are many similar bite incidents to the one experienced by the Bowman’s daughter. He describes the behavior of howler monkeys because by looking at the behavior of one unusual animal the reader becomes more open to the behavior of the truly exotic dinosaurs. Just as Crichton uses the TV Trope of ‘Famous, Famous, Fictional’ (TV Tropes Explanation) in the Introduction, he uses the same setup for introducing the dinosaurs; “Lizard/Bird, Exotic Animal, Biotech Dinosaur.”

Chapter 4: New York (Pages 25 – 28)

The chapter ends with Crichton really upping the stakes – we’ve now got a dead baby in a bassinet in Costa Rica from the same bites that sent the young Bowman to the hospital earlier. We’re also watching the tiered escalation of problem solving – the accident report and unknown toxicology arrives at the desk of a researcher in New York. Because he is not confronted with a clear visual of a dinosaur biting a baby, he can’t imagine what the possible source of the problem could be. His diagnostic tools let him get close to the problem, but it isn’t identified with the urgency that the reader knows is needed.

Crichton builds tension in a realistic fashion by showing how real systems would respond to a problem that the reader knows is real. The tension arises between a threat that the reader knows of, that the characters don’t yet recognize.

Chapter 5: The Shape of the Data (Pages 29 – 31)

Each of the seven ‘Iterations’ has a drawing of a fractal and a quote from Ian Malcolm – the iconic character played by Jeff Goldblum in the films – who isn’t even introduced until Chapter 7, and is only first mentioned in Chapter 6. This chapter title refers to the chaotic shape of the emerging data – and it does so by getting even more technical. We read of protein sequencing and witness again another near miss of ‘DINOSAURS!’ when a protein used in synthesis is overlooked as cross contamination. Crichton gives the reader the first satisfaction as one of the experts finally says, “it looks like a dinosaur to me.”