While this book is almost always classified as a thriller — and the thriller aspects of it are undeniable — at its core, the book is a study of the hubris of scientists who do science not for research or knowledge, but for money and ‘because it can be done’.
The story centers around an experiment gone wrong. Businessman John Hammond envisions a biological theme park filled with resurrected dinosaurs. He sets up InGen, a genetics company, on a small island called Isla Nublar off the coast of Costa Rica. There, using revolutionary technology, the team rebuilds the DNA sequences of dinosaurs from bones and other sources. These are then grown as eggs, incubated and hatched. The island has several sections demarcated by fences and moats, and each species is let into its own section.
John Hammond brings paleontologist Alan Grant and his student paleobotanist Ellie sanders over to the island to showcase his work. He shows them several dinosaurs, such as apatosaurus, stegosaurus, dilophosaurus, velociraptors and the fearsome tyrannosaurus rex. Accompanying them is mathematician Malcolm Ian, who has long predicted that this experiment will fail using his field of study, Chaos Theory.
Dr. Grant discovers that the animals are breeding and escaping the island, which the park people did not expect. Dr. Ian shows that these specific events were predicted in his report, and also indicates that this is the first step in a collapse of the infrastructure on the island itself.
On cue, a disgruntled employee disables certain sections of the security system to steal technology, but this leads to him being killed by the dilophosaurus. While the remaining technicians work to restore the system, a series of mis-steps leads to several people being attacked and killed by dinosaurs, including John Hammond and Malcolm Ian. The story ends with the Costa Rican military having to destroy the entire island from the air.
The book is over 30 years old, and some of the key aspects are still science fiction; resurrecting Dinosaur DNA is impossible because there is simply no way for the DNA to last the vast eons of time since their death. Even so, the world today is vastly different from the world of dinosaurs, up to and including the very air we breathe.
This is Michael Crichton’s most famous work, and the effort put into research, both in geography and science really shows. A very well written book, and adapted well into the first movie of the same name by Steven Spielberg.
On a side note, Costa Rica is famously one of the only countries in the world that does NOT have a military.