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SPOILER ALERT!!!

Just finishing State of Fear. After 3 days for Rahasia Meede, Crichton had lost his charm :D I felt especially annoyed with the obsessive timing. You know, location and time as the chapter head. Hated to have to keep track on those. Or just too lazy, perhaps :P

But halfway trough the book, it turned out not to be that bad. Although, hello..., footnotes all over the novel? Footnotes that refer to scientific journals! Yea, yea, we know you did your homework, Mr. Crichton.

Is it strange that I was more annoyed by the chapter head than the footnotes? :P

Anyway, really, the book was ok. I'm through with climate sceptic/climate sceptic sceptic before so it's not like an environmentalist MacGyver could change my mind just like that. And in a way, it's really Spaargaren 102. I mean, suddenly a sociology professor came out of the blue and explain all this theory of state of fear (in brief, environmental issue is the tool to create fear post-Cold War and pre-terrorism. pfiuh... I thought it was neo-Nazi).

I sometimes feel irritated to face how people from what-so-called developed countries envision us-from-developing-countries, environment-wise. And it's sarcastically portrayed by Ted Bradley character. It's over the top but part of my mind agree to that. That you just romanticize the idea of living in harmony with nature, helping the primitives and so on and so on. While you don't know what it's really like. And sometimes there are more urgent things so that kind of help is less needed. It's just like talking to the tree.

Or it's just the voice of underdog? A cynical, post-colonized mentality? A hidden envy?

Whatever, hehe. As referred to the quote of the year, why so serious?

In a way, this book is a little bit clairvoyant. I mean, it was first published in 2004. And the ultimate bad guy plan was to create a tsunami. Hehe, I know you scratch your head. It's very Joe Vialls, isn't it? But here I think, the bad guys didn't do their homework. I can't see tsunami has anything to do with global warming. Just google it. (Winda, can you help me out here?)

By the way, as to defend his point of view, Crichton made a postscript titled "Why Politicized Science is Dangerous." He gave the example of Lysenko, a Russian guy who "claimed to have invented a procedure called vernalization, by which seeds were moistened and chilled to enhance the later growth of crops." In a nutshell, he was a charlatan who had convinced Stalin that he could do magic in farms. Ring a bell? *fufufu*

Two other (unimportant) remarks about this book:

• I thought the character development of Peter and Sarah is very similar to Kate and Chris in Timeline. The ending is not that explicit, but still...
• There are two many people with name started with B. Pfiuh... Me and my overwhelmed left brain poor memory.