Butterfly Wings & Pandora's Box

For over four decades, from his first novel the Andromeda Strain in 1971 to his untimely death in 2008, Michael Crichton dazzled science fiction fans with sci-tech thrillers about science and technology gone awry. Although often dismissed as an author of escapist pulp or Hollywood screenplay fodder, Michael Crichton remains a writer with a vision, an aesthetic, and a message. He speaks to our inner fears of losing control in a world steeped in science and technology, while at the same time bringing a tone of humility and circumspection to science and its methods and admonishing its practitioners to tread lightly.

Michael Crichton novels are basically mad scientist stories, postmodern loops of Frankenstein, in which big corporations, government institutions, or cultural forces mess with some sci/tech they don't fully understand or appreciate and then as a result must deal with some terrible consequence. Scientific hubris is the villain and human greed and ambition are its henchmen. Crichton is most famous for Jurassic Park, the runaway best seller and iconic blockbuster film. This is fitting insofar as it remains his greatest work and exemplifies the major themes found in much of his pervious and subsequent works. Most notable among these are the Andromeda Strain (1917), Prey (2002), and Next (2006).

Indeed, much of the action in Michael Crichton novels deals with putting the lid back on the proverbial Pandora's Box. In Andromeda Strain, a set of government projects named Scoop and Wildfire are employed to find and develop biological agents from outer space for potential biological weapons. The program is partially successful insofar as it finds an agent, but this agent—an extraterrestrial microbe—proves impossible to control and a threat to all life on the planet. Most of the novel deals with a group of scientists tying to contain and eradicate this threat.

In Prey, a top-secrete research lab Xymos attempts to develop nanotechnologies for the military, swarms of self-replicating microscopic machines meant to act as roving eyes in the sky, but the swarms spiral out of control, adopt the behavior of predators inherent in their programming, and threaten to replicate indefinitely in the Nevada desert. A programming consultant struggles to contain the swarm and the humanoid zombies the nanosized killers have spawned.

Finally, in Next, his most ambitious work, Crichton targets the multi-million dollar genomics industry, which has created a social milieu in which gene patents and genetic products dehumanize human life, where a person's very cells become the property of greedy corporations, and where transgenic experiments produce animal/human hybrids, such as a humanzee. The courts are forced to deal with much of this, but the out-of-control technology continues to wreak havoc on human lives.

Michael Crichton suggests that any scientific endeavor is a potential Pandora's Box. Nature is volatile, pregnant with a myriad of initial conditions and unknown variables, and science can never be sure of the consequences of its influence, of its probings and manipulations, of its attempts at domination and exploitation. Chaos theory is thus the dominant and most appropriate motif in the works of Crichton. It finds explicit presentation in Jurassic Park and personification in the character of Dr. Ian Malcolm.

Chaos theory is a field of mathematics that focuses on determined yet unpredictable systems, often termed non-linear systems, such as found in weather patterns or the stock market. It underscores the variability of science and our vulnerability to its vagaries. Our inputs or initial conditions do indeed determine output, but this output often remains unpredictable. Michael Crichton dramatizes this variability, where the mere flapping of a butterfly's wings can wreak havoc on the most carefully constructed assumptions of science, bringing stark and terrifying consequences, whether they be dinosaurs run amok, bacteria on the loose, microscopic machines swarming, or genomics out of control. Dr. Ian Malcolm explains it best as he prophesies the disastrous climax of Jurassic Park:

"…if I have a weather system that I start up with a certain temperature and a certain wind speed and a certain humidity—and if I then repeat it…the second system will not behave the same. It'll wander off and rapidly will become very different from the first….That's nonlinear dynamics. They are sensitive to initial conditions: tiny differences become amplified….The shorthand is the 'butterfly effect.' A butterfly flaps its wings in Peking, and weather in New York is different…There is problem with that island. It is an accident waiting to happen."

In a nutshell, this is the message found in most Michael Crichton novels. The butterfly effect is an inherent potentiality in all science and technology, lurking beneath the surface of even the most seemingly benign innovations and discoveries. The implication to proceed with circumspection is a strikingly pertinent message for the age. Crichton delivers this message in a lucid and economical writing style, a style that could be characterized as Cinematic, since his novels read like movies and television shows, a style more than befitting the writer of Jurassic Park

Where have all the toggles gone?

Toggle switches…old sci-fi featured tons of toggle switches. They were ubiquitous and far more dramatic than keyboards, mice, or—most bland of all—touch pads. When the science officer aboard the needle-shaped rocket on its voyage to Saturn was faced with a critical situation, nothing dramatized this more than the click clicking of a bank of toggle switches. This simple binary on/off switch found its way onto the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek, the Discovery One in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, and countless other rockets and saucers of the 50s and 60s era Sci-Fi. Much of this stemmed from their actual, real-world use in the NASA space program and just about every area of electronics and electrical engineering. They are still in use today, especially in automotive electronics. Sadly however the toggle switch has lost favor in science fiction. Ever since Star Trek: The Next Generation showed us the wonders of touch screens and the Matrix jacked us into cyberspace via computer terminals, the toggle switch—as far as science fiction is concerned—has been cast into the dustbin of obsolescence.

Netflix Price Hike

Netflix is restructuring its pricing and subscription model. The DVD rental and streaming video services have been split up into two separate services. Gone is the $9.99 per month combo package. Each service will now be offered separately for $7.99 each. Therefore, the combo package will now cost $15.98, an increase of $5.99. Netflix subscribers have until September to restructure their plans.

The changes have caused mixed reactions. Some users are up-in-arms, complaining bitterly across the Internet and threatening to cancel their accounts and seek alternative services, while still others are more philosophical about the change, shrugging their shoulders at the $5.99 price hike, and accepting it as an inevitable cost for a still-emerging new media model. I am of the latter opinion (though I rarely use the DVD service anymore and will probably drop it). I cut the cord on my cable television service last year and now live on Netflix streaming. I will accept the new pricing scheme because I support the service, the a la carte style of media delivery, rather than the 100 channel packages (stuffed with commercials and other unwanted programming) offered by my local cable service. And until my local cable company offers some kind of streaming service (wink wink), I will continue to support and utilize Netflix.