The Bush administration has been criticized for some time for its views of — and use of — science. The issue raised its head again when it was reported that there had been “a visit to the White House last year by Michael Crichton, whose 2004 best-selling novel, ‘State of Fear,’ suggests that global warming is an unproven theory and an overstated threat.”
Back in high school I was a big fan of Crichton’s, especially The Andromeda Strain and The Great Train Robbery. In later years, he seemed to have really climbed up on a soapbox with each new book and the writing suffered for it. He used to seem tight as a writer; in books like Rising Sun, he just came across as turgid.
I haven’t read State of Fear and almost all of the reviews that I read didn’t address the scientific accuracy of his charges at all. On the one hand, it’s a novel and ought to be addressed as such. If it works as a novel, then that’s the issue at hand. But he clearly intended it to be meant as a polemic and if he’s wrong, then that’s a pretty big deal. If I write a thriller about how the big oil companies are manipulating the White House, people aren’t probably going to take it all that seriously, even if they secretly think things like that in the back of their minds.
In other words, Michael Moore ought to be held to a higher standard than Jerry Bruckheimer, even though they both create entertainment vehicles that might dip into the well of paranoia.
I wanted to read some serious analysis of the book and finally found a few things. Outside Magazine took a few shots. Chris Mooney, in his online Doubt and About column for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, mostly focuses on how unrealistic the book is, but does link to a few scientific critiques, such as this one. More recently, the Scientific American‘s blog noted that Crichton was given a Journalism Award by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists; the post also included links to more debunking of the book.
Does the truth matter? If you’re an author that has set out to write a book for political purposes, then it ought to matter. On the other hand, The Da Vinci Code is complete bullshit, as near as I can tell. Lots of people read it and thought it was all real, but I think Dan Brown was mostly concerned with writing an entertaining book.
I am reminded of Ben Elton‘s 1989 novel Stark, which was about a massive conspiracy by The Powers That Be to escape Earth before the apocalypse created by environmental damage. At the time, Elton was white-hot (due to The Young Ones and Blackadder) and this was his first novel. It all seemed a little overdramatic. Now that the scientific community seems to have stopped arguing about whether Global Warming is real and started arguing about whether it’s too late to stop its effect, it no longer seems so.
So, if in ten years it turns out that Crichton’s wrong, will he offer a refund to purchasers of his novel? It would seem to be the least he could do…
2 Responses
-
The Pop View Says:
A controversy related to this book turned up in late 2006.
Global Warming Denier Michael Crichton Fictionalizes Critic as Child Rapist
-
The Pop View Says:
Touché. Gore finally got back at Crichton.
“The planet has a fever,” [Al Gore] lectured [Joe] Barton. “If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, ‘Well, I read a science fiction novel that tells me it’s not a problem.’ If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame-retardant. You take action.”