Agent Palmer

I don’t know James Patterson. I know of him, I know of his work, but I don’t know his work. I do know that I love Michael Crichton, and I haven’t found a book of his that I didn’t fall in love with.

Michael Crichton’s Prey is a parable for technological advancement gone amok. It starts with an introduction to “Artificial Evolution in the Twenty-first Century,” which allows Crichton to weave a better story and set the stage for Prey to read more like a play than a novel.

Next is a masterful chaotic mess combining real science and science fiction so seamlessly that you have no idea what is or isn’t fabricated or researched unless you have a Ph.D., which I don’t. It asks and deals with a lot of bioethical issues and raises as many concerns as it does questions.

Michael Crichton’s The Lost World is a melding of espionage, extinction, and evolution. It’s much more of a short story in scope than Jurassic Park is as a novel. But the tension and thriller aspects of the book make for a gripping read.

It’s been more than two decades since I first read Jurassic Park. In that time, I’ve come to deeply love the original movie trilogy and the new series starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. But the thing is, this book is far more compelling than I remember, and it is quite odd to be placing different pieces of it in the different films in the original trilogy.