Jurassic Park

Transcript

INTRO

“If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.” 

That was a quote from the author J.K. Rowling on reading. Reading is one of the best things we can do in our day, and when you find the right book, it’s also one of the most enjoyable things you can do in a day. So in each episode of the We Should All Be Bookworms Podcast, we build our reading habit by taking a quick look at a page-turning, magnetic, universally appealing book that, once you start reading, you won’t want to put down. I’m your host, Mykella, a budding novelist and a bonafide bookworm. And today, we’re talking about Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.

Jurassic Park is the OG dinosaur story that inspired the billion-dollar blockbuster movie franchise. In this story, a company discovers how to resurrect dinosaurs, and they build a resort to exploit their innovation. But when they bring in a few guests for a test weekend, everything that can go wrong does. On its surface, Jurassic Park explores the question of what happens when humans and dinosaurs, two super-predators separated by 65 million years, are suddenly thrust into the same world. But the question it’s really asking is, what will happen when humans follow their insatiable hunger for innovation and profits to a place of no return?

So join me today as we preview this story. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just finished reading your 33rd book so far this year, or you can’t even remember the last time you read a book — this podcast is for you. In fact, if we can change the world one book at a time, then we should all be bookworms.

I know that you might be thinking - Why would I want to read the book, Jurassic Park, when I’ve seen the movie a million times? Usually I would say because the book is better. But I’m not sure if I can say that in this case because the Jurassic Park movie is one of the few adaptations that does a great job at capturing the suspense and complexity of the book, as well as a movie can. And this is probably because Micheal Crichton, the author of the book, also wrote the screenplay for the movie. That’s not the case most of the time. Somebody else writes the screenplay - and so the movies are usually hollow versions of the book.

In this case, I would say the movie version of Jurassic Park is not worse than the book. It’s just less than the book. It’s a… Disneyfication of the book. It’s still great - but it’s not as scary, and it’s not as adult, and there aren’t as many dinosaurs. The best way to make a ton of money with a movie is to make it as family-friendly as possible. But the book is an adult book, it’s not written for children. So it’s way more suspenseful than the movie. 

For example, the kids in the book are in much more danger than they are in the movie. Certain fan-favorite characters that survive in the movie die in the book. And the movie also left out a ton of interaction with dinosaurs - probably because of limitations in movie technology at the time. But because there are no limitations on your imagination, the book is a richer experience. 

That’s part of the reason there are so many Jurassic Park movie sequels. Movie technology needed time to grow to more adequately capture the awe and wonder and terror of the book. Many of the iconic elements of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th movies were already in play in this first book.. For example, there’s

- A baby t-rex 
- The raptor's nest
- Dinosaurs attacking people on the mainland
- A chameleon dinosaur - that one didn’t appear until Movie #4, and it was already here in book #1.

So you should read the book because if you love the Jurassic Park movie series, you’re going to love the book that much more. They are both equally enjoyable experiences. 

And now is a great time to read the book because the sixth and final installment of the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World Dominion, is coming out soon. The trailer is expected to drop any day now, and I’m super excited to get a peek at the movie. 

I think the Jurassic Park series is so popular because it gives us a chance to imagine how two super-predators might coexist - humans and dinosaurs. But I also think it’s an important story for our culture because it’s a brilliant illustration of how fragile we humans are when stacked up against the full force of the natural world. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author of Jurassic Park is Micheal Crichton. He is one of the most well-known science fiction writers of our time - and was both a novelist and a screenplay writer. Unfortunately, he’s no longer with us. He died from cancer in 2008. But his creative impact on books and movies that explore the disastrous consequences of people going too far with technology can still be felt today. His impact on pop culture, particularly in the ’90s and early 2000s hasn’t been topped by another author yet. His books have sold more than 200 million copies worldwide, and 13 of them were made into movies - many of them blockbusters.

Have you heard of the HBO series Westworld? That was a remake of a series that Crichton wrote. How about the insanely successful medical drama ER that made George Clooney a household name? Also the brainchild of Crichton. And there’s more - the movie Twister was a book first by Crichton. So was Congo, Sphere, and most famously - his two dinosaur books, Jurassic Park and the Lost World. 

Crichton always wanted to be a writer, but he was afraid he wouldn’t make enough money to support himself because most writers don’t. Most writers are part-time writers and have a full-time job doing something else that pays the bills. So Crichton decided to make writing plan B and make being a doctor plan A. He was a student at the prestigious but also expensive Harvard Medical School. And on the weekends, he would write short, high-octane thrillers because he discovered he could get about $2500 per book if he followed a pretty specific formula. So he would write and write and write during every spare moment to pay his way through med school. And he got so good at writing that he never practiced medicine. In his senior year at Harvard, he found himself selling the movie rights to his novel The Andromeda Strain. By the time he graduated med school, he was a respected, award-winning, professional writer who could afford to write full time. In fact, he went on to become one of the wealthiest writers of all time.

Jurassic Park was inspired by real-world breakthroughs in genetics in the 90s. There were all these articles and reports and studies and research about the commercialization of genetics and DNA - could cloning people’s pets become big business? Stuff like that. And that got Crichton thinking… What if you could bring back dinosaurs? And that presented an exciting story challenge that he wanted to solve. He asked himself, “How could you make people believe in dinosaurs, at least for a few hours?”

Around this time, his friend Steven Spielberg called him up to chat. During this call, Speilburg was like, what are you working on? And Crichton’s like, I’m trying to figure out this book about dinosaurs and DNA. And Speilburg was like - Really? Tell me more. You see, Speilburg was a dinosaur nut all his life, and so he was super excited about this idea. So Crichton sent him the book to read, and Spielburg was like - you’ve got to let me make this movie.

The book came out about three years before the movie, and both were blockbuster hits. The Jurassic Park movie franchise alone has so far earned more than 3 billion dollars worldwide.

PLOT SUMMARY

Now here’s a quick summary of the plot.

A super-rich guy named John Hammond and his company buy an island off the coast of Costa Rica and build a wildlife preserve, resort, and theme park. They expect to make a killing on this place because the wildlife are dinosaurs that have been extinct for 65 million years. They were brought to life by a breakthrough in DNA science where computer programs read dino DNA salvaged from mosquitoes preserved in ancient tree amber and stitch together the missing parts with similar strands from live animals like frogs. 

They’re trying to keep this a secret until launch day, but 2 things are happening that the company is unaware of: 1 a rival company has found out and has recruited an insider to help them steal dinosaur embryos so they can backwards engineer what Hammond’s team did and copy it.  And 2: some of the smaller dinosaurs have escaped the private island, and Costa Ricans are being attacked by never-before-seen lizards.

Meanwhile, the Park’s functionality has been plagued by problems from the beginning, and the investors are getting antsy. They’re threatening to cut their losses and just pull the plug on the whole project. So Hammond desperately recruits some experts, including 2 paleontologists, a chaos theoretician, and 2 children, to come spend a weekend at the Park. He’s hoping to get their endorsement and calm down the investors. But, as we all know, shortly after this group arrives and have their ooh and awww moments with the dinosaurs, all hell breaks loose and there’s running and screaming.

FAVORITE STORY MOMENTS

The onscreen version of Jurassic Park didn’t put dinosaurs and people together on the mainland until the second movie, The Lost World. But the book places dinosaurs and everyday people together right at the beginning. This foreshadows for the reader that things are out of control in the Park and it’s my favorite story moment because of what it reveals about human nature.

A wildlife expert in Costa Rica is investigating a lizard attack on a little girl - he’s trying to figure out what kind of lizard it was. She draws a picture for him, and he doesn’t believe she remembers accurately because the lizard in her picture has a long neck, is standing upright, and has three toes instead of 5. A lizard like that shouldn’t exist, but he asks the hospital to tell him about any more attacks. 

Around the same time, on a rainy night, the power is knocked out in a Costa Rican clinic. A stressed midwife is working by flashlight to take care of a mother and a newborn baby. The baby is sleeping in a separate room while the midwife is working on the feverish mother. She hears noises in the baby’s room. The noise sounds like the chirping of birds, so she thinks all is well but opens the door to peek inside just in case. What she sees is horrifying. There are three dark green lizards crouched on the edge of the bassinet with blood dripping from their snouts. They just stare at her at first, completely unafraid. But when she screams and runs into the room, they scatter. The baby dies, and the midwife does not report this death as an attack by strange lizards because she’s afraid of getting in trouble for leaving the baby alone. Instead, she reports it as SIDS, sudden infant death, which is something unremarkable that would go unchallenged. 

By not reporting the attack, she is contributing to a stewing catastrophe. The longer the public goes not knowing this terrifying new lizard species has emerged, the more time the lizards have to reproduce and gain a stronger foothold, making it that much harder to control or eliminate them when they become a problem that can’t be ignored. But this midwife isn’t thinking about the greater good when she makes this decision. She’s only thinking about what makes the most sense for her at the moment. 

And there are other incidents like this sprinkled throughout the beginning of the story where someone could help stall this looming disaster, but they’re tired, or it’s not their job, and so the problem simmers and stews. But each of these people is making a rational decision rooted in human nature, which is designed to think most about what matters to me today, not what matters to all of us tomorrow.

The Jurassic Park problem is human caused. They used scientific advancements to bring back an extinct species they didn’t understand and couldn’t control. It’s a dramatic, extreme illustration of the consequences of human arrogance. We think that because of our immense industrial and technological power, we are invincible and will always be able to tame the natural world and make it do our bidding. But we’re slowly starting to understand how wrong we are.

Right now our world leaders are in the middle of the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference, and they’re discussing what to do to slow down global warming. This is a serious issue because rising temperatures threaten our food and water supplies and cause more destructive storms. If we don’t figure this out, we’ll be facing some uncomfortable disruptions to our way of life that would make the COVID pandemic seem like a cakewalk in comparison. And this problem is human caused - we’ve used our advancements in technology to design a world of convenience for ourselves but we don’t always understand, and we can’t always control the consequences of that technology. This is the central question of Jurassic Park - just because we CAN do something, and it’s cool and exciting and fun and convenient - does that mean we SHOULD? 

And it’s not a question of should we stop climate change to save the planet. It’s not about saving the planet. Jurassic Park shows us is that nature doesn’t care all that much about us. It will devour us and then forget us. The character Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum in the movies) articulates this perfectly in the book: “We have been residents here,” he says talking about the planet, “for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us… We are in jeopardy. We haven’t got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.”

The moral of the Jurassic Park story is that although we have an insanely powerful collective intellect, we are incredibly fragile. And that fragility is enhanced by our self-centered natures which cause us to act in ways that are contrary to our collective best interest. We need to recognize this about ourselves and take measures to protect ourselves from ourselves. The brilliance of Crichton’s storytelling is that he’s able to instill this very serious moral through a suspenseful and entertaining dinosaur adventure.

Jurassic Park will take the average reader about 9 hours to read. That means if you read for at least 30 minutes a day, you should be able to finish this book in just 18 days, which is about 2.5 weeks.

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That’s all for this episode. Thank you for listening. You can listen to new episodes bi-weekly on Tuesdays. And in the meantime, keep reading. Because of you, we’re one book closer to a better world.