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State Of Fear
by Michael Crichton

6.6 based on 18 reviews read critic reviews how did we calculate this? based on 103 votes read user comments rate this book

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In Paris, a physicist dies after performing a laboratory experiment for a beautiful visitor. In the jungles of Malaysia, a mysterious buyer purchases deadly cavitation technology, built to his specifications. In Vancouver, a small research submarine is leased for use in the waters off New Guinea. And in Tokyo, an intelligence agent tries to understand what it all means. Thus begins Michael Crichton's exciting and provocative technothriller, State of Fear. [HarperCollins]

HarperCollins, 624 pages
12/07/2004
$27.95

ISBN: 0066214130

Fiction
Mystery & Thrillers

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Wall Street Journal Ronald Bailey

Every bit as informative as it is entertaining. And it is very entertaining.

Chicago Tribune Alan Cheuse

Crichton gives us a jumpy, 600-page page-burner in the sometimes-hour-by-hour, day-by-day tradition of "The Day of the Jackal" that dramatizes the plight of post-Cold War globalized society.

Entertainment Weekly Gregory Kirschling

And it's a kick to watch a brainiac like Crichton chomp down on the conventional wisdom about global warming with the thrashing jaws of a velociraptor.

Publishers Weekly

This take-no-prisoners consideration of environmentalism wrapped in extravagantly enjoyable pages is one of the most memorable novels of the year.

Booklist Kristine Huntley

Perhaps his most serious and important book yet. [1 Jan 2005, p.783]

Chicago Sun-Times Henry Kisor

Conservative Republicans will love it. It's all about how a greedy ecoterrorist group, with the help of a gullible press, whips up runaway fears about global warming (a threat Crichton maintains is oversold).

USA Today Carol Memmott

This is heavy subject matter, sometimes bogged down by moralizing and too many scene changes.

The New Republic Sacha Zimmerman

But despite these problems, Crichton does deliver a globe-trotting thriller that pits man against nature in brutal spectacles while serving up just the right amount of international conspiracy and taking digs at fair-weather environmentalists.

Boston Globe Richard Dyer

It is all utterly preposterous and extremely tiresome, especially when padded to spread over nearly 600 pages of breathless but sludgy narrative.

The Guardian

The trouble is that while the science may be interesting, the story is pretty peculiar.

The New York Times Book Review Bruce Barcott

This might all be good if not screamingly clever fun -- but for the footnotes. The annoying citations make it apparent that the author desperately wants to be taken seriously on the global warming stuff. That would be perfectly fine in a Weekly Standard cover story. In a thriller, it's a little like having the author interrupt the story to insist that Dr. Evil actually has a death ray. Crichton's proof is itself laughably rigged.

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Robert J. Wiersema

Unfortunately, the clumsy inclusion of the scientific material disrupts the momentum of the thriller aspects of State of Fear, while the low-grade theatrics of those thriller aspects detract from the force of the scientific thought. It's a balance, all right, but not the one Crichton readers were hoping for.

Los Angeles Times Steve Wasserman

The plot is contrived, the characters one-dimensional, the predicaments predictable. Crichton has an unerring instinct for cliché... Whatever his literary aspiration, Crichton's real genius is to have written the first neo-con novel. Inside this bloated 600-page book is a fierce and compelling Op-Ed piece desperate to get out.

Washington Post Dennis Drabelle

Time and again, the action slams to a halt while someone smart and skeptical (a stand-in for the author) grills someone smug and ill- prepared on the state of his or her environmental knowledge, then supplies the correct answers at length.

Houston Chronicle John W. Royal

The plot feels tacked on, something Crichton made up on the spot to support his views. The novel often slams to a stop so there can be page after page of speeches and charts that express Crichton's opinions but do nothing to advance the narrative.

The New York Times Michiko Kakutani

Reads like a shrill, preposterous right-wing answer to this year's shrill, preposterous but campily entertaining global warming disaster movie "The Day After Tomorrow."

Sydney Morning Herald John Birmingham

It's bad writing and it lets the reader ignore the larger point Crichton is trying to make.

The Onion A.V. Club Tasha Robinson

Crichton's readers deserve better. His thesis deserves better. Even his vaguely drawn cardboard characters deserve better, in the form of a story that doesn't make them all look like putzes, no matter what side they're on.

The average user rating for this book is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 103 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Duane M gave it a9:
I loved the story, and appreciated how he points out that research usually comes to the conclusion that the funding organization supports. He also shows how media has failed the public is just reading various press releases and not analyzing it as in the past before budget cuts in news organizations.

Donald C gave it a9:
A very well put together story, and informative to boot. Highly recommend!

Bill P gave it a10:
I really enjoyed this book. It was refreshing to see a different point of view on global warming. Change is constant and we can't control the weather. I do not think it is bad as people want us to believe, but the media loves to scare people.

Susan B gave it a10:
I think it is a timely tome.

Former Fan gave it a0:
I've read voraciously since I was 5, I'm now 53, and this was possibly the worst book I've come across in my life. The characters were hollow and clueless, even the ones with PhDs and JDs, and the dialogue stark and insipid. Critchen takes a long shot at environmentalism, but comes off sounding like an industry paid mouthpiece. You can massage all the data you want, but any thinking person who reads this book has to ask: How much did Dow Chemical/Monsanto pay him? He would have us believe that breast emplants are A-okay, benzene is fine to injest, DDT is a good thing, and we are all as paranoid as he is. I used to like some of Critchton's early work, before he became a media millionaire, but not one more dollar from me. Wonder what size house he lives in?

Rod N gave it a10:
What a powerful way that Crichton delivered his message. I'm not surprised that so many critics in the media gave a low score being that global warming is a sort of liberal sacred cow, and our media is mostly liberal. I did a search here for 'eugenics' and saw no one responded with regard to Crichton's Appendix on Eugenics. If Crichton were around in the 1930s and had written a condemning novel on eugenics back then when it was vogue, parallel to what he did now on global warming, the same lock-step icons of the eugenics pseudo-science would have similarly whined. I read somewhere about something called Iron Mountain. Like Crichton's fictious professor who said that the end of the Cold War required that we have a new 'enemy', aparently there were some elite who were already conjuring something like this in the 60s. I don't see Crichton as a far-right type (his breakout novel was pro-abortion 7 years before Roe v Wade). Also, the so-called far right would first peg the whole purpose of the global warming myth that it be a mechanism to help bring about a one-world-government, I don't know if Crichton has the balls to go there - but certainly he has balls. Keep up the outstanding work Michael Crichton! By the way, I was turning pages and reading so intently I didn't notice the 'thin' 'cardboard' characters - and of course the science was perposterous - it's FICTION!

crichton fan gave it a10:
Wow! I have to say, this is one of Crichton's best books ever! I was gripping the book so hard that the pages almost stuck together.

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