Michael Crichton appears to be the Tupac of the literary world. And by that, I mean, he is still publishing novels a good 16 years after he passed away from complications to lymphoma. Eruption has been the fourth novel to be published since his death.
The last novel, Dragon Teeth, was written by him in the 1970s but not published until 2017. Pirate Latitudes was reportedly written before he died but was found on a hard drive on one of his computers. It was a fun little story about pirates. Yet, I felt Crichton probably was wanting to work on it some more. Crichton was known for a very strict schedule and regiment when he was working on his books. He would reportedly eat the same lunch every day to keep himself in the groove and not have to worry about what he was going to eat.
With multiple books credited to him, he also found many of them being adapted for the big screen, most famously Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World, even though the latter had little resemblance to the novel. A filmmaker, himself, his first movie, Westworld, would be spun off into a popular HBO series. Unfortunately, Crichton didn’t have the success as a director as his friend, Steven Spielberg. However, I’m sure his estate still nice royalties from the shows and movies he was involved with especially the medial drama ER.
But his novels could really make you think about the dangers of a world where science and advanced technology gets out of hand, especially when it comes to greedy people. He claimed Westworld was supposed to be more about greed than the dangers of artificial intelligence. And John Hammond in the book was a complete 180 from the jovial grandfatherly type Sir Richard Attenborough portrayed him as. Imagine actor William Fichtner or the late Miquel Ferrer playing Hammond as a dirtbag to perfection. Crichton’s last novel to be published before his death, Next, was criticized for some of the more outlandish subplots as it dealt with testing on animals and human beings.
Eruption indicates on the cover that it’s written by Crichton, but the stye is all James Patterson, who was approached by Crichton’s widow, Sherri Alexander, to complete it. The novel focuses on the impending eruption of Mauna Loa, an actual volcano which is dormant in real life that is on the Big Island of Hawai’i.
The novel’s main character is John MacGregor, head of the Hawai’ian Volcanic Observatory, who finds himself working with key military officials. Even though the volcano is expected to erupt, there’s a dark secret the military has been keeping on the island for decades – it’s been used as storage for very dangerous chemicals and toxic waste. And the military fears that once Mauna Loa erupts, it’s going to spew all the chemicals into the atmosphere and that can be dangerous not just to Hawai’i but to the entire world.
Eruption comes one year after the wildfires of Hawai’i. News reports from residents have reported that the state government has been irrigating water away from the residential areas and focusing them more on the business and tourism areas which led a drought and the fires. As it was recently reported on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the history of Hawai’i hasn’t been a pretty one as British colonizers followed by Americans were able to take control of the islands. Since then, it’s mostly been by the military for testing as well as tourism, much to the dismay of the original natives some of which have had to move to other states because the cost of living is so expensive.
Since the book is written in the style that Patterson is more famous for with the shorter chapters anywhere from two to five pages on average, it does move at a fast pace. However, some of the technical descriptions Crichton could write in and keep us interested aren’t exactly there. Either Patterson and his editors got rid of these or Crichton just had a generic outline of what he intended and couldn’t do more research. Many writers will go through several drafts while others will go through many re-edits page by page before they continue, but it’s obviously Crichton’s tone in how the characters are designed.
Along with MacGregor who is mostly referred to just as Mac, there’s Col. James Briggs who is the first major military official Mac interacts with on the crisis. Briggs is a generic character but that’s a strict stoic attitude about him. Yet, the one problem that both Crichton and Patterson have had is too many characters without many details to distinguish them from each other. It’s difficult at times to keep track of who’s who apart from the main characters.
With Twisters in the theaters, this could be seen as a companion disaster story to that flick. And it’s no surprise Alexander is already in negotiations for the film rights to Spielberg for this movie. One of my main complaints of the 1996 Twister was how one-dimensional all the characters seemed. Crichton isn’t the first writer to conceive a notion of a volcanic eruption as a main story. In the late 1970s, producer Irwin Allen pretty much exploited every disaster, both manmade and natural, into star-filled movies. In 1980, the last batch of which was When Times Ran Out… with Paul Newman, William Holden, Jacqueline Bissett, Ernest Borgnine, Pat Morita, Alex Karras, Red Buttons, Barbara Carrera and Burgess Meredith among many others dealing with a dangerous volcano on a tourist island.
I don’t know that Crichton may have been working on this idea for years but the lack of popularity of disaster movies caused him to abandon this idea until he worked on it later. Then, there were two volcano movies released in the late 1990s (Dante’s Peak and Volcano). Little is mentioned by Alexander in the afterword about how far along her husband was with the story. Larry McMurtry himself intended Lonesome Dove to be a plain western movie before rewriting it as an epic western, and earning the Pulitzer.
Crichton may not have been as prolific as Stephen King or Patterson (both of whom have endured criticism for their novels), but the man published about two dozen books in his lifetime. That’s not bad. I feel Crichton did contribute a lot to the literary world. He received a M.D. from Harvard but instead felt the need to write about the dangers of messing with mother nature or the human body. Even though it was based on the book by Robin Cook, a doctor too, the images of people suspended by cables in Coma still resonates an eerie vibe decades later.
It’s a good read. Even tough summer is ending, this is the type of book you take to the beach with you. Just hopefully, the beach isn’t in Hawai’i.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 