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In State of Fear, a missing chunk of donation money gets used for nefarious purposes, which ultimately are intended to serve as an exclamation point on a conference on global warming: We made it happen, so that now, when we say we told you it would happen, you'll believe us and switch your allegiance to our agenda. The novel is not that simple of course, and events and heroes come in to save the day at the last minute, but that is the gist of it. Underneath the plot, the novel is really about information architecture and the plausibility of denial.

Ecologically, everything is interconnected with everything else. It always was, of course, but under globally hyperlinked convergent media conditions, you can actually see the connections because they happen so rapidly that whether you solve the question of cause and effect begins to pale in comparison to the sheer pleasure of pattern recognition. The global village has a brain (electronic media), and now you can watch its synapses firing. If you haven't been watching the media on a daily hyperlinked basis, you can see it in media about the media. Increasingly in the movies, from Conspiracy Theory (in 1997, when the Internet became a mass medium) to last year's The Butterfly Effect (for which Ashton Kutcher is the reason most people missed this otherwise provocative film), you witness the interconnectedness of everything, and how one small change in one realm can have massive consequences in another realm.

In addition to being a visually-oriented page-turner that would make a great movie (duh), Crichton's book does three other things exceedingly well: 1) It makes the case for fiction writers as the last truth-tellers. 2) It gives ample grist for the conspiracy theory mill. 3) It offers the reader an excellent primer on media ecology.

To the first point, Crichton deftly reminds us that today, only fiction writers can tell the truth. (Mark Twain thought only dead men could). In Neil Gaimain's book, American Gods, the author's note tells us that this is a work of fiction, with the caveat that "only the gods are real." In Crichton's book, the disclaimer of fiction has only this exception: "footnotes are real." God, it would seem, is in the details. And that is where you'll have to look, and look carefully, to consider just what Crichton really is saying. For on the one hand, he is extremely critical, almost mockingly so, of the misuse and abuse of science by propagandists pushing an agenda. For his take on environmentalism as tantamount to a religious faith, see his famous speech to the Commonwealth Club from October of 2004. At moments, his debunking of junk science, complete with charts, footnotes galore, and common sense backing him up, reads like some of the best of Michael Fumento's or Todd Seavey's non-fiction writing on the same subjects. (Full disclosure: these gentlemen also have their critics.)

On the second point, Crichton's book does give an awful lot of tantalizing speculation, bordering on justification, for some of the more provocative conspiracy theories out there. Do a Google search on "tsunami conspiracy", and you'll see what I mean. Crichton's novel itself unravels a series of seemingly disconnected events until the protagonist finally understands what turns out to be the ultimate conspiracy for political control by means of manipulation of nature —calving ice shelves in Antarctica and creating underwater earthquakes to spark 500 mph tsunamis in the South Pacific.

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February (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49