State of Fear is a 2004 techno-thriller novel by Michael Crichton, his fourteenth under his own name and twenty-fourth overall, in which eco-terrorists plot mass murder to publicize the danger of global warming.
[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] The novel had an initial print run of 1.5 million copies and reached the #1 bestseller position at Amazon and #2 on The New York Times Best Seller list for one week in January 2005.
The eco-terrorists have no qualms about how many people are killed in their manufactured "natural" disasters and ruthlessly assassinate anyone who gets in their way (few would recognize their preferred methods as murder: the venom of a rare Australian blue-ringed octopus which causes paralysis, and "lightning attractors" which cause their victims to get electrocuted during electrical storms).
Along the way, the group battles man-eating crocodiles and cannibalistic tribesmen (who feast on Ted Bradley, an environmentalist TV actor whom Drake had sent to spy on Kenner and his team).
The rest of the group is rescued in the nick of time by Morton, who had previously faked his own death to throw Drake off the trail so that he could keep watch on the ELF's activities on the island while he waited for Kenner and his team to arrive.
Evans quits his law firm to work for Morton's new, as yet unnamed, organization, which will practice environmental activism as a business, free from potential conflicts of interest.
Several critics have suggested that Crichton uses the major characters as proxies for differing viewpoints on the topic of global warming in order to allow the reader to clearly follow the various positions portrayed in the book.
"[16] State of Fear is, like many of Crichton's books, a fictional work that uses a mix of speculation and real world data, plus technological innovations as fundamental storyline devices.
In a 2003 speech at the California Institute of Technology, he expressed his concern about what he considered the "emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science—namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.
[18] The Wall Street Journal's Ronald Bailey gave a favorable review, calling it "a lightning-paced technopolitical thriller" and the "novelization of a speech that Mr. Crichton delivered in September 2003 at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club.
Zimmerman criticized Crichton's presentation of data as condescending to the reader but concluded that the book was 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.".
[20] In March 2006, Michael Crowley, a senior editor of The New Republic, wrote a strongly critical review focusing on Crichton's stance on global warming.
[24] In The New York Times, Bruce Barcott criticized the novel's portrayal of the global warming debate heavily, stating that it only presented one side of the argument.
Peter Doran, leading author of the Nature paper,[30] wrote in the New York Times: "our results have been misused as 'evidence' against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel State of Fear".
[40] Daniel P. Schrag, Director of the Center for the Environment at Harvard University, called the award "a total embarrassment" that he said "reflects the politics of the oil industry and a lack of professionalism" on the association's part.