The novel behind Steven Spielberg's classic 1990s dinosaur movie.

We're starting a bookray for this and the sequel The Lost World. It's the wrong Lost World (the right one is, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World), but still contains dinosaur adventure fun! PM at any time, with your shipping preferences, to join.

Bookray
Nell-Lu, UK (Int)
criminologeek Hong Kong (Int)
Bookworm-lady, Spain (Europe)

Bookray complete!

An entertaining if emotionally manipulative read.

Crighton keeps the tension cranked up to maximum throughout this book. There's never an easy way out for the characters: the dangers within Jurassic Park (a theme park containing living dinosaurs produced via genetic engineering - everyone must have seen the film) are so huge that it seems no-one will get out alive. Not even the little girl. Or the attractive female paleobiologist. Or the nice paleontologist who can't work computers. And the corporate lawyer doesn't stand a chance.

The book manages to give a sense of the complexities of genetic engineering and of chaos theory, while highlighting the moral issues involved in science. Mathematician Ian Malcolm gets to monologue quite a lot about the problems that a scientific mindset can cause. His point is personified by genetic engineer Henry Wu: so focused on the achievement of creating dinosaurs that he doesn't have any idea where the DNA he uses to fix gaps comes from.

But, the big baddies have to be the money-driven corporations: John Hammond and InGen, the creator of Jurassic Park, and Lewis Dodgson (good name, by the way!) of Biosyn Corporation, whose attempt at industrial espionage is the catalyst for the book's disasters. Greed is definitely not good.

There are a lot of very visual uses of dramatic irony (characters turn away from the window just as something we the reader know to be important goes past; missing characters struggle through the jungle just metres from teams trying to get the park back to normal) that mean this book is only a small step away from a screenplay. The repeated image of a compy attack at the end of the book is also very Hollywood - particularly as the reprise involves a character getting his just desserts.

This isn't a book I'd re-read, but it was a good adventure to be taken on.

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

Travelling to criminologeek in Hong Kong. Happy reading!

Received with many thanks! =)

Sorry that I have forgotten to update the journal. The book was already sent to Bookworm-lady. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for sending this on, together with its "mate", Criminologeek; they arrived in perfect shape.
Thanks for the postcard, as well...
And thanks, TheLostBook, for sharing these books with us. Looking forward to reading them!
Eva

Currently reading it... and about time! :)

I enjoyed reading this book more than I expected... in fact, I picked it up at times I would not usually read during the day...
I admit that I was initially discouraged by its small print... but I decided to give it a go, and got hooked on immediately! I love the way everything is described, the characters are very well defined, and reading this is even better than watching the Spielberg film.
I have always liked the character of Ian Malcom, the mathematician; recently I found out that he speaks with the voice of the author, that is to say, Mr Crichton puts in his mouth his own ideas about science in general.
Here is a quote which was used verbatim in the last (for the time being) instalment of this series ("Jurassic World 2"), when Malcom is testifying in court:
"...events are unpredictable. That they can change suddenly , and without warning. (...) But we have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us that straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow om a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way."
This novel was written in the early 90s, and there is one hillarious moment when none of the adults in the room know anything about computers, and it is up to Hammond's grandson, Tim, to re-start them.
I really recommend this novel; good literature disguised as entertainment.
Soon to continue its travel... even though TheLostBook project ended back in 2009.

Sent to the winner of the Sci-Fi Sweepstakes. Enjoy!!

Thank you for sending this book! Like most people I’ve seen the movie. But I’ve never read the book. I think I’ve only read one of Critchon’s books. Can’t remember the title at the moment. Something to do with an expedition underwater. :/

The Lost Book project sounded interesting. Too bad it’s no longer around.

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One of the starting books for the To the Stars: A Science Fiction Bookbox 3.0!

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I've read this one before, so I'm leaving this venerable and well-traveled book in the bookbox for someone else, but wanted to add my comments:

I'd read the book ages ago (after seeing the excellent 1993 movie, I think, but I'm not positive about that) and I remember enjoying it, though at this date most of my memories of the story are from the film. But it's a very cool story (book AND movie), lively and entertaining.

Overall I have to say that some of the changes made for the film were an improvement - example: in the book, the children consisted of an 11-year-old boy and a 7-year-old girl, with the latter having almost nothing to do but whine. The film-girl was the older sibling and the computer whiz, something that saved a lot of time; in the book, the hapless boy kept paging through computer screens for much longer than seemed reasonable.

There were other changes; several characters consolidated into one, for example, and some tweaks as to who survived and who didn't, with additional changes to character relationships - the book-Grant claims to like kids from the outset, which takes a lot of the fun out of his being stuck with them later on. So, overall, I'd say this was a film version that fine-tuned and enhanced the book - but the book's still a good read!

[There's an extensive TV Tropes page on the franchise, including the book and the films that followed; lots of entertaining info, but beware of spoilers.]