The
Shore of the Inland Sea
In the summer heat of Montana, paleontologist Alan Grant examines
a dinosaur bone in the earth. His assistant Ellie tells him
he has a visitor. The visitor is Bob Morris, a lawyer with the
Environmental Protection Agency. They go into a trailer to talk.
Ellie explains that they are working in that area of Montana
because it contains fossils of dinosaur nests and infant dinosaur
bones. Morris explains his visit. The EPA is concerned about
the activities of the Hammond Foundation, from which Grant has
received funding. Morris wants to know why it only funds dinosaur
digs at cold-weather sites; why it is buying up large quantities
of amber, the yellow resin of dried tree sap, and about the
biological preserve it is setting up in Costa Rica.
Grant also prepared a paper for InGen corporation about the
dietary habits of juvenile dinosaurs. He did this at the request
of the lawyer for InGen, Donald Gennaro, who said he was planning
a museum for children to feature baby dinosaurs. Morris says
that although they have no evidence yet, they believe the Hammond
Foundation is evading the law concerning technology transfer.
They purchased three supercomputers and sent them to Costa Rica,
as well as twenty-four Hoods, which are automatic gene sequencers.
Morris reveals that another American biotech company, Biosyn,
has acted irresponsibly and illegally in setting up risky operations
in Chile, based on genetic engineering. Grant does not take
Morris’s investigation seriously. He thinks John Hammond,
head of the Hammond Foundation, is harmless. Then Ellie tells
him he has a call from Alice Levin, the technician at the TDL.
Skeleton
Grant and Ellie are pleased with their new finding of infant
velociraptor bones. Then a fax arrives from Alice of the X-ray
of the lizard remains. Grant is stunned because the X-ray looks
exactly like a procompsognathus, an extinct form that flourished
during the Triassic period, 220 million years ago. Grant and
Ellie decide it is either an amazing discovery or a fake. Hammond
calls, worrying about the EPA investigation. He talks about
the biological preserve the Foundation owns, an island a hundred
miles off the Costa Rican coast. Hammond plans to open it to
the public in September of the following year. He gets agitated
when Grant tells him about the procompsognathus, and persuades
him and Ellie to visit the island for the weekend. He offers
to pay them generously, and they agree to go.
Cowan, Swain and Ross
In the San Francisco law firm of Cowan, Swain and Ross, which
owns five percent of InGen, there is consternation at the growing
problems on the Costa Rican island. The investors are getting
nervous. The lawyers, who include Donald Gennaro, InGen general
counsel, agree that they must inspect the island. Grant and
Ellie are two of the experts they have already hired to do so.
A third is a mathematician, Ian Malcolm.
Plans
Grant and Ellie examine the blueprints of Hammond’s island
project, which he has sent to them. They find it puzzling. It
consists of mostly open space, with a network of roads, tunnels
and outlying buildings, as well as a man-made lake. The island
is split up into six divisions, each separated from the road
by a concrete moat and electrified fences. Ellie notes that
the dimensions are enormous. The moat is thirty feet wide and
resembles a military fortification. The buildings are all concrete,
with thick walls. Grant then examines the infant velociraptor
fossil, with the help of computer-assisted sonic tomography
(CAST). He gives out some information about adult velociraptors.
They were the most rapacious dinosaurs that ever lived, and
they hunted in packs, although nothing is known about their
social behavior in groups.
Hammond
Gennaro joins Hammond on the flight to Costa Rica. Gennaro regards
him as evasive regarding the problems on the island. But Hammond
is forthcoming about the progress he has made. There are now
238 animals on the island, and fifteen different species. He
speaks of it as the most advanced amusement park in the world.
To save costs on personnel, it is automated with the latest
computer technology. He insists that everything is fine, although
Gennaro knows that it is not.
Choteau
Grant and Ellie join Hammond and Gennaro. Grant and Ellie take
an immediate dislike to Gennaro. They settle down for the flight
to Dallas, Texas, after which they fly to Costa Rica.
Target of Opportunity
The Biosyn Corporation of Cupertino, California, calls an emergency
meeting of its board of directors. Biosyn is InGen’s rival
in the development of what they call “consumer biologicals.”
At the meeting, Lewis Dodgson, the aggressive and unethical
head of product development at Biosyn, tells the board that
InGen has managed to clone dinosaurs and is constructing the
greatest tourist attraction in the history of the world. It
will be hugely lucrative for InGen, who will patent the animals.
The board agrees that Biosyn must obtain samples of InGen’s
dinosaurs and then create their own, modifying them slightly
to evade the patent. It is left to Dodgson to arrange this industrial
espionage.
Airport
In the lounge at San Francisco airport, Dodgson meets his contact
from InGen. He persuades him to steal frozen dinosaur embryos
in exchange for one-and-a-half million dollars, half of which
Dodgson already has in his suitcase. The man promises to do
the job and be back at San José airport in Costa Rica
by Sunday morning.
Malcolm
Ian Malcolm, the mathematician, joins the party at Dallas airport.
He says that he has always believed the island resort would
be unworkable. He predicts they will have to shut it down. On
the flight, he explains to Gennaro exactly why the project will
fail. His calculations are based on chaos theory, which says
that even simple systems exhibit unpredictable behavior. He
confidently expects such unpredictable behavior to manifest
on the island.
Isla Nublar
On the final flight by helicopter to the twenty-two square mile
island, which is called Isla Nublar, Hammond’s party is
joined by Dennis Nedry, a computer consultant. They make a perfect
landing in foggy conditions. A man named Ed Regis welcomes them
to the island. On his first sight of his new environment, Grant
spots a dinosaur.
Welcome
Ellie, Gennaro and Grant stare in astonishment at the four dinosaurs
they see. Grant identifies them as apatosaurs, commonly known
as brontosaurs. They remind him of oversized giraffes.
Analysis
This section
sets up Grant as the practical, knowledgeable, outdoors man
who likes to think of himself as standing outside the academic
mainstream. He has no patience for academics or museum creators,
whom he calls “Teacup Dinosaur Hunters.” He is also
not interested in computers and does not understand them. This
positions him well to be the hero of the novel, one of the themes
of which is the vulnerability of computer technology and the
foolishness of putting too much faith in it.
The dangers of genetic engineering are also introduced, in the
context of the Biosyn company that behaves irresponsibly with
the genetically engineered rabies vaccine that it developed.
The name of the company is an obvious clue to the way the reader
is supposed to think of it, since “syn” sounds the
same as “sin.” It suggests that human attempts to
tamper with nature through genetic engineering are misguided.
This section also warns of the dangers of allowing American
biotech companies to set up operations in foreign countries
in order to evade U.S. federal regulations. Crichton also hauls
out a red flag to highlight the fact that genetically engineered
animals can be patented, according to a U.S. Supreme Court decision
in 1987.
Finally, this section introduces chaos theory, which is the
theoretical underpinning for all the disasters that happen on
the island. Appropriately enough, it is advocated and explained
by Ian Malcolm, whose distinctive dress (all in black) makes
him stand out from the others. It is almost as if he is going
to attend a funeral. Malcolm’s first explanation of chaos
theory (pp. 75-77) sets up the main conflict of ideas in the
novel: chaos theory, that claims that all complex systems are
inherently unstable and unpredictable, against the beliefs of
people like Hammond, Wu and Arnold. These men believe that the
latest computer systems can accurately predict the behavior
of living systems. They also believe that biotech inventions
can be controlled and confined according to what their inventors
wish. The novel will show that Malcolm is correct and the others
are wrong.
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