Review: State of Fear

By Micheal Crichton

Micheal Crichton is one of those popular literature writers who thrills by going beyond just page turners, and excites us with the content. He's your dividing line between serious science fiction, and best-seller thriller, and he seems to dance across both sides with ease. State of Fear is another such book, which along with a fast paced storyline, and page-turnability also has great content. Consider it the science fan's Da Vinci Code.
So, the book basically deals with Global Warming, and the great sham that it was, and has become. The thriller element is provided by an extremist eco-terrorist group, that's plotting ecological terrorism on a big scale, to prove to the world that Global Warming is doing bad things, which well, it isn't. Consider this book the anti "The Day After Tomorrow", which is incidentally one of the worst movies I have ever seen in a theatre.
The thought provoking element is provided by the stimulating Ayn Randish discussion placed into the book, where theories of Global Warming, which I myself stopped believing in two or three years back, have been systematically debunked in a fun, cruel and vicious way. Along with that is the crux of the novel, that the world is now in a constant "State of Fear", created by the governments and the media of the world, to make it easier to cattle control the mob. Fear about terrorism, the environment, our health, and about the five billion things scientific studies in universities now seem devoted to finding out that can kill us, or take "2-5 years out of our lives". Sounds nuts? It's not. Why the hell else did George W. Bush get a second term back?
Just the way I like it. That's pretty much all the plot I'm going to give away now, though I will reccomend you go pick up the book. It's a great read, and if any of you are those environmental chappies who think the world is going straight to hell, it really might change your view on things.

Read!