What you do not have is anything recognizable as human. Add to that near-omniscience, a LexisNexis-like ability to cite obscure scientific papers, and a penchant for talking like HAL from 2001 and you have an egghead author’s wet dream. Kenner makes MacGyver look like a damsel in distress, with training in martial arts, espionage, guns, helicopters, and whatever else the machinations of plot require. John Kenner, a professor of Geoenvironmental Engineering at MIT (any similarity to MIT professor and global-warming skeptic Richard Lindzen is, again, hard to miss) and an undercover government agent.

NERF is run by Nicholas Drake, a man whose humorless zealotry functions as the book’s stand-in for the entire green movement.ĭrake’s nemesis is Dr. The Plot ThinsĮvans is a lawyer for George Morton, a rich philanthropist upon whose financial largesse depends the National Environmental Resource Fund (any similarity to organizations living or dead - like, say, the Natural Resources Defense Council - is purely intentional).

It’s ironic that in excoriating scientists and the public for insufficient analytical skepticism, Crichton has produced a book that demands a sponge-like passivity on the part of those reading it. Perhaps it is fitting, though, since Evans is a cipher, a blank slate, and as such an appropriate stand-in for the reader, whom Crichton means to lecture and manipulate so transparently that an intellectual pulse would be merely a hindrance.

State of fear book