Michael Crichton

An American bioengineering research firm erects a theme park on a Caribbean island, complete with living dinosaurs, and invites a group of scientists to be its first terrified guests

A Novel

Jurassic Park

Sabrina D. 

“Story of our species,” Malcolm said, laughing. “Everybody knows it’s coming, but not so soon.”

“No. I’ll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists. Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature. Which is true, but that’s not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like ‘seeking truth.’ 

"Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don’t do it, someone else will.Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts.Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a r*pe of the natural world. Always…”

I only just watched the movie like three months ago on a flight and was like wow I would’ve loved this as a 7 year old. And this book at 10 probably. Unfortunately now I am 21 and can read just how deeply Crichton hated women. Also the fact he made Ian Malcom and did Not believe in climate change irl. Need to have cognitive dissonance like that. These are NOT dinosaur train’s velociraptors!

En esta espectacular novela, los dinosaurios vuelven a conquistar la Tierra. En una isla remota, un grupo de hombres y mujeres emprende una carrera contra el tiempo para evitar un desastre mundial provocado por la desmedida ambición de comercializar la ingeniería genética. Pero todos los esfuerzos resultarán vanos cuando el inescrupuloso proyecto quede fuera de control y el mundo a merced de unas bestias monstruosas... Parque Jurásico, la novela más célebre de Michael Crichton y una de las más leídas en los últimos años, fue adaptada al cine por Steven Spielberg en una película que se convirtió en el gran acontecimiento cinematográfico de 1993 y en el origen del fenómeno de masas llamado "dinomanía". “Una joya de la fantasía científica.” El País

I there wasn’t so much sexism in this book it would be 5 stars. That being said, this was the perfect mix of nerdiness and action and philosophy. Incredibly written, some of the injuries felt a little bit inconsistent (like the kids should DEFINITELY be dead, right?), but the dinosaurs felt very real. 

Hannah Bateman

this was so hard to finish. i enjoyed the first 2/3 because of the action and adventure but by the end i was really tired of malcom’s ramblings even tho he was literally dying. 

Krystal

What a great read! Brilliantly written and filled with science. Loved the dated wonder at a touchscreen. Super vivid and un-put-down-able. 

Josh Dawson

Raptors cannibalizing their young did not make the Spielberg cut

Paige LeBook

Jurassic Park 25 Anos - Caixa

I thought the movie did better with pacing and danger. The Trex chase scene was great in the movie but wasn’t handled the same in the book but it was all still a fun introspective ride.

Jordan

lala

The reason why I read this book was mainly because my sister won’t shut up about Jurassic World. So, naturally I picked up this book and delve into the Jurassic Park world. It started off mysterious and slowly it reveals the main event of the novel, that is the return of dinosaurs on earth. The protagonists are the same as the movie: Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, and Ian Malcolm. However, you can see clearly that John Hammond is sort of the villain here. The plot is basically the same with the movie with a little difference here and there but nothing significant. John Hammond in the book was reviving dinosaurs not only because of his excitement towards dinosaurs but mainly because of money. Hammond refuse to let any of the dinosaurs be harmed even if it bears danger to the humans in the park because he thinks the animal is expensive. He also brought their grandchildren Tim and Lex not because he loves them but solely because he thinks Gennaro (the Lawyer) would approve the park if there were children. Alan Grant plays a more significant role, while the rest.. not so much. It’s not as dramatic as the movie, but it was an interesting read.

I give Jurassic Park 4 T-Rex. 🦖🦖🦖🦖

elizabeth

I'm reluctant to rate this so highly due to the whole "we're blowing global warming out of proportion" thing in Crichton's State of Fear (2004). It's not like his work did as much as big oil to legitimize the watering down of the climate crisis or the casting of doubt on climate science, but...yikes.

Regardless, this is a book that shows up on so many of those "books you have to read" lists that I gave it a chance when it was free at the library. Plus, I've never seen the movie, but I feel like that'll happen at some point, and I like to read the book first.

Whether or not you'll enjoy Jurassic Park comes down to a huge list of factors, but perhaps the largest indicator is if you tend to enjoy plot-driven (as in, less character-driven) novels. You'll get lots of characters, lots of action, and lots of problems to solve met with solutions that propel chapter after chapter. The quick pace made for some page-turners of chapters, and when I finished, I had the feeling that I went on a hell of a ride. That said, I didn't leave the book feeling as though I truly knew the characters or watched them develop. That's fine--but it's not for everyone. 

Crichton's commentary is thinly veiled, if at all, using Malcolm as his mouthpiece. At its worst, the commentary involves broad, clumsy philosophical statements and hints at the egotism that was to come in State of Fear. At its best, the commentary provides the novel with thematic significance and depth. Characters present differing views of the role of science, anxiety for the future, and the mechanics of the universe (hello, chaos theory!), anchoring the more fantastical setting and giving action-packed scenes room to breathe and to mean something.

Some miscellaneous notes:
• I found the "science" of this science fiction novel--the graphs, the theories, you know the stuff--more digestible than that of The Three-Body Problem or even The Martian. 
• I've racked my brain trying to find out a good reason that Crichton made the kids almost steadfastly annoying. Let me know if you come up with one.

Luke Harkness

This is a fantastic dinosaur-based sci-fi book. Never before have I read a book with so much scientific detail where I felt like I was reading a non-fiction alongside a fiction. Now I understand there’s famously some false information in here. However, some of the truly scientific things about chaos theory, the evolution of dinosaurs, possible behaviours of dinosaurs and how they may have tended to their young and so much more made this feel like a truly educative read.

It’s not really like the film at all. The general idea is the same - Island of dinosaurs, people (all names the same) go to test it out and then havoc ensues. However, the storyline is vastly estranged and the characters are uniquely different creating what feels like a 4th Jurassic Park film (excluding JW and JW:FK as they are a new franchise). I highly recommend for anyone wanting a good, fun, educational and enjoyable piece of dinosaur fiction

Vicky  Nuñez 

I do not know what I expected from this book, but what I did not expect was to enjoy it as much as I did. 
Needless to say, it is amazing. It brings much depth to the movie.
It is a definitely a must read for everyone.

kayla 

(Confession: I've never seen Jurassic Park. Don't get me wrong, I live in the UK and I've been in close enough to a TV on a Bank Holiday Monday or Boxing Day to have caught little snatches of it. But never seen the whole thing. Seemed like a cool story though?)

I'm in Essex, caring for my mum. I wanted something easy to read on the train down here, so I thought this would be interesting and fun. I couldn't settle down to any of my "currently reading" shelf. 

It was not interesting, nor fun. The prose was fucking awful. I wish I'd highlighted passages of it because it seemed SO off to me. Lex and Tim irritated me to hell. Lex gets attacked by pterodactyls. She's insta-fine next paragraph. Falls in a river, stops breathing. Don't worry she's saying "whee, go faster!" next bit. This is a kid who's been hassled on and off by dinosaurs all night?? Not gonna lie, skimmed the rest of it from then on. It's a shame because it seemed to start half-decently.

Don't talk to me about chaos theory. I mean it! (Because it's incredibly boring and I don't care.)

Jurassic Park: A Novel

Veronica Hawkins

The difference between the movie and the book is not that great of a difference, but it was a glorious read. Some characters were really frustrating to read.

Anyaconda

Read the book and of course had to immediately watch Jurassic Park 1-3 🦖🦕

Anthony

Solid read. Made me feel nostalgic for the film but I definitely enjoyed the book!

Katherine Yang

really fantastic! mathematician's warnings ring just as chillingly true 30 years later with scientists and technologists obsessed with "can i" over "should i".

A breakthrough in genetic engineering leads to the development of a technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA, a method that brings about the creation of Jurassic Park, a tourist attraction populated by creatures extinct for eons. Reissue.

Gavin

Frankensaurus. Both very clumsy and ahead of its time. Crichton is often described as a one-legged stool: i.e. he has good ideas, but no prose or characters. Ian Malcolm, his sexy radfem primitivist chaos theorist is an exception, and if anything the film's (iconic) depiction of him is less striking and seductive than the sneering pole depicted here.

 It's worth picking on Malcolm because he's depicted as prescient, fundamentally correct about the island; he gets the most airtime by far, with the only pushback being Hammond saying "pish posh!" every so often - (Unless you count the raptor attacking him as a discursive act); he is even given the chapter header pages to be oracular on, slowly drawing a dragon curve as if it meant anything. And his philosophy, endorsed by Crichton, is tepid and dismaying finger-wagging.



So: He denies that modern life is better than premodern life and endorses Sahlins' lazy-bushman hypothesis: 

  
    ‘What advances?’ Malcolm said irritably. 'The number of hours women devote to housework has not changed since 1930, despite all the advances. All the vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers, trash compactors, garbage disposals, wash-and-wear fabrics... Why does it still take as long to clean the house as it did in 1930?’
    Ellie said nothing.
    'Because there haven’t been any advances,’ Malcolm said. 'Not really. Thirty thousand years ago, when men were doing cave paintings at Lascaux, they worked twenty hours a week to provide themselves with food and shelter and clothing. The rest of the time, they could play, or sleep, or do whatever they wanted. And they lived in a natural world, with clean air, clean water, beautiful trees and sunsets. Think about it. Twenty hours a week. Thirty thousand years ago.’


The first claim is flatly false: average housework by US women decreased by about 14 hours(!) a week over this period. (Table 6, last column.) This is despite ballooning house sizes, inventory of objects to maintain, and time actually spent with the children. It also omits our greatly increased levels of hygiene and personal fragrance, though I suppose that could be zero-sum if we habituate to it.

The second is false but not as flatly. I can't find anyone speculating "twenty hours" about the economy of the Upper Paleolithic French. If Crichton is merely mashing up the famous Bushman studies with the punchy image of Lascaux, then despite celebrated dissemination by anthropologists, the claim is untrue: contemporary African hunter-gatherers spend more than 50 hours a week on food production. Worse, Malcolm's smug rant puts zero weight on the giant disease burden, the constant warfare, the giant boredom, the crushing conformity and illiberty of nomad life, and the perfect absence of intellectual life among the ancients.

(Judging by the hostility of Pinker's reviewers, Ian Malcolm is still with us, railing against e.g. consumerism and overpopulation - as if those weren't people just trying to live their lives - and reductionism, denying or minimising the huge material and spiritual gains of science and other blessed modernities.)

More: Malcolm is himself wildly overconfident about modelling, e.g. the fit of basic fractal theory to the park disaster; Crichton is credulous about the almost-completely unfulfilled promises of the wild-eyed Santa Fe set. 
  
They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything

 The latter claim is true for all phenomena except pure random number generators though; the untrue version Crichton means depends on ignorantly thinking that "predict" always (or ever) means "predict with certainty".

Crichton was a programmer, and there's a nice wee code listing in a critical moment, in a made up language resembling Perl + Forth + COBOL. Definitely optimised for making the reader feel smart for reading it, or vindicated in skipping it. But points still.

Beatrix Haase

Full Review To Come... In a while cause let's be real I never have time for book reviews anymore, but I shall try.

xoxo,
Bebe

Sade A

After reading this book, you'll look at the first Jurassic Movie and go "wow!! I've totally been cheated off what could have been an even more awesome movie" damn you Hollywood.

📌 Character wise, everything was way different from the movie. (view spoiler)[Alan Grant had a beard and Sattler wasn't his love interest. Gennaro wasn't a wimp, Ian Malcom was an egotistical douche bag that never followed this rule when talking - Keep It Simple; Dennis Nerdy was still fat and a colossal idiot, Timothy was a star, Alex was an annoying shitty child that i honestly would have fed to the dinosaurs with absolutely no regrets and finally Hammond was a psychotic troll that would have sacrificed his grand-kids if it meant he could keep the park open. (hide spoiler)]

Supporting characters : Ed Regis - Wimp! Robert Muldoon - Kick ass dude, Harding: didn't really get that much action.

This book is about a rich fella who decides to play God and create Dinosaurs. But does he create just those cute dinosaurs that don't eat people? Nope!! he creates those meat eating ones too, like so

oh wait, hehehee 

Like so

Unlike the movie you can look forward to people dying gruesome horrible deaths from the jaws and poisons of dinosaurs which trust me makes up for all the talk on chaos theory, fractals, DNA, dinosaur bones and basically everything Ian Malcom says in this book. 
All in all despite Micheal Crichton's attempt to sabotage his book anytime Ian Malcom spoke or Dr. Wu tried to explain the glory of DNA (Frankly except you're Sheldon Cooper you probably won't get all those stuffs either) i really enjoyed this book.

P.S: you can't outrun a T-Rex in heels.
 
Muldoon: The Rex is out there, somewhere...and we don't have any weapons worth a damn"
Gennaro: We're in a jeep
Muldoon: Oh he can outrun a jeep. Once we leave this road and go onto open terrain, the best we can do in a four wheel drive is thirty, forty miles an hour. He'll run us right down. No problem for him"

You're welcome.

Ryan LaFerney

Michael Crichton's disaster thriller, "Jurassic Park,"written in 1990, before the widespread use of the internet is in my opinion, a postmodern recycling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein myth. Both stories are about the destructive power of human error and the insanity of playing God (exemplified by the characters of John Hammond and Henry Wu). And both stories are regarded as classics. Jurassic Park in particular is regarded as a modern classic for its brilliant display of somewhat precise (if not, altered or purely created) scientific data alongside the fantastic. I do not disagree with this popular consensus. What Crichton does well is make the fantastical believable by using scientific research. And he is pretty darn good at writing tense and frightening scenes as those of you who have read the book or seen the famous film adaptation (which Crichton wrote the screenplay for) know.

However, I can understand why he also regarded as a guilty pleasure for many. For one thing, his prose isn’t very elegant and his characters often seem to exist to perpetuate the ideas and philosophy of the story. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, as Ian Malcolm for instance, in the film, exists more or less as the same character: the philosophical mathematician. His purpose is to state and prove that the park is prone to human error and as we all know, his predictions turn dire. But, there isn’t much here in the way of character development. Additionally, Crichton is very fond of exposition and while, science is fascinating, the first part of the book is often stuffed with descriptions and explanations. Once again, this is just a particular quirk of Crichton's writing. For many, this style of writing is very annoying while others love it. Another particular quirk of Crichton’s writing is that his descriptions of side characters and women often come off as sexist and borderline racist. Maybe this wasn’t the case back in 1990 but its 2018, and I found myself bothered by some of his quick descriptive passages that seemed off kilter and very unnecessary. 

The good news is that once you make it to the second half of the book and all hell breaks loose, Jurassic Park becomes a thrilling ride.

You’re probably wondering is the book similar to the film? The book is quite a different beast than the film it spawned. Like all adaptations, lots of details and twists got lost, like the dinosaur migration to the mainland (which was my favorite part of the early part of the book) and the chapter in the aviary (which I believe made its way into the terrible film, Jurassic Park III). But, I can’t help but think that the changes that were made in the movie script produced a better story (for the most part-John Hammond should have been eaten alive for his hubris as he is in the book). In the film, we care more about the characters, particularly Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler (who in the book are not romantically involved as it would have been very unprofessional). Dr. Grant’s character arc in the film, from disliking kids to saving and embracing them, is wonderful. In the book, Dr. Grant is merely paired with the children as a survival tactic. Also, Tim and Lex are very annoying and in many ways caricatures of children. I simply care more about the characters in the film than I do the book because they don’t just feel like they are archetypes….they feel fleshed out (no pun intended). And perhaps this is on purpose? Dr.Grant really isn’t a hero in the book the way he is portrayed in the film. There are no heroes in the book really, just folks terrifyingly trying to survive. (To be fair, although Grant is the protector of the children in the film, and the character we most identify with, the true hero is the T-Rex that eats the raptors at the end of the film, allowing the the films stars to escape from a near death situation). What is clear in both the movie and the book is that nature will always find a way and humans are powerless and fools to think they can control it (or in this case recreate it).

Critique aside, let’s not kid ourselves, we don’t read a Crichton book for brilliant characterization. We read a Crichton book mainly for its the pulpy “real science” sci-fi it provides and the heart pounding thrills. 

Verdict: A classic it may be, Jurassic Park works better as film as the book reads mainly as the screenplay-adaptation-friendly prototype (even though it was published before the film was made). With this being said, I enjoyed its pulpy nature, its philosophical concepts (as borrowed as they might be) and the thrills of dinosaurs hunting human prey. It's a fine piece of pop sci-fi (if you can get past Crichton’s flawed storytelling) and might I dare suggest that it is even a good summer beach read? Just beware of the dinosaurs lurking near your resort.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Timeline, Sphere, and Congo, this is the classic thriller of science run amok that took the world by storm. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read “[Michael] Crichton’s dinosaurs are genuinely frightening.”—Chicago Sun-Times An astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA has been discovered. Now humankind’s most thrilling fantasies have come true. Creatures extinct for eons roam Jurassic Park with their awesome presence and profound mystery, and all the world can visit them—for a price. Until something goes wrong. . . . In Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton taps all his mesmerizing talent and scientific brilliance to create his most electrifying technothriller. Praise for Jurassic Park “Wonderful . . . powerful.”—The Washington Post Book World “Frighteningly real . . . compelling . . . It’ll keep you riveted.”—The Detroit News “Full of suspense.”—The New York Times Book Review

Nicole Sonja

This was an excellent book! Definitely deserves to be remembered.

Enjoyed it. Different enough from the movie to keep you hooked. The little girl was annoying, tho.

Jeroen van Meerendonk

I thought I really liked the movie, but the book is much better! There are complex ideas and views on the world given that they did not put in the movie! I really like Malcom for that, much more than in the movies where I found him to be very self-absorbed. 

a.girl.a.dog.and.books

Jessica Lynn

i like when the dinosaurs f'd shit up.
I will never get tired of re-reading this work of art. *chef kiss*

Jurassic Park A Novel