Book Review: Eruption by Michael Crichton and James Patterson
When I heard that a “lost manuscript” by Michael Crichton about volcano eruption had been finished into a novel by James Patterson, it was a no-brainer for summer reading. I’m a sucker for a geo-apocalypse story.
No question, this novel is a page-turner. It’s exciting, and always made me wonder what would come next: it held my attention. The chapters are extremely short- a few pages at a time- making for easier reading. It will certainly make an awesome action-thriller movie. I hear that Spielberg has already signed up for it. The characters are developed well enough without having to make the book too long and, after all, the main character could be argued to be the volcano itself, Mauna Loa. I think I know of, or have met, all the volcanologists portrayed in the book. And by and large, they get Hawaii- the Big Island and its people- satisfactory enough.
That said… reading this book required a suspension of disbelief that grew to the point of just becoming annoying. I think I know why: the book is set in the near future, but it appears that Crichton finished his writing about 20 years ago, and no one (Patterson? Hello?) managed to update it to be tech-realistic for the mid-2020s. As a result, there are too many plot twists and casual occurrences which felt like glitch-in-the-matrix moments or “WTF?” moments. If it were stated that this book was set in a very slightly alternative universe, I’d have been cool with that.
As for the depiction of the volcano and the natural world – the atmosphere and ecosystems surrounding it, the science advisor didn’t do their job, in a very basic way. (In case you didn't know, I’m a professor of earth science and a professional geologist, who is not a volcanologist by specialty, but has dabbled in it.) There are some real howlers which wouldn’t pass muster with an introductory earth science student. Even if one is willing to suspend disbelief about the known history and eruptive behavior of Mauna Loa to accept the premise that the novel describes events around its biggest and most anomalous eruption ever, ever… and even if you accept the premise that the U.S. military would have done some head-scratchingly incongruous things on the Big Island during the Cold War (that’s the closest I’ll come to a spoiler), well, there are too many glaring misstatements of basic science. I could easily take numerous pages out of the novel and ask students to circle the errors therein on their final exam, the next time I teach freshman-level geoscience. It just became tediously annoying. Hopefully, they can be left out of the movie.
For a more entertaining, more gripping, more satisfying, and more exciting Crichton update, read The Andromeda Evolution, Daniel H. Wilson’s 2019 update to The Andromeda Strain.
*** Three stars out of five
