On a whim, I rewatched The Andromeda Strain last night—the old, 1970s version rather than the 2008 remake from Ridley Scott, both based on the 1969 novel by Michael Crichton.
Was there ever a popular writer more in love with the gadgets of science—and more suspicious of science itself, or, at least, of scientists? Plenty of science fiction and fantasy has been mistrustful of science. Just among the classics, there’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau.
For that matter, plenty of regular pop fiction feels the same mistrust: If you ever can’t figure out who did it in an Agatha Christie murder mystery, guess that it was the most prominent doctor or scientist in the story, and you’ll probably be right.
But in novel after novel, Michael Crichton somehow managed to combine the cheering on science and the ginning up of terror at that same science. Notice, for example, in The Andromeda Strain, how the scientists and technicians are always wrong. The worst effects of their arrogance are avoided only by the intervention of accidents too mundane for them to notice. But, oh, they have such cool toys.
An odd combination, isn’t it? And it took a kind of literary genius, in a minor vein, to pull it off so consistently.
August 5th, 2009 | 1:04 pm
I’d quibble with the assertion that Moreau is mistrustful of science. Wells’ unsettling idea in that book (as I see it) is not merely that a dog is an operation away from a man, but that a man is an operation away from a dog. That is, not that science is capable of perverting nature, but that it reveals (perhaps “exposes” would be the better term) true human nature as being not especially elevated or exceptional. As to whether that revelation is good or bad–a judgment that would be entailed in deciding whether to trust or mistrust science–Wells seems (in Moreau and elsewhere) neutral. In Wells’ books science is mostly amoral: it undermines human pretensions, clarifies or confirms the “negative” low truth about an indifferent nature, may (under the guise of technology) lead inevitably to the decline and extinction of the human species. But this is simply what science does; there is no real “cautionary” element to Wells’ theme, as there arguably is in Frankenstein, Jekyll, and BNW. If anything, Wells seems gleeful in expressing it. Of course, he does so with exquisite imagination and some terrific writing.
August 6th, 2009 | 1:58 am
[...] his post on Michael Crichton, Joseph asked, “Was there ever a popular writer more in love with the gadgets of science—and [...]
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