Michael Crichton sepaks to the Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy
An excellent
speech delivered by Michael Crichton to the Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy:
Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century
Some of you know I have written a book that many people find controversial. It is called State of Fear, and I want to tell you how I came to write it. Because up until five years ago, I had very conventional ideas about the environment and the success of the environmental movement.
The book really began in 1998, when I set out to write a novel about a global disaster. In the course of my preparation, I rather casually reviewed what had happened in Chernobyl, since that was the worst manmade disaster in recent times that I knew about.
What I discovered stunned me. Chernobyl was a tragic event, but nothing remotely close to the global catastrophe I imagined. About 50 people had died in Chernobyl, roughly the number of Americans that die every day in traffic accidents. I don’t mean to be gruesome, but it was a setback for me. You can’t write a novel about a global disaster in which only 50 people die.
Undaunted, I began to research other kinds of disasters that might fulfill my novelistic requirements. That’s when I began to realize how big our planet really is, and how resilient its systems seem to be. Even though I wanted to create a fictional catastrophe of global proportions, I found it hard to come up with a credible example. In the end, I set the book aside, and wrote Prey instead.
It's a bit of a long read -- plan on taking about ten minutes -- but worth it.
I am very glad that he didn't move on after writing State of Fear.
This is stuff that needs to be brought to people's attention again and again until it sinks in...
Posted by DaveH at December 28, 2005 10:28 AM