Book Review : Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

Twenty six years after watching it the first time in a theater, the jaw dropping visual effects of the first Jurassic Park movie are still fresh on my mind. Watching creatures long extinct coming back to life and then running amok in an island built specifically to contain them was immensely exciting to a young boy. It took a couple of years for the dinosaurs in my brain to temporarily vanish along with some of the other images of childhood. The feel of nostalgia was so strong when I watched the T-Rex coming out of the paddock in Jurassic World that I almost leapt out of my seat in the movie hall !

Then again there was the book written by Crichton which was one of the first few ‘grown-up’ novels that I read and not surprisingly , I could barely understand a thing. The whole points on Malcolm and his chaos theory, the science behind the dinosaurs and the technical aspects of the park were all the totally uninteresting bits and I sank my teeth quite greedily on the bits on the dino rampage. I read again and again the parts I loved until they became almost imprinted on my mind. The reading experience though was by no means complete and having read this book completely now I do realize that my notions about the whole concept of Jurassic Park were rather misplaced.

What lies beneath the awe inspiring facade of Jurassic Park is quite simply a faulty system with an even faultier fail-safe. The dinosaur cloning methods are quite impressive and yet the brains behind the theme park have little or no clue as to the behavior of the animals themselves. It really doesn’t appear prudent to bring to life one of the world’s largest land based predators and then observe it for how it would behave around human beings who are potentially prey. At the onset the security systems are shown to be rather impregnable and slowly chapter by chapter they all come undone. Dennis Nedry, the rogue programmer is however only the domino that sets the whole chain in motion. A mix of complacency, inefficiency and bafflement leads to utter chaos at the command center of the park.

The version of John Hammond from the movie was a kindly old man who reminds of you of a slightly eccentric granddad but the Hammond that Crichton envisioned was a prick and a rich one at that. The kind of rich man who throws money and people at problems and expects them to go away and if they don’t then yell, coax, cajole, threaten or mollycoddle the problems out of existence. The kind of rich man who through the force of character goes up the ranks and stumbles somewhere along the way. The influence of Hammond over the scientists and the technicians have a huge and influential part to play at the overall downfall of the park. The vision of the park is all his and it is a stroke of genius and yet his habit of pushing others, even the children onto this highly risky enterprise does not speak too highly of his skills as a humane person.

The animals are pretty much the most famous part of Jurassic Park by now and yet I had this thought as to whether this whole story could be transplanted elsewhere. Could the T-Rex be replaced by a Bengal/Siberian Tiger or a pride of Lions ? Could the Velociraptors be replaced by a pack of Wolves ? The story would still be a taut thriller and yet the whole sense of dread might be diminished there for these are animals we know. The years we have spent with them on this planet have given us an indication as to how they might behave at certain instances. How can you apply these rules to an animal who no human being has ever seen before and is almost as big as a building ? The best you can do is to cobble together some approximations on animal behavior and hope that the enclosures hold them. Crichton scores big when dealing with the rampaging T-Rex and the fiercely intelligent raptors. The science of what the dinosaurs really were is skewed and almost twisted out of shape while a fantastic thriller is delivered for the readers !

Jurassic Park to me is one of the best sci-fi thrillers of all time. There are no two ways about it. And well if you cannot be bothered with reading this longish review, there is always the shorter version as said by Ian Malcolm : “God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.” 

Book Review : One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

 

Think of this : You are seated on the banks of a river which has no beginning or end and all that you see are the silvery, serpentine waters in front of your eyes. While all physical attributes say otherwise, you feel that your senses are at their peak levels – everything you see and hear is crystal clear and your thoughts flow around and envelop you like fine mist. In a quiet moment of reflection, you come to an inescapable conclusion that the water that flows through the river are your thoughts and they spill away before you can even think of holding on to them. This is how I would assume what being stoned might feel like.

Gabriel García Márquez’s invention of Macondo is an embodiment of being in such a limbo for while you travel through the town, there are umpteen things happening around you and multiple stories unfold themselves and yet in one reading it is humanly impossible to grasp all of it. At a superficial level, the whole storyline can be compressed into a multigenerational epic of the Buendías and their relationship with the city of Macondo. Such a one word summary would be akin to calling an Elephant as just another animal, for while it is true that the Elephant is an animal there are much more fascinating things about the pachyderm than the taxonomical specifics.

Macondo is a town in Colombia with the only indication to the whereabouts being that it is some distance from a swamp. From such an bland and otherwise unremarkable existence, the city begins life with the arrival of the mercurial José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Úrsula Iguarán. Úrsula bears children and they and Macondo grow up together. Under the able guidance and iron will of José Arcadio, the town slowly begins to thrive and this gradual flowering of the city fuses it together with the fate of the Buendía family from then on. When the moon of the Buendías waxes, the city flourishes and vice versa and one only needs to look at the microcosm of this family to see how the city and the wider nation is faring. Magic freely intermingles with the humdrum of routine life in Macondo and so you have men and women who easily live a hundred years, an old man who writes arcane prophesies in Sanksrit on an eternal set of manuscripts, an ethereally beautiful girl who flies off into the clouds while she is hanging out the washing and rainfall that lasts for a four year period without a moment’s respite. Magic is not called out as a system or something complicated enough to be learned but the people of Macondo (and the reader by extension) are made to see it as a way of life in a place where myths form the mainstay of an entire population’s culture. Macondo and it’s first family of the Buendías are thus used as a brilliant metaphor that chalks out how the nation of Columbia evolved through political reformations, civil wars, the arrival of modernization in the form of the cinema and the automobile, the crushing vice like grip of American capitalism and how it’s inhumane ways led to the massacre of countless multitudes.

The beauty of Márquez’s writing is that he writes at a totally different level of ‘show-don’t tell’ and it falls to the reader to interpret all that happens to the place and the people. You can think of the whole proceedings as a dreamy haze while you were stoned or as a succinct distillation of the centuries old history of a population and you would not be wrong on either count. The story is all this and much more ! The prose is so delicately structured that dialog is minimal and it is the reader who has to connect the dots about how the story is to proceed.

The Buendías for want of a better analogy are like the wheels on a car going downhill with a faulty braking system. They are doomed to repeat all the mistakes of the previous generations with no way of stopping or pulling back from their core nature. Only one trait of theirs continues all through the generations – solitude. This however is pressed on every member of the family whether they like it or not. Some of the family members willingly embrace the social isolation and others struggle valiantly against it’s python like grip and finally succumb. The title of this novel (among other things) is an excellent summing up of what it would have meant to be a Buendía in Macondo. There is love, bravery, sex and violence in huge servings all through the story and yet as a reader I could not but stop to wonder why it was that not even a single Buendía could escape the crushing conclusion of their family saga !

I had put off this book for a long time thinking it is a dense and maybe even uninteresting read but now that I have read it, it must be said that the book deserves almost all the praise that is heaped on it. It is not for nothing that authors like Salman Rushdie and Neil Gaiman cite Márquez as an influence for he is a master who manages to mix the real, the unreal and the surreal into a delicious cocktail that packs a heavy punch. Even as the last page has turned and the inevitable fate has fallen on Macondo, the place and it’s landmarks will stay vividly lit up in my mind for a long time to come.

The only confusion I had initially with the book was with the names of the characters with fathers, sons, uncles and nephews and most other male members being named as either José Arcadio or Aureliano across six generations !

If you have not read this book yet then you are missing out on a fantastic reading experience. Read this and be stoned (sans the weed !)

Book Review : Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari

 

It has been approximately 200,000 years since a rather insignificant bipedal ape started off on a path to become the most invasive species that the planet has seen. This one species has since then irrevocably changed the face of the earth to better suit their requirements. A small group of such humans bonded together to form roving bands of hunter gatherers who traveled across lands and eventually settled almost all over the world, tribes with chieftains were the next step in their evolution which later morphed into kingdoms. Empires, mass upheavals, federalism and parliamentary democracy all followed suit in this march of history. While all of this was going on, the past couple of decades introduced a game changer : the internet which has since then revised the way we think, interact and even select our governments. This past is extensively documented but then all of this begs the question : what next ? Yuval Noah Harari who tackled the history of mankind in his seminal work Sapiens attempts to answer this question while evaluating multiple alternate futures for humanity.

Not so long ago the biggest threats that humanity had to face were threefold : plague, famine and war. The first of these more of less met its match with the wide spread usage of antibiotics and advances in medical technology. Although it is very much possible that any given day a new strain of virus might break free and wipe out a good chunk of the world population, that could be a freak occurrence and the possibility of which is quite small. The second one – famine has become a stuff of lore and legend in the annals of mankind. This does not mean that people do not starve to death in the world, they still do but Harari’s brush stroke is rather wide which tells us that the days of famine staring us in the face as a global threat has passed. What little remains is a result of either abject poverty or willful manipulation by devious administrators to keep a population subjugated. The third one has killed countless numbers in the course of two world wars and the cold war but when the twentieth century rolled around, something interesting started to happen. Barring the occasional flareups, global wars pretty much ground to a halt in the past century. The reasoning behind this was pretty simple : war is an extremely costly affair and businesses/governments could gain more through commerce than they could ever hope of accomplishing through warfare. A few missile strikes might make you feel like you are king of the hill but the expenses that those missiles rack up can be pretty much backbreaking for your tax paying citizens and in the age of social media, that is not a risk anyone wants to run. Long story short we have pretty much vanquished all that stood against us in the past, so what is next for us ? Harari has answer : we would want to become gods !

If we decimate every known disease carrying pathogen then the obvious next step would be to think of immortality and that might not really be the relegated to the realm of sci fi anymore. In a world where things change, morph and evolve in a matter of hours, the future could be an actual age of superheroes. Now let us stop right here and look at the practical side of it : none of this will come cheap and only the super-rich could even be able to afford a tiny bit of all these said advancements. A few centuries from now the economic divide would be so vast that it would be a wide, horizon-encompassing chasm between the rich and the poor. One look at the world’s richest list show us that only a tiny percentage of people are qualified enough to be super rich with no indication that the gap between them and the normal mortals would ever close. The logical summary it gives us is that a vast, vast majority of human beings will be rendered effectively useless in a world of the super powered beings of the future. What is more interesting is that in such a world, a Matrix like scenario will probably never happen for humanity will become redundant for all practical purposes. If you have ever thought that you will one day be a slave to a robotic army then Harari is sorry to burst your bubble for he feels that the robots/techno humans will not even give you a second glance. In such a world, have you wondered as to what happens to religion ? The answer according to Harari is pretty straightforward, in a future where mankind itself will undergo radical changes there will be very little space for the religions of the present day. There is every possibility that data could be the new god in a world where wish granting super powered beings are a norm !

Reading Harari is about navigating through countless interpretations, evaluations, hypotheses and analyses to arrive at the thread of a theory. There is history, mythology, science, anthropology and technology all finding its way into how he weaves his narrative together and he minces no words. Harari is opinionated and makes no qualms about it but there is no way you will not be impressed by the sheer amount of background work that he has done for the book. Maybe a few decades from now, we might look back at this book and laugh at how it got the whole thing wrong but then that is still ok since the scope of this book might even spill into a few centuries. Most of the technological revolutions, super powers and a data based lifestyle are not changes that would come around fully in the next hundred years or so but with what little data we have, this is a possible extrapolation of where we might be headed.

What kept bothering me all through the book was coincidentally the one point that also impressed me : the scale/timeline of the narrative of the book. It spans centuries and with the current rate at which we are wreaking havoc on our environment and the ecosystem, a century on earth seems to be a long shot. I live in a little state at the southernmost tip of India which was ravaged by the biggest floods in recorded history just a year ago. The soil composition has changed drastically in the state ever since. Every time there is rain, the water runs off into the ocean in under a day and the ground water levels are dangerously low. We are only a small distance away from drought while the neighboring state is already in the throes of one. There are every possible signs that this will only increase in the decades to come. With such being the case across most of the cities in the world, how can we think ahead to a century ? What alternatives will come into the picture ? Of course Harari does not answer these for it is not under the scope of the book but these are important questions still.

If you have even a passing interest in mankind, history, anthropology, science and the future then both Sapiens and Homo Deus are MUST reads. While the first book teaches you how inflated our egos are, the second tells you how ridiculously redundant we might be in the centuries to come !