Science Fiction – Page 2 – Nonfiction and Nonsense

Dune by Frank Herbert

I bought this book with the intention of finishing it in time to go see the film in theaters, but that didn’t happen. When I came to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t be able to get through it before it left theaters I spoke to my friend who had read the book. I asked her if they managed to fit the entire book into one film and she said no. So I had then planned to read up to the part she said the film ended at, but that didn’t happen either, because I will say, getting through the first few chapters was a bit rough. You just get thrown in the middle of it without any backstory or explanations, which can be challenging or frustrating when the text is full of unusual made up words and strange names. Trying to figure out what the words meant and how the characters were related to each other meant that I was reading relatively slowly at first. But as soon as I got into the story I found myself looking forward to my evening reading in bed.

I’ve been trying to think about what reading this feels like, or what it can compare to, but I can’t think of anything. I always mentally compare it to Tatooine, because of the vast deserts, but it’s more than that and vastly different from Star Wars. It’s political, tribal, mystical, but also serious and dark, expressing very few moments of joy or humor. It is definitely a book I would read again.

The Lost World by Michael Crichton

Fiction

Another week has gone by and I still haven’t finished the book I started two weeks ago. I feel like no one is going to believe that I have actually finished the book once I do, and that I will have made the review up. If it wasn’t for a sudden onset of abdominal pain and an emergency room visit over the weekend, I believe that I would have been able to focus and get through it. Due to anxiety and discomfort, I needed to read something entertaining to try and keep my mind off things while I waited in my hospital bed. I grabbed The Lost World from my pile before I drove to the hospital.

I had nothing else to do but read while I sat in the emergency department for four hours, but I was not only reading to pass the time, I was reading because the story was excellent. A character that was supposed to have died in Jurassic Park was surprisingly still alive. I actually said “what…”, as I was completely flabbergasted that I was finding myself reading a passage from their point of view. I am glad that this character wasn’t dead, I really enjoyed them in print and in the films. There are several new characters in this sequel, and you will recognize some of them if you have seen the movies. You will also notice that some of the characters are combined into one, or that personality aspects of certain characters are given to several different ones in the film adaptation. Besides enjoying the characters, the plot itself is rich and philosophical as it explores the great debate of all the questions and concerns regarding genetic exploration.

At the end of the book I longed for more, but sadly the author passed away at a relatively young age. I don’t know if he was planning on these books being part of a trilogy, but it definitely could have been explored. In the future, I plan on reading through the entire Michael Crichton collection; he has enough sci-fi books to keep me, or anyone else, going for a long time.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

Fiction

My all time favorite movie is Jurassic Park, the original, the classic. I could watch it every day for the rest of my life and never be bored of it, and it always impresses upon me how well the special effects have held up over time. The film was released in 1993, just three years after the book was written by Michael Crichton. I can’t believe it took me all this time, a spell of over twenty years since I first saw the movie in my friends basement, to finally read the book that inspired the movie.

From the start, I could see that there were going to be a lot of differences between the book and its film adaptation. Some scenes in the book were excluded from the film but I recognized them as being used in the plot of some of the other films that followed. Some of the characters that live in the movie actually die in the book, and some of the characters that die in the movie survive the Jurassic Park nightmare. There are also some variations in character personality, gender changes, and deviations to the outcome. The differences don’t change my feelings about the book or the movie, I like them both independently of each other. I’m very interested to read the sequel, I wonder if the movie version of The Lost World coincides with the storyline.