I've been working on a thing that won't see the light of day for a while and in the process re-read State of Fear by Michael Crichton. It's a bad book on lots of levels and I may write more about it here at an appropriate time.
However, there was one of those side-side-issues that's been bugging me a little. If you haven't read the book the Bond-villain-like baddies are eco-terrorists trying to panic the world into taking action on environmental causes.
It is isn't hard to see why the baddies are baddies even if some of the characters sympathise with their objectives. They assassinate individuals and they are also planning events that will lead to mass deaths. That's bad right?
OK but there is a clever thing in the way Crichton sets this up but I think it might be accidental.
The eco-terrorists kill people by using a little blue-ringed octopus in a plastic bag. It's a convoluted way of murdering somebody because they have to manhandle their victim anyway so they get the octopus to bite them. Their methods of mass murder are also complex.
- They work out a way to target lightning at people
- They seed clouds to cause a rainstorm to cause a flash flood that will hit a picnic ground
- They have an aborted plan to do something to a hurricane
- They have a plan to cause an undersea landslide to trigger a tsunami that will hit a specific part of California
So in each case, a natural event is the direct cause of death. The octopus is very contrived and obviously, no court of law would see it as anything but murder, even so, it fits the same pattern. I assume Crichton was partly just after a bizarre murder method and also figured that eco-terrorists would do something "natural". The mass murder by weather phenomenon is more relevant to the plot. The murder methods are intended to look like natural events caused by global warming, to increase support for measures to stop global warming.
So here is a question. Why are these murder methods wrong? Note, I don't mean why are they wrong if the cause was just. I mean, why, for the people trying to stop the terrorists, are the terrorists' actions wrong?
It's weird when you think about it, that a book that is so dedicated to opposition to action on global warming, has villains who:
- Engaged in action that changes the natural environment...
- ...in a way that leads to people dying from natural disasters.
Who does that remind me of? Don't fossil fuel companies resemble that or other corporations engaged in climate-changing activities? I kept wondering if Crichton was setting this up just so a character might get a word in edgeways and say "well who are the real baddies here?" Yet they never do, which is less of a surprise given the general tenor of the book.
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