As promised, I spent a few days reading Michael Crichton’s latest thriller, Why the Environmental Movement Is a Big Fake Lie. Seriously. This was not a good book. Now, I’m going to try to stay out of the politics of it, because probably most of the factual bits of the book were well-researched, or even accurate. Leaving that aside, it had more problems than you can shake a pointed stick at.

First of all, the opening segment reminded me of Snoopy’s novel. For about 50 pages, there was a string of seemingly unrelated incidents, scattered all around the world and involving all different characters. Was there, in fact, a dark and stormy night? Okay, maybe not, but that’s the only true divergence from the formula. After that, he went straight into a Terry Goodkind novel. That is, the plot was a thin, semi-transparent cover for a series of polemics. Which were themselves irritating above and beyond the fact of them, because they were presented in a smug, know-it-all voice (that I may be reacting to more negatively than I should, because it reminds me of a guy I used to game with) to correct the conveniently naive assumptions of first our heroes and later some Hollywood caricatures. Well, okay, now I’m being unfair, as I’m quite sure they were totally believable Hollywood types and not caricatures at all. But the point is, if you need to write this kind of thing, just write a scientific book. Oh, but wait, that wouldn’t let you trick a lot of people into hearing what you wanted to say.

The very worst part, though, is that Crichton has on occasion written a lot better than this. So if he was this invested in the message he was trying to get out, I feel like maybe it wouldn’t have killed him to be a little more subtle and apply a bit more actual talent to the topic. Because I’d probably be a lot more comfortable with his message if I weren’t so pissed at being talked to like a six year old.