Kenner saves the day after a Cristopher Nolan-style globetrotting adventure through Antarctica, Arizona, and the Pacific Ocean, climaxing in a tsunami-level catastrophe. The hero is John Kenner, an MIT professor with a secret agent identity and a stand-in for Crichton himself (who held an M.D. Their goal is to establish a “state of fear” by convincing the public opinion that climate change is real. The novel portrays scientists in cahoots with a fictitious environmental association (National Environmental Resource Fund, or NERF) that funds eco-terrorists keen on engineering environmental disasters to subvert the world order. Crichton entered the fray with the intent to denounce climatology, of all things, as the real enemy of humankind. By then, climate change was on the verge to become the hottest talk in town, with counter-climate change propaganda morphing into the frontline of the burgeoning right-wing culture war. Some years later, Crichton decided to exploit his unearned role as a spokesperson for scientific wrongdoing and alert his worldwide readership to the dangers of science through his novel State of Fear (Crichton 2004a). The novelist really did have a chip on his shoulders. The smug tone of the address betrayed the fact that Crichton did not quite believe those reassurances himself. Scientists, according to Crichton, were the ones who misunderstood the role of mass media and failed to grasp that storytelling was incompatible with science, that their negative portrayal was quite inevitable, and that there was no point in worrying since “there is essentially no correspondence between social reality and movie reality. When celebrated novelist Michael Crichton (1942-2008) addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1999, he gaslighted the scientific community by saying that stereotypical portrayals of mad scientists and other negative tropes in the movies were absolutely normal (“Since all occupations are portrayed negatively, why expect scientists to be treated differently?”).
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