Jurassic Park

I spotted an old copy of the novel Jurassic Park at a used-book sale. The cover proclaimed Soon to be made into a major motion picture!. I recently finished reading it. When I told a coworker that I was reading that book, I was met with a laugh. “Surely you’re joking! Who reads Jurassic Park!”

Usually when people talk of science fiction they mean authors like Asimov and Clarke.  Sci-fi is usually set in the far future, with time travel, space etc being the common themes. I never thought of Michael Crichton as a science fiction writer although now that I think of it there was definitely a lot of science and a lot of fiction in his works. Does science fiction have to have time travel or be set in the future?

As far as the movie is considered, I thought this was a case of very good adaptation. The movie remains faithful to the book (except some minor changes) and and the things that it leaves out are well suited in the book but would have been tedious in the movie. For example, the book is structured around chaos theory. The mathematician Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) studies the park and predicts that the island would eventually go out of control. The book is divided into “iterations” demonstrating how complex unpredictable structures emerge out of simple structures. There are some very interesting explanations about chaos theory, genome sequencing and even programming.

A situation in the book that I found really interesting was when they discover that the animals must be reproducing but they aren’t sure. The program that searches for the animals appears to report the correct number. Then they discover that the program stops when the number of animals it is searching for is reached. It assumes that only error condition is when there are missing animals and not extra animals  – it is a very believable bug.

Also quite interesting is the way the mathematician Malcolm deduces that the animals are breeding – the height distribution is a normal distribution and not a tri-modal distribution you would expect given that there are three batches produced at different times.

Lastly, Nedry, the programmer, played by “Newman” — His back story is that he was made to make changes late into the program and wasn’t being paid to do so – enough to make any programmer mad!