Agenda?

The last bullet point in the author's message is this : "Everyone has an agenda. Except me." I read only the author's message before I began State of Fear, and even 200 pages into the book, I can't get it out of my head. I frankly don't know what Crichton means by that, and it may be irrelevant to the book as a whole, but it has made me focus on the subject of manipulation - by the characters to each other, to scientific data, and by Crichton.

Although the actual writing of the book is rather painful (and admittedly fun to laugh at), its simplicity serves a very direct purpose. By using such formulaic and clicheed writing, Crichton is allowing the focus to be the scientific data. I myself and am confused at this point about what to believe. This book has made me really question my own knowledge about global warming, and how much of it is repeated notions and vague ideas, or actual fact. The scene with Evans getting interviewed by the Vantu team made me incredibly uncomfortable; although I do believe in global warming, and can see Crichton's purpose with this scene, I still began to doubt all the global warming information I'd heard.

But the characters who are fighting to spread (seemingly false) information about global warming are also manipulated to make readers think about data sources. Crichton reverses a kind of paradigm by characterizing the environmentalists with glamour. Instead of hippies and peace loving people, they are sexy, corporate, and armed with advanced tech savvy. The extreme focus on sex (like describing Marisa wearing a "tight skirt and spike heels" and Sarah Jones' long legs and blond hair) and questionable business ethics (Nick Drake [who could not be more wrongly named!]) employs a tactic of making the enemies this book as unlikeable because they are enviable and mean. Crichton creates characters who are hybrids of cultural and scientific 'wrongs', and least according to him.

I'm interested to see how this book will unravel. At my current point I can see the complexity of the book and the interpretation of the scientific data. But so far, it is clear to me that there is an agenda in this book on the behalf of the author, which is carefully crafted to create confusion. With so much manipulation on all parts, the issue of global warming becomes a question of reliable data and how culture proliferates its acceptance.