Jurassic Park : A Novel (1990) with James Lovegrove

If you are as excited as I am about Jurassic World Rebirth which is releasing this summer this is the podcast for you. Each week in the lead up to the film I am going to be sitting down with a guest to discuss an entry or aspect of the Jurassic franchise. 

This is episode one and it’s all about Michael Crichton’s original ‘Jurassic Park’ novel from 1990 and my guest is author James Lovegrove. 

We talk about our first experiences of reading the novel and what we think of Steven Speilberg’s adaptation. We also explore Michael Crichton’s early years and our thoughts on his writing style.

• Guest Name: James Lovegrove
• Bio: James is an author of over 70 books writing across many genres and also happens to be a huge Michael Crichton fan
• Links: Website, Facebook, Twitter/X

Chapters

03:02 The Genesis of Jurassic Park

06:04 Michael Crichton's Writing Style and Themes

12:13 Character Analysis and Differences in Adaptation

17:46 The Impact of Science and Technology

23:55 Comparing the Book and Film

30:06 Relevance of Jurassic Park Today

Next week I’m sitting down with Derrick Davis to talk about Steven Spielberg’s classic 1993 film. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

This is just a warning to say that this episode features spoilers, mild language, and lots of talk about dinosaurs. Now, if that's not for you, then drop what you're doing and leave now.

SPEAKER_00: 0:15

Jurassic Park starts with a mystery. Along the coast of Costa Rica, there have been strange reports of people, mainly children, being attacked by small lizards that appear to stand on two legs. But no animal matching their description has been seen on planet Earth for 65 million years. An injured workman from a nearby island building a mysterious amusement park is taken to a remote medical center by helicopter during a storm. The worker dies from terrible slashing wounds that the park employee says were created by machinery. However, the doctor thinks they have all the similarities of an animal attack. We then follow a group of experts, a paleontologist, Alan Grant, a paleobotanist, Ellie Sattler, and mathematician, chaotician, Ian Malcolm, among others, as they are invited to this private island owned by a biogenetics company called InGen, run by eccentric billionaire John Hammond. Once they reach the island, they see what Hammond and his chief geneticist, Dr. Henry Wu, have managed to do. and that is bring dinosaurs back to life. They are joined on the tour of the park by Hammond's grandchildren, Lex and Tim. Before they get too far into the tour, the group witness a group of raptors aboard a boat bound for the mainland. To make matters worse, the safety of the visitors and the island is suddenly put into jeopardy by the park's computer technician, Dennis Nedry. He is involved in a case of industrial espionage for rival biogenetics company Biosyn, run by Louis Dodgson. He turns off the power so he can deliver the stolen embryos to the boat, but he is attacked and killed by a Dilophosaurus that spits poisoned venom in his eyes. In the chaos, the adult T-Rex breaks free and attacks the group's land cruisers, injuring Ian Malcolm and splitting up our group of visitors. Dr. Grant must try and get across the island with Lex and Tim in tow, surviving a dangerous ride on the lagoon and an aviary filled with pterosaurs. The island's most deadly animals, the velociraptors, are involved in a battle of wits with the few remaining visitors. Ellie even plays a game of chicken with them to distract them away from trying to get into the main building. When the power is eventually reestablished and the boat captain is called, the raptors on board are destroyed. John Hammond is killed and eaten by a group of compsignathids, and Ian Malcolm succumbs to his injuries. As the survivors are taken to be debriefed by the Costa Rican government, the army moves in and destroys the island and all of its inhabitants. However, there are still reports of strange animals making inroads across the mainland, and we are left wondering if life has found a way.

SPEAKER_01: 3:28

Hello and welcome to Road to Rebirth. I'm Roland Squire. And I just can't wait to share all their thoughts and stories with you. How the podcast will work is that each week I will be looking at an entry or aspect of the Jurassic franchise. And the idea is that you read and watch along with me. Today, I'm talking about Michael Crichton's original novel from 1990. And thank you so much to Caleb Burnett for the wonderful synopsis and also theme music at the top of the show. If you haven't read it... Stop what you're doing now and read it. It's fantastic. Then come back and join me as I chat with a great guest. Kicking us off here is author James Lovegrove. James is a prolific author and has been writing professionally for the past 37 years. He's written over 70 books. has written sci-fi thrillers and also books for children. He's probably best known for his sci-fi series Pantheon and his third book in that series made it to the New York Times bestsellers list. More recently, he has continued the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Conan the Barbarian, but has also written tie-in novels to the television series Firefly and also Marvel's Doctor Strange. And luckily, he also happens to be a huge fan Michael Crichton fan. So I sat down with him last week to talk to him over the phone about his first experience of reading Jurassic Park. So where did your love of Michael Crichton start?

SPEAKER_02: 5:35

I think I saw The Andromeda Strain on TV many, many years ago. Probably when I was about 11 or 12 or something like that. So I picked up the book because I thought the film was great. Picked up the book and Didn't get on with the book because it's very, as we will probably talk about, the style is incredibly dry and quite cerebrum in places. And I was just too young for it. So I then didn't read another Michael Crichton until Jurassic Park came out. And whereupon I read the paperback and loved it. And therefore just grabbed every other Michael Crichton book that was around at the time. and have since read everything that he's done, pretty much.

SPEAKER_01: 6:16

So it really was Jurassic Park that got you into Crichton as a

SPEAKER_02: 6:21

writer? Absolutely. There are three books that I have read in a single sitting and late into the night. One of them is Ian Bax's Escort Airstream. One of them is A Prayer for Owen Mead by John Irving. And the third is Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. It's one of those things where you say you can't put a book down. I could not put that book down. I was just weaving that well into about three or four o'clock in the morning and I was completely gripped by it.

SPEAKER_01: 6:45

What was it that really... drew you in with that?

SPEAKER_02: 6:48

Dinosaurs. I mean, for a start, dinosaurs. So just the concept, it's so brilliant, so unusual. The idea of a theme park with dinosaurs in it, I mean, crikey. And then obviously, you know, it's going to all go horribly wrong. You can tell that by, I haven't got the hardcover with the chip kid design, which is very, very stylish. The paperback's got this sort of picture of the island and the lightning striking down from a stormy sky. And the strap line is, in the future, there will be dinosaurs. And you know that shit is going to happen, and it's going to be exciting. And the books start in a very dry sort of reportage way, almost like it's an article in a scientific journal. And then suddenly it sort of shifts into a mystery mode. Why are these people in Costa Rica being attacked by dinosaurs? strange unknown reptiles. And from there, it just then slips into sort of thriller mode. But also with these dollops of very, very interesting discussion about scientific issues, chaos theory, and that sort of thing. But at least make it feel like you're doing something intelligent and learning something, even as you're enjoying a very, very exciting, well-paced action

SPEAKER_01: 8:09

thriller.

UNKNOWN: 8:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 8:10

So I thought we'd just start by, you know, getting to grips with who Michael Crichton was. Do you know much about his early life? Well,

SPEAKER_02: 8:18

not too much, but I mean, not much more than Wikipedia can tell us. But I mean, he was at Harvard and I think he started writing. He was at Harvard Medical School. And I think he started writing while he was there, just sort of potboilers, just to make a bit of money, which is incredibly, you know, it sounds... It's amazingly, someone that young just thought, I can write a thriller and it will sell. And I mean, some of the early ones really did quite well for him. And I think the film rights were sold and everything. So he was still at college writing. And then I think he gave up being a doctor after, or trying to be a doctor after two or three years and decided that what he wanted to do was be a writer. He then, I think it was 1969, was the Andromeda Strike. And that was his first sort of proper... I think it might even be his first book under

SPEAKER_01: 9:12

his own name. Yeah, that's the first written as Michael Crichton. So he had a period before that where he was writing under pseudonyms, including one, I think, that was Michael Douglas was one of his pseudonyms, which is quite

SPEAKER_02: 9:24

funny. And also one was Geoffrey Hudson, which is based after a 17th century dwarf who was in the courts of one of the royal courts at the time. So... Yeah, Andromeda String, he's right. That was his first Michael Crichton book. And it was a huge success. And I think the film followed pretty soon after. And then after that, it was Terminal Man. And he didn't always do technical. That was the interesting thing as well, because he's done historical novels like Great Train Robbery. Yes. Again,

SPEAKER_01: 9:56

a film that... And he ended up directing that film. I know, it

SPEAKER_02: 10:02

just makes you think of how skilled and clever it is to step

SPEAKER_01: 10:06

up and direct a film. Well, one of the films he directed that ties quite nicely in with his later idea for Jurassic Park is Westworld, of course, released in 1973, starring Yul Brynner as this unstoppable robot cowboy in a theme park catered for the super rich to go and sort of live out their lives in the Wild West, for example, or Roman times. And just like Jurassic Park, of course, it all goes horribly wrong. A

SPEAKER_02: 10:35

film called Runaway, I think you did, as well, sort of soft-fitting with robots on the loose kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01: 10:43

I've never actually seen that. If I'm

SPEAKER_02: 10:44

thinking of the right one, it's got Magnum. What's Tom Selleck? And when I say robots, they're not like Android. They are like a sort of servo robots, you know, ones harvesting crops and things like that. Not a very memorable film, I don't think, but an interesting one nonetheless.

SPEAKER_01: 11:07

What do you think is the main standout of Michael Crichton as an author?

SPEAKER_02: 11:13

He's a very restrained writer. There's no flash. Very sort of journalistic. Or, as I said, scientific, like He often tells a story as though he's unfurling the scientific issue, a problem that he then wishes to see resolved. He uses a lot of graphs and charts and images peppered throughout his books to, again, give that sort of technical gloss to everything. It makes it more realistic and credible, even as he's telling maybe a slightly incredible story about genetically engineered dinosaurs, for instance. And he's always on the top of current trends. In Jurassic Park, it's Chaos Theory, which was very popular at the time, sort of the early 90s, late 80s, early 90s. And also DNA sequencing is becoming quite a thing then. What about you? How do you feel about his

SPEAKER_01: 12:16

style? Yeah, I'm kind of drawn by the, particularly for Jurassic Park, like the short chapter titles, pared back descriptions, character motivations, all of that sort of stuff. It's very immediate, particularly, as you said, the way that Jurassic Park starts with dry nature of a chapter 11 closing. And it talks about InGen being this, it slips in InGen as being this company that is like a hundred other genetics companies that are folded. You kind of go from the wide shot, I suppose, and you're slowly narrowing into the idea of InGen and this is the place, this is the story that we're going to tell. Timeline, which was written post Jurassic Park, the idea of essentially photocopying people back into the past is a ludicrous idea when you say it like that. But when you read his description of it, you were just like, why has nobody done this before we should be doing this right now

SPEAKER_02: 13:11

but it's very good at doing that of meshing reality is dragon teeth it's based on uh something called the bone wars which i didn't know about but it was about um people hunting for or dinosaur bones and others in the american west and two of the characters are are actually real people and um i think something similar with uh with Eaters of the Dead. Not necessarily real, but because it's associated with Beowulf. It's got that sort of interesting, it's the true story of Beowulf element to it. And I think that's very clever to be able to sort of interleave it to the reality in such a way that you feel like you could be reading something that's actually based on, all of it's based on that rather than just here and there.

SPEAKER_01: 14:00

Yeah, and I think he's got a real... authoritative tone, that kind of commands that you read and you pay attention and that you believe what he's saying because he's very to the point with everything.

SPEAKER_02: 14:13

And I think with his science, I am no scientist, but when I read it, it sounds incredibly plausible to me. And I'm very, very reluctant to ever question it because it just seems to me that this is someone who's done the homework and knows exactly what he's talking about. And there's also, I mean, apart from being obviously a very clever man, I think he was very foresighted in many ways. There's a passage in The Lost World, the Jurassic Park sequel, which I've highlighted because it's about losing diversity and not just species losing diversity, but humankind losing diversity and intellectual diversity. So is that disappearing faster than trees? But we haven't figured that out. So now we're planning to put 5 billion people together in cyberspace and it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Now he's writing that back in 1994, 95. And already he was 5 billion people. I mean, we're eight now. But he was foreseeing the fact that something like the internet would start to sort of reduce everything to slop almost. Individual thinking and originality would be among the many victims of that tide of slop.

SPEAKER_01: 15:33

I think that's what hit me about reading these books now at the age I am and looking at them in a different way is quite how prescient all of Crichton's work is. It's the thing of man versus nature. For somebody with a scientific background, when we look at Jurassic Park, he feels like he's got a big hang up over scientists and the scientific approach. He speaks about the fact that just like the medieval age, the scientific age will die out as well. You think that you're better than the people in the people in the future will think that you are just as wrong as then.

SPEAKER_02: 16:12

That sort of leads me to think about State of Fear, which is one of his later novels, published not long before he died. He died in 2008, I think. And that is very provocative because it's essentially a screed against the doom-mongering and also eco-doom that we find ourselves in. And I think there was quite a lot of pushback against it. I think a lot of people felt that he was massaging data to support his argument that actually we're not in a deathly environmental degradation and that in the future, I think, people will consume more and be happier than they are now. And in a way, it was sort of refreshing that someone who was a very intelligent man was taking this approach and backing it up with arguments. But I don't know that his arguments have been borne out by reality and that it was possibly as you say, him being provocative with this, it's not a very effective novel, but as a screen against a certain sort of type of mode of thinking, it was certainly interesting, let's put it that way.

SPEAKER_01: 17:19

So looking at Jurassic Park and the difference between the novel and the film, some of the key people in the story, you know, like John Hammond, Henry Wu is very different as well. He gets a lot more in the book than he does in the film version. And also the fates of the characters as well differ quite a lot. So you read the book before you saw the film?

SPEAKER_02: 17:46

Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And I was, I mean, well, we'll move on to the film, but possibly later, but certainly, yeah, Hammond, for instance, John Hammond, the billionaire owner of Injun and founder of Jurassic Park, is not a good person. He's not Sir Richard Attenborough, sorry, Lord, is it Lord Richard Attenborough? Yeah, yeah. Old twinkly-eyed and avuncular. He's a roosterous, catty-less bastard. and is just, you know, it's hubris. He says something like, helping mankind is a very risky business. Personally, I would never help mankind. He's in it for himself. And Wu is much the same. Wu is, he's very empirical. He seems to have no conscience. And he, I mean, I think there are occasions where he says to Ammon, you know, you should be careful. This is not necessarily a great idea. But Hammond manages always to sway him, usually with the lure of money and scientific renown in his life in the future. And in the movie, he barely features. He's just a sort of one talking head among many. Although they did bring him back for the sequels, the later ones. The

SPEAKER_01: 19:04

most recent ones. The

SPEAKER_02: 19:05

most recent ones. But Wood and Hammond both get killed in the book.

UNKNOWN: 19:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 19:10

Yeah, and the other person who also killed him, although this gets retconned, is Ian Malcolm.

SPEAKER_01: 19:17

What's interesting is that, you know, John Hammond, when I was reading it this time, I was trying to draw parallels between now and then and seeing, and the tech rise that has happened and how those strong men that were present in the 1980s feel very... akin to John Hammond. He's just doing anything for money, trampling over everybody else. And I don't want to say the T word.

SPEAKER_02: 19:43

I can't think of anyone who you could compare him to right now. No, no, no. And there's a certain element to the dinosaurs acting like the gods in a Greek tragedy by punishing the hubris of Hammond and Wu. But somehow the movie flips that because characters who don't die in the book get killed in the movie. And it seems that the dinosaurs are somewhat less morally discerning in the movie. For instance, the hunter, Muldoon, he's played by Bob Keck, I think, in the film. Yeah. And has that wonderful Chevrolet line. Yeah. I mean, all of that, he survives in the book. Yep. Gennaro, the lawyer, the one who's eaten on the toilet by the T-Rex, he survives in the book as well. And I wonder if that was maybe because Spielberg seems to be no fan of lawyers after he named the shark in Jaws after a lawyer, Bruce. Yes. So, I mean, coming back to what you asked earlier, having read the book, when I then saw the film, now I'm going to, this is probably going to make a lot of people despise me. I didn't enjoy the film very much, but I felt the book was so much better, so much richer. The film was great as a Spielbergian fun ride. And It obviously couldn't have the scientific depth of the book. So in the book, for instance, when we're being told about how the dinosaurs were being created, it's not done with a happy jolly party with Attenborough sort of interacting with it and being, again, very smiley and 20s. Isn't this all fun? And here we are, this is very simple so that you can all understand it. but there were other things that i just felt it was it was about the spectacle and there's no denying that the the the cgi that was groundbreaking at the time the dinosaurs was amazing and so with the practical effects you know people seem to forget that a lot of the dinosaurs in the media are huge great rubber creation but i think by the stan winston um yes stan winston did yeah yeah who did aliens as well and They are hugely impressive. There's real sort of soul and life in those big giant heads of the dinosaurs, which the CGI probably wasn't capable of so much in Heads and Tails did. I was disappointed that there were no pterosaurs as well. They had to be saved for a later film.

SPEAKER_01: 22:18

Yeah, because that's such a... I think when I think of the book, I think of the river raft scene. Yeah. The Avery sequence is a huge, huge moment. So the book, compared to the film, it starts... You get lots of incidental characters at the start of the book that you never get in the film version of Jurassic Park. Some of those ideas are taken and put into the Lost World film. But, yeah, the start of the book is a slow burn. So why do you think that... How do you think that works for him in telling that sort of story, that slow burn?

SPEAKER_02: 22:57

I think it works because there is very little suspense in the first part, except that he does introduce an element of mystery. Bossy is killing these people in Costa Rica, which gets you then through the science a bit and into the park. And where, as Ian Malcolm has been busy telling us, chaos is going to ensue at some point. So we're kind of anticipating that. So you are able to get through those first 100 pages, which can be quite heavy with the science, simply because you are anticipating that there's going to be carnage, and lo and behold, there is carnage. And I think that's one of Crichton's great skills as a writer, is to keep you engaged and interested. Evening, and again, this might be slightly theoretical, you don't come to Crichton for characterization. A lot of his characters are not distinctive and memorable. They are there to serve functions of the plot. So even Malcolm, who I think emerges as the most fully formed and distinctive character, he's a bit of an arrogant prick because he's right all the time, but he's not ashamed about being right. And he will tell you to your face, you're wrong, you're stupid, I'm cleverer than you. And I suspect that the reason that we all loved him is because Jeff Goldblum in the movie made him a much nicer and cooler and sleepier person and sexier than this rather sort of pugnacious and tenacious mathematician in book.

SPEAKER_01: 24:32

I was trying to think about this. Who is the main character? of Jurassic Park, you get introduced to Alan Grant first. And when I've watched the film, it's always difficult between Alan Grant and Ian Malcolm as to who is actually the main person. Ian Malcolm is the head of the main character. And then you've got Alan Grant that is the doing. He is the character that goes out and does everything. He's not a kind of mouthpiece. He is just functionary. in his way. Whose arc do you think... I mean, do the characters have arcs?

SPEAKER_02: 25:15

I'm not convinced they do. And I think something the movie drew out to create an arc for Alan Grant was to have him learn to accept the two children, Lex and Tim, and become... paternal towards them where before he'd be you know purely an intellectual all about the paleontology and

SPEAKER_03: 25:36

yeah

SPEAKER_02: 25:37

um and there is that's hinted at in the book but not terribly strongly uh and if there anyone needs the heart of this it's weird you're right there's this kind of three-part character all these three characters merged into one person if you merge them into one person ellie satner would be the heart of it because she's the one who has you know an element of compassion that both Grant and Malcolm lack. And I think in the movie, Samuel was a very good cast. And they gave him a slightly sort of Indiana Jones-ish air with the hat and the tunas. And he brought, again, some warmth and some humanity to the character. Because a lot of these people are just scientists. But yeah, it is hard to say. I think he's... I don't think he generally interests humans so much as what humans do.

SPEAKER_01: 26:31

That's interesting. Yeah, I'd never really thought a bit like that. They're almost like his pawns that he uses to get things done and to do the things. Like Ian Malcolm is his mouthpiece for this story. And more so than I think any of the other books that I've read of Crichton, Malcolm feels like Crichton. Why do you think he decides to kill Malcolm at the end of Jurassic Park?

SPEAKER_02: 27:02

It's a strange decision, and one that I've been able to reverse. I suspect it might have been sort of an element of Jeremiah, here I am in the wilderness, prophesying doom and no one's listening to me, and my fate therefore is forever to be ignored and die unacknowledged. And in The Lost World, he miraculously recovers and comes back, and he's back with a vengeance. Yes. Ah, so you didn't listen to me this time. Well, wow. Hear what I have to say. I mean, I think that's, again, I don't know. There's no sort of evidence of it. In fact, it was because Jeff Goldblum made him such a winning character, this kind of cool, black-clad, figure that possibly prompted Crichton to resurrect him. But more generally, the movie was, let's say it's an all ages experience with safe elements of violence and The book is much more hardcore and gory. I mean, there's one scene, which doesn't make any sense, where Alan Grant uses chemically poisoned eggs to kill the Velociraptors. Yes. And, you know, I can't see the Sam Neill version of Alan Grant doing that because he loves dinosaurs too much. He means they are threatening his life or the life of people he's protecting.

SPEAKER_01: 28:38

He'd been thinking about writing this for ages, and we talked about Dragon Teeth that came out after he died, but that was, I think, originally written in the early 70s and wasn't picked up by a publisher. So he was always interested in dinosaurs, and his first attempt at writing this was as a screenplay, and it was about a grad student that was creating a dinosaur in a lab, secretly. And I think he couldn't get... He thought that... too expensive for a grad student to be doing that and why would you you couldn't keep that thing hidden and so to have the money to do this it needed to be for entertainment

SPEAKER_02: 29:18

yeah absolutely because that's where the money would be and I think it's again Hammond says something to Henry Woo about we wouldn't be able to do this research at a university or in any government institution because there'd be too many checks and balances for one thing. But they also, they just wouldn't, because we had failed a couple of times already in various experiments. But private enterprise kids, hey, that's where it's at. You know, that's where we're pushing the boundaries and where, you know, stuff gets done. And it would be unwise to go on parallels with Elon Musk, but maybe he can. You know, there's something just like, you know, we can do anything we like because we're private enterprise and no one oversees us and what could possibly go wrong.

SPEAKER_01: 30:05

Which is the better version of the Jurassic Park story do you think?

SPEAKER_02: 30:09

I think I was going to sit on the front and say leave and enjoy both because they are both very different things but they share so much DNA. But you go to the film for two hours of escapist fun and you know directed by the greatest living director of our time, at the height of his powers, with some incredibly, for the time, sophisticated computer effects. The book is a more cerebral experience, but you don't look down on it for that, because it is exciting and gripping in its way. But it grips you more intellectually, whereas the media can grip you viscerally.

SPEAKER_01: 30:56

Do you think it remains relevant today?

SPEAKER_02: 30:58

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I don't think it can ever not be, just because the themes of science potentially running mock are consistent and always ever-present. You know, you think about AI today, you know, becoming such a huge issue, especially for some of us writers. And also the conspiracy theories behind COVID, that it might be created in a laboratory in Wuhan and all of these things. There are always scientists out there who are pushing the boundaries without the necessary checks and balances to make sure they're not pushing them too far. And also perhaps without thought the consequences beyond the notion that this is something that they are interested in and that they want to research and explore. and to hell with the consequences.

SPEAKER_01: 31:52

I'm going to leave our interview there. Part two will be released in a couple of weeks, and that will be our discussion about Michael Crichton's follow-up novel, The Lost World, from 1995. You can find James on his website, which is jameslovegrove.com, and on there you'll also find his links to his Facebook and Twitter, which I'll also put in the show notes for this episode. He has a new book out in June, and that is Fantastic Four, The Coming of Galactus, just in time for the new film that's coming out in July. For now, I'll just say thank you so much for listening to this first episode, and I Just to say that next week I will be chatting to Derek Davis of Jurassic Time about Steven Spielberg's classic adaptation of Jurassic Park. It's a really fun conversation and one not to be missed. If you would like to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show, it would be very much appreciated. It really does help this podcast find its audience and importantly, find people like you. But until next time, I'll just say bye. Thank you very much for listening and goodbye.