Good book, somewhat unrealistic in its sensationalism. Sometimes, on the edge of your seat, sometimes you are reading about the authors views, facts about the environment that are footnoted, and then following the characters through harrowing adventures. ( )

I wasn't sure as I read the book whether the climate science presented in the book was meant to be fact or fiction, and I am still not totally sure, but from the afterward it sounds like the author takes the position of one of his main characters who is a denier of man made climate change. The story also depicts environmental groups as fronts for climate terrorism - again not clear if the author thinks this is actually going on.

The story is a reasonably good action/thriller, but it left a bad taste given the political overtones. If it were more clearly fiction, e.g. set on a different planet or something, it might be an ok book, but I didn't realize what I was getting into when I started it and ended up not enjoying it all that much. ( )

Environmental extremists attempt to prove global warming by setting off a series of disasters. A secret government unit works to stop them, while the lawyer for an environmentalist's charitable causes is stuck in the middle. This book started slow for the first fifty pages and risked becoming polemic. From there, Chrichton provides his typical combo of science and techno-thriller fiction. Reading the well-balanced arguments, complete with data and citations, made me want investigate how both sides of the cases his characters present have played out now that this book is nearly 20 years old. ( )

This book was well written, although it got very preachy at the end (almost like reading an Ayn Rand book). And I vehemently do not agree with Michael Crichton's take on global warming being a hoax. ( )

On the question of global warming/climate change, the theme that dominates Michael Crichton's 2004 thriller State of Fear, I'll try to keep it mercifully brief for anyone who might be reading this review. Suffice to say that the people who give this book 1-star, and those who give it 5-stars, are both wide of the mark, and reveal their ideological allegiances. Crichton is a sceptic but not a 'denialist', that loaded term which has become all the rage in the two decades since State of Fear was published and which has always seemed to me an underhand attempt to provoke connotations to Holocaust denial.

Crichton's appeal is for scientific scepticism and independent inquiry, endeavouring to be free from bias, ideology, financial influence or peer pressure. Whatever one's opinions on Crichton's specific stance or his conclusions, that's a worthy aim for any piece of fiction. His commentary on media manipulation and the politicization of science remains timely, and has perhaps become even more so in the years since State of Fear's publication. One can only imagine what Crichton, who earned a medical degree from Harvard, would have written of our approach to the Covid pandemic and lockdown.

Contentious themes aside – and it seems a lot of Crichton's books possess such taboo themes, and it's a shame that honest contrarians and dissenters have been harried out of mainstream art and culture – the inconvenient truth is that State of Fear is not a great thriller. Crichton is a good storyteller, and his pages flow by easily, but the plot was very synthetic. Kenner, the spy with an answer to everything, lacks the flaws to make him interesting, and the fact that the plot sees him bring along our everyman cast of lawyers and 9-to-5-ers across dangerous continents and into perilous gunfights and outlandish action set-pieces becomes increasingly absurd. The threat from the environmental terrorists in the book (which is made weaker by the lack of a central villain) would in a common-sense book be dealt with by spies and special forces, not by one spy and the have-a-go heroes he picks up along the way.

It's clear that State of Fear was a polemic of environmental scepticism first, and a thriller a distant second. The plot and characters are thinly adorned around the powerful and controversial theme and exist solely to justify it. Or at least, they justified it in 2004, when the book was published; in 2023, the reverse is true. The plot and characters are no reason at all for State of Fear to retain value or interest. But its expression of a minority viewpoint, a view that has become verboten in the years since, gives it a transgressive value in a Western culture that has become increasingly slavish to the cultural complacency, under-informed debate and scientific hubris that Crichton always railed against in his novels, regardless of their particular topics. His are novels that, for all their pessimism, now seem like a time capsule of a healthier age. ( )