This is propaganda written by an ultra-rich person. Utterly despicable. I just thought Crichton was mediocre until I read this. Now I think he's insidious. There're 2 basic thrusts: Global Warming is a myth & ecology activists are phenomenally stupid. I don't actually have much of an opinion about global warming one way or the other so I don't hate this novel so much b/c it's a threat to mass consciousness there. I hate it b/c it's so repulsively propagandistic (w/o any self-acknowledgement as such).

The basic plot is what you'd expect: a thriller about 'good' vs 'evil'. The 'evil' people are the ELF, the Earth Liberation Front - whose name, of course, is meant to be evocative of ALF (Animal Liberation Front) & Earth First!. One of the 'good' guys is John Kenner. Strangely enuf, ELF is just a bunch of dumb hippies who somehow manage to have one of the most diabolically clever plots to technologically create eco-disasters ever conceived of. How such bumbling idiots have such genius for invention & planning is never explained. Of course, in formula-writing-world, the 'evil' plot HAS to be diabolical so that the 'hero''s genius for defeating it can be exciting.

Kenner, contrary to the dupes & imbeciles of the ecological activists, is a superhuman genius: you know, the guy who can recite an encyclopedic array of scientific 'facts' from memory & shoot machine guns while parachuting? The guy who makes 007 look like a kindergarten student? Highly intelligent but also w/ a perfectly honed killing machine body - one of these 'geniuses' that we know constitute the US ruling elites that justly run this world for the better of mankind? Right. Who on earth believes this crap anymore?! Apparently Crichton does & the extreme popularity of his bks might indicate that many people at least get off on such myths.