Jurassic Park Retrospective Pt. 1: The Novels
Believe it or not, there was a time when dinosaurs weren’t the superstars they are today. For much of the period between the early 1800s, when dinosaur fossils were first recognized as such by science, and the 1960s, these so-called “terrible lizards” were thought to be nothing more than slow and stupid cold-blooded lizards, like larger and more pathetic versions of modern-day reptiles. They were mistakenly thought to be evolutionary dead-ends, destined to be replaced by superior species like humans. Some in this era correctly argued that dinosaurs were actually the ancestors of birds (most notably Thomas Henry Huxley). Still, they were largely ignored by those who preferred to bask in their teleological view of evolution and insist that animals as immense as Diplodocus, Brontosaurus, and Apatosaurus were inherently doomed to succumb to the pressures of Earth’s gravity.
The cracks began to show around 1969 when John Ostrom first formally described Deinonychus antirrhopus, a species of dromaeosaurid theropod that lived around 110 million years ago around modern-day Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Oklahoma. Ostrom pointed out the creature’s extremely birdlike appearance, including its ratite-like spine (meaning it resembles modern-day ostriches and emus), its horizontal posture, and especially the sickle-like claws that would eventually make the dromaeosaurids like Deinonychus and Velociraptor into modern-day celebrities (indeed, the name Deinonychus means “terrible claw” in Latin). This, he argued, was proof that dinosaurs were warm-blooded ancestors of modern-day birds.
This would spark a “dinosaur renaissance,” in the words of Ostrom’s student Robert T. Bakker, who would lay out all the evidence for warm-blooded dinosaurs in his classic 1986 book The Dinosaur Heresies. Noted paleontologist and illustrator Gregory S. Paul even included illustrations of feathered dinosaurs in his 1988 book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, nearly a decade before fossils of Sinosauroptryx prima were first discovered in China’s Liaoning province in 1996.
But it would take breaking these ideas out of the science labs and college campuses where they were first formulated and into the public consciousness to truly turn dinosaurs into the apotheosis of awesomeness they are perceived as today. Along came two men who would take it upon themselves to light the way: Michael Crichton by writing the book, and Stephen Spielberg by directing the movie.
Let’s start by seeing how the novel that started it all came into being.
Michael Crichton
Crichton speaking at Harvard on April 18, 2002 (Photo by John Chase of the Harvard News Office)
By the time he started work on the story that would become Jurassic Park in 1983, Michael Crichton had become a superstar in the field of science fiction literature for his stories involving real science taken to fantastical extremes. But while novels like The Andromeda Strain and TV series and movies like Westworld and ER have a high spot in his legacy, none have quite reached the levels of notoriety as Jurassic Park.
The story started as a screenplay about a graduate student who accidentally recreates a live pterosaur from fossil DNA. Crichton had reservations about the idea, though. For one thing, he had to get over how far-fetched the idea of cloning animals that hadn’t existed for millions of years sounded. Indeed, it has since been discovered that DNA only has a half-life of 521 years, which precludes the possibility of producing clones from 66 MYA fossils (also, one would think the mosquitoes’ digestive tract would have done a number on the strands before the amber encased them). Also working against the idea was how expensive genetic engineering was at the time, plus the fact that a prehistoric animal clone has no practical utility… except maybe as a form of entertainment.
From there, Crichton decided to base the story around a safari-themed amusement park featuring cloned dinosaurs that eventually break loose. He originally wanted to write the story from a child’s point of view, but everyone who read the original draft said it would work better if it were written from an adult’s point of view.
Finally, the story was rewritten as a novel and published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., on November 20, 1990.
The Novel
First edition cover, based on Henry Fairfield Osborn’s 1917 diagram of a T. rex skeleton
(Disclaimer: Some of the criticisms in this following section may be lifted from Lindsay Ellis’ video essay she made for the Jurassic Park movie’s 30th anniversary, which can only be viewed on the streaming service Nebula with a paid subscription. I’ll leave it up to you to see if the site is worth your time and money.)
The movie’s plot is practically identical to the book’s, except for some subplots and plot threads that were excised to streamline the narrative. For example, the book begins with a lengthy prologue that shows that several Procomsagnathus have escaped to the Costa Rican mainland, where they maim the daughter of a pair of wealthy tourists and chew a newborn baby’s face off (oh yeah, Crichton went there)! Before all that, though, we get to see the aftermath of the raptor attack we saw at the beginning of the film, with the wounded worker’s supervisor, Ed Regis, trying to pass it off as a construction accident despite the doctor recognizing signs of an animal attack (which ends with the worker projectile vomiting blood until he succumbs). Finally, we get to see a compy corpse, half-chewed up by a howler monkey, get analyzed in a New York City lab before it finally makes its way to Alan Grant at his dig site in Montana.
As I’m sure you can imagine from reading all that, one thing that almost immediately sticks out to anyone who reads the book after watching the film is how unrelentingly cynical it is. Unlike the movie, where the characters often let themselves get caught up in the wonder of seeing these fantastic animals resurrected even long after the park’s systems have broken down, here the characters, especially Ian Malcolm, almost immediately regard the dinosaurs with suspicion, fully anticipating that the park is going to break down at any second. Indeed, the prologue, in addition to going on far longer than it should before we actually get to our real main characters, has already spoiled much of the wonder behind the dinosaurs by portraying them as ruthless killing machines that not even babies are safe from.
Not helping with this impression is that John Hammond is the complete opposite of the well-meaning but naive grandfather figure he is in the film. In the book, he’s a selfish, conniving, and amoral bastard who barely even tries to pretend he’s in it for anything other than money. He even rants to Dr. Wu at one point about how there’s no profit to be made in helping humanity, and it’s also made clear that he only brought his grandchildren to the island as a “won’t someone please think of the children” gambit to stop Gennaro from shutting the operation down.
Speaking of the children, Tim and Lex’s ages are reversed. The book version of Lex is easily the most hated among the fandom. She is portrayed as a whiny brat who constantly complains about being hungry and tired, to the point that she practically has no survival instinct. True, she’s clearly traumatized from all the death and destruction she’s witnessed since the T. rex broke out of its paddock, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying to sit through.
Most other characters are similar to their film counterparts, especially Dennis Nedry and Ian Malcolm, whereas others…don’t have much of a character at all (the book version of Ellie Sattler is practically a sexy lamp).
As for the most important characters, the dinosaurs, we’ve already covered how Crichton gears us to despise the dinosaurs from the outset by having them literally eat a baby. However, much like the film, the book still attempts to ground the dinosaurs in what was best known about them in the contemporary science of the late 80s. Still, there seem to be times when Crichton falls into the common trap of making the dinosaurs into mindless killing machines to make them scarier at the expense of how they may have behaved as real-life animals. The T. rex gets this especially bad. Rexy spends most of her “screen time” hunting Grant and the kids, even when it makes no sense for her to do so. She even abandons a fresh hadrosaur kill to continue chasing the trio at one point. It gets especially ridiculous when the trio finds her waiting for them at the bottom of a waterfall with her mouth open, hoping they’ll fall in, an image so cartoonish that I can imagine the Sharptooth from The Land Before Time shaking his head at her.
Crichton’s excuse for making the Dilophosaurus and Procomsognathus venomous (that we have no way of knowing whether or not it could do so based on fossils) also falls flat when we remember that modern-day venomous reptiles have hollow teeth to make room for the venom to actually get injected, which would easily be discerned by looking at fossilized teeth. Yes, I know one of the big speeches in the book (from Dr. Wu) is that these aren’t real dinosaurs but rather genetic hybrids, but it still doesn’t make Crichton any less wrong.
The last significant problem with the novel is a plot hole, which is pointed out on the book’s TV Tropes page. During the safari tour, before the storm and the T. rex breakout, the main characters spot a pack of Velociraptors stowing away on a cargo ship headed for the mainland, which gives the plot a ticking clock element as Grant struggles past the dinosaurs to reach the visitor center and warn the crew. However, Malcolm, who was among the group who witnessed the stowaways, is already at the visitor center recuperating from being wounded in the T. rex attack, with nothing to stop him from warning about the runaway raptors except being stoned out of his gourd on painkillers (and suffering from gangrene that ultimately kills him…sort of).
One may get the impression that I hate this book from my complaints about the underwritten characters, paleontological inaccuracies, and relentlessly cynical tone. It is true that, on the whole, I vastly prefer the film’s tone and characters to the book’s, but that doesn’t mean the book is terrible by any means. Crichton is just as good at creating tension in his own way, especially in describing Nedry getting stalked by the Dilophosaurus and what happens after the main characters find hatched eggs, thus proving that the dinosaurs are breeding. Malcolm asks the control room staff to adjust the automatic computer count, which is designed to cap the number of detected dinosaurs at the expected number of 238. When they do so, they discover that the number of dinosaurs has increased to 292, with the Velociraptor population rising from eight to thirty-seven. The book expertly captures the slowly dawning horror of the characters as Malcolm’s warnings about a system-wide breakdown start to come true right before their eyes. And it only gets worse from there.
I recommend you look at this book at least once and see what you think. Granted, those who have already seen the film will probably not be all that impressed, but it doesn’t hurt to see where one of the most beloved film franchises of all time got its start.
The Lost World
This novel is the only sequel Michael Crichton ever wrote to one of his books. Despite pressure from the first book’s fanbase, he was reluctant to do so because the original book didn’t leave any opening for a sequel. True, mainland Costa Rica is still dealing with dinosaurs that have escaped to the mainland. Still, many of the essential characters like Malcolm, Hammond, and Wu are dead, and the dinosaurs on Isla Nublar have been firebombed into oblivion by the Costa Rican military.
But when Stephen Spielberg, fresh off the success of the Jurassic Park film adaptation, also started pushing for a sequel, Crichton decided to give it some more thought and decided there was room to fix some errors he made in the first novel, like the by then disproven idea that T. rex would lose sight of you if you stopped moving and how newly cloned Velociraptors would have developed strong pack dynamics without any adults to teach them. One of the biggest, however, was the overly streamlined genetics lab from the first book, which seemed far-fetched given that the type of genetic engineering Jurassic Park was conducting should result in a very high failure rate for most embryos. Therefore, Crichton shifted the dirty work to a large R&D facility on Isla Sorna, the titular lost world.
Finally, to pull this off, Crichton would need to raise Ian Malcolm from the dead, which wasn’t that difficult a task given that his death was so obliquely described in the first book. As the man himself put it, “I could do without the others, but not him because he is the “ironic commentator” on the action. He keeps telling us why it will go bad.” He even took inspiration from Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote an equally famous dinosaur novel of the same title and also brought one of his most famous characters, Sherlock Holmes, back from the dead after his infamous fall off Reichenbach Falls with his archnemesis Professor Moriarty.
Unlike the first novel, The Lost World’s plot differs wildly from the film adaptation. Aside from the basic premise of Ian Malcolm leading a new group to Isla Sorna to rescue someone (Richard Levine in the book and Sarah Harding in the film) and the famous T. rexes pushing a trailer off a cliff scene, virtually none of the plot points from the novel are adapted into the movie. About half the characters introduced in the book (Richard Levine, Arby Benton, Jack Thorne, George Baselton, and Howard King) are absent from the film version, as is the primary human antagonist, Lewis Dodgson. The book is much smaller in scope, with the action focused entirely on Isla Sorna (indeed, the climatic T. rex San Diego ramage is a film original scene).
In addition to correcting some of the paleontological inaccuracies he made in the first book, I felt that Crichton was much better about writing the female and child characters in a much more believable way. Sarah Harding feels less like the sexy lamp Sattler was in the first book, being a muscular wildlife expert who manages to punch out a raptor and plays a significant role in getting Dodgson killed by the T. rexes at the end, thus getting revenge for Dodgson leaving her to drown for no apparent reason when they first arrived at the island. Crichton also clearly took notes from Spielberg’s handling of Tim and Lex from the first film, as Arby and Kelly Curtis play far more active roles in the plot, with Kelly in particular managing to tranquilize two raptors (thus saving Levine’s life) and helping to find the service tunnel that allows the group finally escape from the island at the end.
Like the first book, much of the science described in this book is interesting to read, even if Malcolm’s drawn-out speeches about chaos theory can get somewhat pretentious. Even so, the scene where the characters encounter a pair of Carnotaurus who can change their colors in a way that makes them completely invisible, like stereotypical Hollywood chameleons (at least at night), right down to being able to mimic chain-link fences, is just a bit too ridiculous to take seriously.
I also felt that the ending was a little too abrupt for my taste. The action is just as high-octane as it is in the rest of the book, with Harding racing to catch a helicopter before it leaves (and failing to do so) and the raptors about to break into a general store where the main characters are hiding. Then, the group discovers a service tunnel that leads to a boat dock, which the characters use to escape, and the story only continues long enough for Malcolm to explain that an outbreak of a prion-based disease will eventually kill all the dinosaurs on Isla Sorna. It’s not a bad ending, just a bit sudden.
Overall, The Lost World is a bit more low-key than Jurassic Park, but it still has plenty of heart-stopping dinosaur action with much better character writing than the first book. Check it out and see what you think.
And with that, the first entry in my Jurassic Park retrospective is finally out. It definitely took a lot longer than I thought it was going to, which can be partially blamed on me spending the first half of the month finishing Part 1 of the 2023 animated series list and also me having to spend much of the past two weeks dogsitting (first for one of my mother’s teacher friends and then for my cousin’s hyperactive black lab who virtually never stops wanting to play fetch). But the important thing is that it’s out now for your reading pleasure (or displeasure; I don’t control how you guys react to it).
Stay tuned for the next entry on the franchise’s real MVP: the legendary 1993 film adaptation directed by Stephen Spielberg and released by Universal Pictures. Until next time, beautiful watchers!
