A techno-thriller, with a neo-con point of view

Michael Crichton is one of our most gifted popular novelists. A true son of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Crichton specializes in cutting-edge science fused with suspense in what has been called the techno-thriller. Since his arrival in 1969 with “The Andromeda Strain,” Crichton’s fecund imagination and considerable storytelling talent have brought pleasure to millions. Over the course of a baker’s dozen entertainments, including such bestsellers as “Sphere,” “Jurassic Park,” “Timeline” and “Prey,” Crichton has revealed himself to be a master of plausible and frightening scenarios of science unloosed in the hands of the unscrupulous and the obsessed. He is a connoisseur of catastrophe.

If science run amok has been Crichton’s stock in trade, our political culture and its discontents have not been far behind. In other novels such as “Rising Sun” (about Japanese economic competitiveness) and “Disclosure” (about women in the workplace), he has tackled some of the more contentious issues of our times.

In his new novel, “State of Fear,” Crichton combines both. It is the story of what Crichton regards as a hoax -- global warming -- perpetrated upon a gullible public by cynical environmentalists and their celebrity supporters who plot acts of eco-terrorism to maintain multimillion-dollar fundraising bureaucracies. The conspirators include Nicholas Drake, a trial attorney with no scientific background who is co-founder and president of the National Environmental Resource Fund, which pays him an annual salary of nearly $350,000 (plus a $100,000 expense account) and bought him comfortable homes in Brentwood and Georgetown. He is an eco-czar to an adoring court of acolytes who will stop at nothing.

Drake is increasingly desperate for a new and effective cause to raise the $42 million a year required to keep the fund alive. The threat of species extinction no longer works. “You can’t raise money on insect extinction,” he declares. “Exotic diseases from global warming -- nobody cares.” Something spectacular is needed to coincide with his upcoming Santa Monica conference on “Abrupt Climate Change.” The media need a story. So do his well-heeled benefactors. Privately, he knows that recent scientific research no longer supports predictions of ecological disaster. No matter. He will hasten history by giving it a technological shove. He conspires to artificially induce a series of deadly climate events.

The plot devolves on the efforts of one Peter Evans, attorney to George Morton, a wealthy philanthropist and heir to a forklift fortune (described by Crichton as possessing “the congenital uneasiness of inherited wealth”), and Sarah Jones, Morton’s beautiful blond -- what else? -- Girl Friday, to get to the bottom of increasingly ominous mysteries that seem oddly and portentously linked.

They hook up with the indispensable John Kenner, an erudite Harvard Law School graduate, expert mountain climber and precocious MIT professor and also a powerful agent for a secret federal intelligence agency, and Sanjong Thapa, his computer-savvy and militarily skilled Nepalese sidekick.

Together with Kenner’s niece, Jennifer Haynes, a young, attractive blue-eyed attorney with attitude and a specialty in martial arts, they quickly find themselves trying to unravel and prevent a terrorist project that is “global in scope, immensely complicated, extremely expensive.” The plot unfolds on three continents and numerous locations: Paris, London, Vancouver, Iceland, Los Angeles, Culver City, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Antarctica, San Francisco, Oakland, Flagstaff, the Solomon Islands and, repeatedly, the Van Nuys Airport.

Michael Crichton is a man justly famous for doing his homework, typically leaving no fact unremarked, so eager is he to establish the verisimilitude of the stories he is at pains to tell. Readers of “State of Fear” will learn many things: Did you know that the total weight of termites is a thousand times greater than the weight of all the people in the world? That the methane produced by termites is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide? That scientific studies show no increase in extreme weather events over the last 100 years and that, “if anything, global warming theory predicts less extreme weather?” That banning DDT killed more people than Hitler?

The plot is contrived, the characters one-dimensional, the predicaments predictable. Crichton has an unerring instinct for cliche: Sarah and Jennifer, for instance, find themselves tied to stakes while dark-hued South Pacific cannibals salivate and pound their tom-toms; he’s even tossed in a man-eating crocodile. But none of this matters.

For Crichton, the novel is politics by other means. He reserves his real passion for set pieces of dialogue in which he argues against fashionable nostrums that have lodged themselves in the popular imagination. He is appalled by the mumbo-jumbo that opens liberal Hollywood’s wallet to do-gooder causes on the basis of science that is hostage to political correctness. He writes sneeringly and contemptuously of those romantic idealists who would swallow wholesale the snake oil of liberal delusions and dubious science sold by modern hucksters.

All this is made plain in numerous footnotes and charts that spice the text and in two eloquent and impassioned appendices and a useful bibliographic essay of the more than 150 books and studies he consulted to write this book.

In the history of popular literature, it has usually been those on the left who have sought in the novel an instrument to gain a wide readership for their causes. Think of the works of Jack London (“The Iron Heel”), Upton Sinclair (“The Jungle”), John Steinbeck (“The Grapes of Wrath”). More recent examples include E.L. Doctorow (“Ragtime”), John le Carre (“The Constant Gardener”) and Barbara Kingsolver (“The Poisonwood Bible”).

Now comes Michael Crichton offering a screed against the received wisdom of Rachel Carson’s fear-mongering progeny and the manic exaggeration that he argues has been her most pernicious legacy more than 40 years after the publication of “Silent Spring.” Whatever his literary aspiration, Crichton’s real genius is to have written the first neo-con novel. Inside this bloated 600-page book is a fierce and compelling Op-Ed piece desperate to get out.

Steve Wasserman is Book Editor of The Times.