Charles Carroll’s “Cretaceous Chaos”
If you’re like me, you took a class in college called “Science Fiction in Literature and Film.” It was an English course that looked at four Science Fiction stories and analyzed their translation from book to film. We looked at “A Clockwork Orange,” “Starship Troopers,” “Jurassic Park,” and “I am Legend.” And yes, it’s probably the most excited I’ve ever been for a class.
I loved all these stories but there is one that stands out because of an observation that I’m still not sure what to do with. “Jurassic Park” is simply dinosaurs wrapped around “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Here are some of the breadcrumbs.
Michael Crichton, (the author of Jurassic Park,) often takes chapters and a phone book of characters to meticulously build the scientific shenanigans at the center of his novels. It’s one of the things I like most about his writing. In J.P. we the readers know it’s a dinosaur story, but the characters don’t. “Dinosaur” isn’t said until page 27. The character that says it, introducing the fantastical to Crichton’s hard science, is a tech with an “active imagination” named Alice.
One of the most skeptical characters of the story is Ian Malcom. Malcom’s main role is to represent mathematics and chaos theory. He insists that the park will fail because systems like it will always succumb to chaos from the illusion of great structure. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures, was a logician/mathematician and much of his literary work is an expression of how logical systems aren’t as stable as they seem and can easily lead to absurdity, dare I say, chaos. While we’re talking about Malcom, he also introduces himself as “mad as a hatter.”
The conflict of J.P. involves a double agent named Nedry crippling the computer system that maintains the park. Nedry works for a competing biotech company that is trying to steal the park’s technology. Nedry programs a technological freeze that the protagonists struggle to undo for most of the book. They follow his trail deeper into the chaos unfolding; a trail that Nedry conceals under the name “the white rabbit object.”
As mentioned above, there is a competing company trying to undermine the park for most of the book and its sequel, “The Lost World.” This company is run by a mysterious man named Lewis Dodgson. That name is a combination of a man named Charles Dodgson and the pseudonym he used, “Lewis Carroll.”
The chaos theory that Malcom talks about throughout the story is a vast concept that I won’t get into here. There is a hypothesis within it though that describes the need for species to be constantly changing and adapting to avoid extinction. Simply, the world is crazy and the only way to survive is to be crazy yourself. This hypothesis is called “The Red Queen Hypothesis” specifically in reference to Alice’s red queen.
So, what does this all mean? I don’t know. I know there’s more than what I was able to list here. I know Crichton was too well researched of an author for this to be coincidence. I know that Crichton originally told the story from the perspective of one of the children along on the disastrous tour. Maybe it’s a leftover from that. Maybe the child’s fantasy of dinosaurs is supposed to be Wonderland and it’s when we try to apply order to fantasy that everything becomes chaos. Maybe “Jurassic Park” is about organized adults trying to reclaim chaotic childhood.
Or maybe I’ve spent too much time surrounded by books, drinking tea, and wondering what a stegosaurus playing croquet would look like.
