One of the most imperative concerns which have been raking the entire world for almost two decades now is global warming. Tagged as one of the most grisly and vicious intangible monsters which are insidiously exterminating the world at its own volition and pace, global warming is the crux of major deliberations at putative scientific research centers, illustrious conferences and definitely the weather observatories. However, when we rave or rant for or against this minatory monster, all the truisms that we have at our disposal are mainly amassed from scrappy articles or probably from a few pieces penned down by some renowned authors. In a coup to catenate a string of such articles, Michael Crichton took a fictional dig at the gargantuan called Global Warming in his book called The State of Fear.
State Of Fear was published in the year 2004 and is a techno-thriller or can also be assorted as a dystopian novel. Written in the wake of one of the gravest concerns of the world, this novel narrates a thrilling story of how a pick of handful few were pitted against synthetic catastrophes which were orchestrated by a clique of environmental terrorists in order to promulgate their agenda for raising funds.
The story starts in a restaurant where a young man tries to intervene in a ruckus between a young couple. The girl later turns out to be one of the criminals, who is only meant to entice the young scientist to show her ways of spawning giant waves and ends up killing him.
To justify the title of the novel, Crichton initiated the plot with two cold-blooded murders whose lives were mercilessly taken without any remorse and that set the tone of the story. Despite a haywire start, the plot started to flow in one direction after a few chapters and revolved around two sides where one was hell-bent to commit atrocities against mankind under the masquerade of cataclysms and another was hell-bent to avert them.
The story revolved around Peter Evans, who is a lawyer to George Morton, a multi-millionaire magnate, and philanthropist, who is an aficionado in donating to various organizations, underpinning different natural causes. Peter Evans rendered a role which needed him to be naïve and concurrently someone who was ready to save millions of lives, just because he thought that killing someone for the sake of whosoever’s safety did not make sense.
His nemesis turned out to be his colleague, Nicholas Drake, who was the director at NERF (a firm that carries out environmental friendly activities throughout the entire globe). Nicholas Drake, on the contrary to Evans, was a cold-blooded bloke who could have gone to any extent sans any remorse to validate the magnitude of his firm.
The other characters involved are John Kenner, Sanjong Thapa, Sarah, George Morton. John Kenner initially played the role of an insufferable savant to Evans who was simply trying lay down his view-points in order to prove his cause right. However, Evans later realized that Kenner was simply trying to save them all from the fate of being a victim of Nicholas Drake’s avarice.
The story was compact and definitely a page-turner as it was a gripping adventure till the last page which narrated the story of a contest between the good and the bad guys. It was simple and by no means tried to sport a twist that could have bamboozled or probably left the readers in awe. Crichton chose simplicity over too much thrill and that ruse actually worked well.
However, there were major loose ends to this oeuvre of Crichton. Firstly, the story had multiple questions unanswered. Questions that concerned the fate of Drake, the fate of NERF, the provenance of John Kenner, a chapter that instigated sudden interest in an intelligence agency in Tokyo fizzled out in that very chapter, as it was not mentioned any further.
Secondly, there were multiple footnotes attached to the story, where the author claimed that the details he used were upshots of the detailed studies at various environment research centers. The scientists, however, claimed that those data were manipulated as global warming is million times bigger than what it was rendered as.
Thirdly, in an attempt to carry on three scenes at the same end, the story suffered certain drawbacks like losing its intensity for a while. A deliberate attempt to induce love into this thriller failed miserably as no one knew what was the denouement of those transient infatuations.
However, once again the story did thrive on its material and was eulogized by several critics across the world. Crichton’s innovative coup to show the world a point that global warming may be a monster but its impacts are still millions of years to feel could have been definitely tagged as a derring-do, only if he would have left it to fiction. However, his essay to chip in with a few footnotes probably foiled it all.
If you are in for a thriller, you will not be disappointed at all, as this story is solely thrived on the thrill. If you are in for some facts and a thriller, you may simply feel that you are a wanderer in a lost world where there will be no dinosaurs but only giant waves that will kiss your feet and gently flow back to the depth of the ocean, not be seen again forever.