I have read most of Michael Crichton’s novels. He was effective at presenting and developing
his story lines. His research was deep
and thorough, and his ability to develop plots centered on scientific and
technical issues in a way that seemed authoritative was partly responsible for
his success. Sometimes, he stretched the
facts and inserted speculative ideas of his own—which is what a fiction writer
can do. I remember discussions with a
geneticist friend of mine who found the idea of cloning as presented in the
Jurassic Park novels (1990, 1995) completely implausible. Where I felt Crichton typically faltered was
in resolving his plots—then his novels became more formulaic and
predictable. I was bothered by his
right-wing politics, particularly his denial of climate change (see State of
Fear, 2004), and by his
treatment of Japan and the Japanese in Rising Sun (1992). His novels are, ironically, permeated by an
underlying skepticism about technology that is both reasonably cautionary and
also hyperbolic.
The posthumous novel
Dragon Teeth (2017), a manuscript found by his widow among his papers,
may be one of his best books. It’s a
well plotted story of fossil hunting in the Old West. Though its main character, William Johnson, a
young man from Philadelphia who on a bet goes on a fossil hunting expedition, is
fictional, other important characters are based on fact: especially the paleontologists
Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, whose intense rivalry in the
late 19th century as they hunted for dinosaur fossils has become
legendary. Robert Louis Stephenson
briefly appears, as do other historical figures (Wyatt Earp prominent among
them). I was reminded of the novels of
E. L. Doctorow, which often included historical figures. The focus on Cope and Marsh is the novel’s
strongest asset.[i] The
novel is basically a yarn—though it centers on fossil hunting, it isn’t science
fiction or fantasy. It’s an Old West
tale. At times Crichton seems to be developing an overview of the opening of
the American West, of Native Americans, of fossil hunting. But mostly this is an adventure story about a
young and arrogant son of wealthy parents coming of age. It was exciting and interesting from
beginning to end. It does not suffer
from the problems in resolution I found other Crichton novels.
I would like to
know to what extent editors or others contributed to the final form of the
book: to what extent it is Crichton’s book, or some other person’s idea of what
Crichton would have wanted. Crichton’s
widow provides an afterword which suggests the novel is primarily Crichton’s
work, but one never knows, since the novel was never finished (though this
published version seems finished and complete).
[i]
See the National Geographic article
on Marsh and Cope at http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/15/battle-for-the-bone-wars-beasts/.
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