When you realize your laptop hasn't been plugged in for the last 4 hours you've been working...
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I think Nedry's death in the book is that for me. The movie version is practically G-rated compared to how it went down in the novel.
It was so visceral in the book. I remember watching the movie thinking "oh its about to happen", then it's basically off camera.
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Wow, it's been near 30 years since I read that. The thing I remember most distinctly is how different the lawyer was between the book and movie.
I only read the book as an adult on vacation. Thing that stood out to me was the very first scene and going "Oh! Yeah, probably good they didn't put that in the movie."
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I loved Crichton, but goddamned does he over explain tech.
The log was a record of the system over the last few hours.
If readers may not be familiar, he could help them infer that from character actions or dialog.
"Well Wu? What's the log say the system's been doing over the last few hours?", said Arnold
Congo was maybe the worst for techsplaining. Still a great novel!
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This is a structure even more common than just one author. It needs a name like the hero's journey has. Heck, your summary works for Alien Ressurection!
I nominate "Science goes wrong"
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This was the first Crichton novel I read, and it got me into his other works. Most of them have the common theme of:
- There's a secret science place where science happens
- At event causes people not normally associated with the secret science place to have to go to the secret science place
- The secret science at the secret science place goes horribly wrong
- The secret science place blows up in the end
That formula doesn't really detract from any of his books, but I did laugh when I had read enough of his catalog to see the pattern.
Not to nitpick, but it's only been a single page and I already feel like the author has over used the word "said", is all the dialogue this bad?
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Marginally related but today was having a meeting with someone who is notorious for not being plugged in. I wish I had a recording of it because she literally went "oh sh-" mid sentence and then was booted as her computer shut down. Impeccable timing.
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Now I want to read the novel again.
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This is a structure even more common than just one author. It needs a name like the hero's journey has. Heck, your summary works for Alien Ressurection!
I nominate "Science goes wrong"
I can't dive into tvtropes right now, but I've got dollar on someone having coined a term already.
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Not to nitpick, but it's only been a single page and I already feel like the author has over used the word "said", is all the dialogue this bad?
Not really. There's just a lot of characters in that scene (Muldoon, Hammond, Wu, Arnold, and Gennaro) all with dialog.
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Marginally related but today was having a meeting with someone who is notorious for not being plugged in. I wish I had a recording of it because she literally went "oh sh-" mid sentence and then was booted as her computer shut down. Impeccable timing.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Heh, that's happened a lot since our org updated to Win11. Updates in the middle of the day (despite IT assuring us those only install after hours
) and people just randomly drop from meetings as their PCs reboot. Project manager almost called shenanigans on that until it happened to her mid-meeting.Today (well, yesterday now), mine was just "Preparing to hibernate due to low battery" and I was like "wait, what?!" and was frantically making sure everything got saved (this old workhorse doesn't always want to resume from hibernate). Turns out I had the cord plugged into the laptop but didn't plug it into the outlet
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I only read the book as an adult on vacation. Thing that stood out to me was the very first scene and going "Oh! Yeah, probably good they didn't put that in the movie."
wrote last edited by [email protected]Despite posting a photo of the book in my hand, I haven't read it for a good minute. You're referring to the clinic scene? (I think that's first in the book, but not 100%).
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Have you ever read State of Fear?
I don't really recommend it.
Is that the climate change denial one?
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This is a structure even more common than just one author. It needs a name like the hero's journey has. Heck, your summary works for Alien Ressurection!
I nominate "Science goes wrong"
The secret/nefarious science place with a thousand big red buttons?
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… Im now invested in what happens next
What were they working on?
What happens over the next 20 seconds?
Their system was set up such that when they rebooted the whole thing (which they needed to do to get out of the lockout Nerdy used, intending to steal the DNA samples, deliver them to his contact at the docks, then return without anyone realizing what had happened), it would first start up only using AUX power. Then they just needed to run a command to have the system switch to main power.
But they forgot because the whole island was a well-polished shit that they were barely holding together and hadn't ever trained on what to do after a reset.
After this scene, the power goes out through the whole park and to restore it, someone needs to go to the power station and manually activate the mechanism that closes the breaker to bring main power back on.
In the movie, IIRC they just skipped straight to the "start the power up manually in the power station", which Ellie does after Arnold fails to do so or return.
The book had a better system overall (where main power could have been turned on from the control room, or safely in the bunker if they had remembered it before the fences failed) and the issue was with a lack of experience with that system. The movie's version was simpler but a stupid system for a park full of dangerous predators because it didn't have a fail safe at all. Plus that stupid 3d interface that apparently Lex knew and was thus able to figure how to enable secondary systems when all of that would be custom software running on the OS.
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Wow, it's been near 30 years since I read that. The thing I remember most distinctly is how different the lawyer was between the book and movie.
Hammond also gets a very different ending in the book.
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Their system was set up such that when they rebooted the whole thing (which they needed to do to get out of the lockout Nerdy used, intending to steal the DNA samples, deliver them to his contact at the docks, then return without anyone realizing what had happened), it would first start up only using AUX power. Then they just needed to run a command to have the system switch to main power.
But they forgot because the whole island was a well-polished shit that they were barely holding together and hadn't ever trained on what to do after a reset.
After this scene, the power goes out through the whole park and to restore it, someone needs to go to the power station and manually activate the mechanism that closes the breaker to bring main power back on.
In the movie, IIRC they just skipped straight to the "start the power up manually in the power station", which Ellie does after Arnold fails to do so or return.
The book had a better system overall (where main power could have been turned on from the control room, or safely in the bunker if they had remembered it before the fences failed) and the issue was with a lack of experience with that system. The movie's version was simpler but a stupid system for a park full of dangerous predators because it didn't have a fail safe at all. Plus that stupid 3d interface that apparently Lex knew and was thus able to figure how to enable secondary systems when all of that would be custom software running on the OS.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I feel obligated to point out that the "stupid 3D interface" was actually a REAL stupid 3D interface. Someone at Sun Microsystems genuinely thought we'd enjoy browsing our filesystems by flying over a virtual city. It really was a UNIX system as she said, just one with a batshit frontend.
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Hammond also gets a very different ending in the book.
Now that you mention it, I recall he's generally a lot more sinister in the book.
