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But what the hell does that have to do with this science fiction novel? Way too much. It distracts from the story, while adding nothing to it. I suspect that Crichton could have had the effect he wanted by skipping the entire footnote thing and just claiming that the bad environmentalists were conspiring to defraud the media with misleading data. That would make me wonder the next time I saw a similar news story on the tube.

Here's another problem: if you are a female reader, you are not going to find any women you like here. The two main women in the book are overpoweringly beautiful, intelligent and athletic, and are fighting over the dorky protagonist, who already has an equally beautiful, yet significantly less intelligent aerobics instructor sex-buddy. Why are the men in the novel just regular old guys, albeit somewhat intelligent, but all the women are freakin' supermodels?

As much as I didn't want to deal with the science he presents in the book, it seems like the only reason that he wrote the thing, and therefore deserves at least a quick sideways glance. Crichton claims to have spent three years reading about the climate, and presents a voluminous bibliography of his sources at the end of State of Fear. I wonder what makes an author think that he knows more about paleoclimatology than the scientists who've studied it their entire lives? Three years of reading the scientific journals? Go pick up a copy of Science or Nature at the newsstand and see how much of an expert you feel like when you get done trying to read it.

This is complicated stuff.

The following is a quotation from the bibliography section of the book:

"No reader should assume that any author listed below agrees with the views I express in this book. Quite the contrary: many of them disagree strongly." (p.584)

So basically he is saying that he is using the various sources and data in the book out of context to mislead the reader about the validity of the arguments he presents in the novel. What the hell? So you are telling me that you pretended to write a novel that was really a thinly veiled commercial for your personal anti-global-warming agenda that you supported with a bunch of lies and deception? And you want me to pay $27.95 for it, but you only wrote the novel part as an afterthought?

What I recommend you do if you are a Michael Crichton fan like me is to get this one at the library, and read the "Author's Message," the appendices and the bibliography. These are the parts Michael Crichton really should have written in a magazine article somewhere instead of in this book. Then check out this link to a very brief article in Science, one of the two most respected scientific journals in the world. It will give you a clear perspective on the scientific community's point of view on the global warming issue.

Once again, although I actually enjoyed reading most of the book, I still felt really gypped in the end. And when I started looking into the science a little bit, I felt gypped about that, too. This book could have been really great had a little more thought been put into it, but as it stands it seems like a dirty trick.

Hey, why not read one of Crichton's other books? I have read almost all of them, and thoroughly enjoyed each one up to now. Everyone makes mistakes - I bet he will write another good one soon.