“At times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct….” I just read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park for the first time, the 1990 novel that inspired the iconic Steven Spielberg film series. The film franchise, with its groundbreaking CGI dinosaurs and star-studded cast, has become so pervasive in the popular imagination it’s hard to imagine a time before T-Rex stalked the nightmares of multiple generations. But the source material is just as terrifying as the blockbuster films that came after. Jurassic Park draws on a long tradition of blending science fiction with horror to explore terrifying possibilities of the future and to warn about the dangerous consequences of misusing new technologies.
For those only familiar with the film adaptation of Jurassic Park, I find it to be quite faithful, though the book has a slower buildup, dives a bit deeper into the story’s philosophical underpinnings, and really has room to explore the nitty-gritty of the groundbreaking science and technology featured. The novel opens with some musings on the rapid developments in the field of genetics, then weaves together disparate narratives about a workman with suspicious injuries, accounts of children being attacked by an unknown species of small lizard, and a team of paleontologists at a dig site. It’s well over a dozen chapters in before the main cast of characters—paleontologist Alan Grant, his student Ellie Sattler, mathematician Ian Malcolm, lawyer Donald Gennaro, computer programmer Dennis Nedry, billionaire John Hammond, and his two grandchildren Tim and Lex—arrive on Isla Nublar and get their first glimpse of a giant dinosaur. Despite the slow buildup, the novel is quite dark from the very beginning, with a gruesome infant death setting the tone for the unfettered violence that the dinosaurs are capable of. Ominous hints are dropped throughout about the poor choices both in the design of the park and in the genetic engineering of the dinosaurs. And hanging over the characters’ heads all the while is the threat (or as Ian Malcolm sees it, the inevitability) that the dinosaurs on the island will get loose and spread to the mainland where they can wreak havoc on the wider population unchecked.
As I outlined in a post several years ago about the overlap of sci-fi and horror, to blend these genres is to reckon with the legacy of the Age of Enlightenment—the intellectual and philosophical movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that prioritized rational thought, encouraged rapid scientific advancement, and posited that one could find a rational and scientific explanation for everything once science has advanced far enough. On a philosophical level, much of the horror in Jurassic Park comes from the suggestion that this type of Enlightenment thinking is inherently flawed. Not—as many Gothic novels or works of supernatural horror would have it—due to the existence of ghosts, demons, or some other spiritual interference in the material world. But rather, as Ian Malcolm explains, due to chaos theory: a mathematical concept which describes complex systems—such as turbulence, weather, human and animal behavior, or any other phenomenon found in nature—as inherently unpredictable. This theory leads Ian Malcolm to boldly proclaim before ever stepping foot on Isla Nublar that John Hammond’s little island experiment will fail to proceed as he expects it to and that the park is “an accident waiting to happen.” This theory brings chaos and uncertainty back into the world of science, setting the stage for the terror that follows.
Like many works of sci-fi horror, Jurassic Park explores societal anxieties about newly developed technologies. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein plays with advancements in the study of anatomy and hints at a brand new field at the time called galvinism, which involved experimenting with electricity and muscle tissue. H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau is a condemnation of vivisection—the practice of cutting animals open while they are still alive, usually for the purpose of study. In Jurassic Park, one new field of study being explored is genetics. The process of DNA sequencing had been invented just a couple of decades before this book was written, and Michael Crighton takes it to the extreme, imagining a world in which scientists can create new life on a whim and bring dangerous creatures back from extinction. Another new technology heavily featured in Jurassic Park is computer programming and the concept of automation. All of the electric fences and other security measures in the park are controlled automatically through a single computer program, which leaves them vulnerable to power outages and nefarious actors. Even more alarming, the park staff keep track of the dinosaurs solely through a series of cameras that log their presence and tally up the numbers. Due to a failure of imagination on the part of the programmers, however, the program only counts up to the expected number of dinosaurs and fails to alert anyone to the fact that they seem to be multiplying.
And, of course, we can’t talk about sci-fi horror without mentioning the mad scientist trope. In this case, this trope is split among several different characters. The central villain of the story who kicks off the ill-fated dinosaur experiment is not a real scientist himself, just a man with enough money and so few morals that he can draw the scientists down the wrong paths. John Hammond is a billionaire who conceived of and financed the park. He makes many terrible decisions along the way, from starting with far too ambitious of a project to cutting corners in the construction, understaffing the island, and failing to prepare for negative outcomes. He even endangers the lives of his own grandchildren by inviting them to visit the island while it is still incomplete and untested. The actual scientists in the story have their own share of flaws, especially Dr. Henry Wu, who is so caught up in his scientific achievements that he creates hundreds of dinosaurs before learning that the frog DNA he has spliced into their genes allows them to change sexes and reproduce.
Much of the anxiety surrounding new technologies and mad scientists comes back to the age old struggle between man and nature. The more that humans try to exert control over the natural world, the more nature will push back in unexpected and catastrophic ways. And the punishment for playing God—as John Hammond seems to do when he makes decisions about which species should populate the earth—is, poetically, a gruesome death at the hands of one’s own creations.
Have you read the original novel of Jurassic Park? (If not, you can easily find a copy at your local library, on shelves at your favorite local retailer, or online using this Bookshop.org affiliate link!) Do you enjoy when science fiction is blended with horror? What other examples of this genre blend would you like to see me explore? Let me know in the comments!