Adventure classics -- Dinosaurs for the kid in all of us

Jurassic Park

by Michael Crichton

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I never intended to start this July of science fiction adventures with Michael Crichton’s homage to Arthur Conan Doyle. No, not that Doyle. The Doyle who created super-rational detective Sherlock Holmes. I mean the Doyle of the 1912 adventure, The Lost World (and whose boyishly irascible hero, Professor Challenger, bears more than a passing resemblance to dino entrepreneur John Hammond in the Jurassic Park movies).

Should I have saved a discussion of Jurassic Park the novel until the latest edition of the Jurassic Park movie franchise hits the screens next summer? While I thought about this, giving myself the pleasure of a re-read of Crichton’s cautionary 1990 blockbuster, I was also reading next week’s book, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Actually, I was re-reading Huxley. One of the pleasures of this blog is the excuse it offers to revisit old friends. And Crichton’s laboratory re-creation of extinct dinosaurs reminded me so forcibly of Huxley’s creation of made to order human beings, I determined to run them back to back.

Dinosaurs first: Jurassic Park is ostensibly a cautionary tale about the dangers of genetic engineering, a danger more ominous now than when Crichton first began exploring the idea with a 1983 screenplay.

“The story wasn’t convincing,” Crichton wrote in notes on his official website, www.michaelcrichton.net/. “Finally I decided on a theme park setting, and wrote the novel from the point of view of a young boy who was present when the dinosaurs escaped,“ only to get years of angry reactions from his trusted readers. “Finally, one of the readers said that they were irritated with the story because they wanted it to be from an adult point of view, not a kid point of view. They said, ‘I want this to be a story for me.’”

Luckily for all of us, the adult point of view belongs to Dr. Alan Grant (loosely based on real life paleontologist John Horner), whose wonder at the resurrected dinosaurs is as great as any kid’s.

Lured by the promise of funding for his research, Grant agrees to a weekend visit at the theme park wealthy eccentric John Hammond is constructing on his private island off the shores of Costa Rica. Hammond has also invited Grant’s colleague, Dr. Ellie Sattler; skeptical mathematics genius Ian Malcolm; and an investment lawyer. Most bizarrely, although Hammond knows the park is having problems, he invites his two grandchildren as well, making front runner for clueless grandpa of the year. 

Too bad computer genius Dennis Nedry has chosen this particular weekend to shut down all the park’s power and computer systems so he can pass frozen dinosaur embryos to a corporate espionage agent. Mix in a brewing tropical storm and a pride of vicious velociraptors, and things start to go very, very wrong.

“You’re going to engineer a bunch of prehistoric animals and set them on an island?” asks mathematician Malcolm. “Fine. A lovely dream. Charming. But it won’t go as planned. It is inherently unpredictable, just as the weather is.”

Crichton had never before written novels in series, but Jurassic Park, novel and movie, were so successful he wrote a sequel, The Lost World, paying more explicit homage to Doyle’s version.

Crichton has now gone where all good writers go, but the dinosaurs live on. My complaint? After viewing numerous trailers of movie number four (Jurassic World) on YouTube, I was disappointed not to see baby T. rexes tricked out in the feathers they are now believed to have worn as juveniles. I can only hope the complete movie will correct the omission.

(Next Wednesday -- John Hammond of Jurassic Park thought he had complete control of his engineered dinosaurs. But as we all know, the creatures didn’t read the script. And they’ve spent two of Crichton’s novels and going on four movies exercising their saurian version of free will to escape beyond the reach of human hubris. Can Huxley’s engineered human beings escape as well? Stay tuned for the next adventure classic, Brave New World.)

Adventure classics -- Caution: pterodactyl crossing

The Lost World

by Arthur Conan Doyle

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My family loves dinosaurs. A grandson went to his first grade class’s “career day” program dressed as the paleontologist from “Dinosaur Train.” My daughter measured her foot against the prints in Texas’ Dinosaur Valley state park. And I remember my disappointment as a child when I realized finds of dinosaur eggs were fossils that would never hatch living baby dinos. So Arthur Conan Doyle’s foray into the world of dinosaurs, The Lost World, had to make my reading list.

Actually, my first introduction to the story was a cartoon version, only one among dozens of offshoots inspired by the prolific story. Including of course, Michael Crichton’s only sequel novel.

The debt modern writers owe goes deeper than a T. rex’s footprint. As the late Michael Crichton noted in his introduction to a new edition of the 1912 tale, it “set the standard and the formula for fantasy-adventure stories since that time. The tone and techniques that Conan Doyle first refined in The Lost World have become standard narrative procedures in popular entertainment of the present day.”

image: wikimedia commons

As he did in his pioneering works of detective fiction, the Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle establishes a larger than life expert, the brilliant, irascible and very eccentric scientist Professor George Challenger. Young journalist Edward Malone plays Watson to Challenger’s Holmes, interpreting the great man’s actions and ideas for the readers of Malone’s newspaper -- and of course, for us.

When the story opens, Challenger has returned to London from an expedition to South America with the outrageous claim of finding a remote plateau he believes harbors a lost colony of dinosaurs. With Challenger’s photographs and specimens lost in an accident, he has only a sketch in a notebook left to him by dying explorer to support his story. When scientific colleagues demand more proof, an independent expedition with Malone in tow sets out to replicate Challenger’s journey.

Unfortunately for modern readers, reconstruction of dinosaur anatomy and behavior was still in its infancy in the early twentieth century, as you can see from the illustration for this post, a page scan from Conan Doyle’s original edition. Tyrannosaurus rex had received his name around the turn of the century, but still had a reputation for being slow, cold-blooded, and dim-witted. And the viciously brainy velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame wouldn’t be discovered until the decade after Conan Doyle’s story.

“Conan Doyle needs a clever antagonist to sustain his narrative,“ Crichton wrote, “and with warm-blooded, intelligent dinosaurs still fifty years in the future (he) postulates a race of savage ape-men.” The expedition’s scientists, big-game hunter, and of course, reporter, are barely a match for the atavistic ape-men (“dryopithecus of Java or pithecanthropus” the expedition scientists speculate).

But keep reading for Conan Doyle’s climactic scene of a living pterodactyl set loose in a packed London lecture hall. It’s as outrageously entertaining as any movie show down between T. rex and raptors. Makes me wish that somehow that lonely pterodactyl found its way home.

Conan Doyle’s tale, its copyright extinct as a dinosaur, is available at
www.google.books.com/.

The text of Crichton’s introduction is available at www.crichton-official.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics looks at another monstrously influential adventure story, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth.)