Michael Crichton died in 2008 and his new novel, “Eruption,” is somehow out in 2024. Be suspicious; be very suspicious. Of course, no one is really faked out by this project: It’s James Patterson writing from Crichton’s notes (and what widow Sherri Crichton redundantly describes as “an unfinished partial manuscript”) for a volcano novel.
It’s the third not-really-him “Michael Crichton” novel. “Micro” (2011) is one-third Crichton’s writings about how the world of insects would be dangerous and bizarre if we were to shrink to that size, and Richard Preston finished it as a passable adventure. Daniel H. Wilson’s “The Andromeda Evolution” (2019) – not passed off as Crichton’s, although his name is in bigger letters on the cover — respectfully delves further into what an alien-virus invasion might look like.
By far the weakest of the three, “Eruption” might have some “unfinished, partial” chunks written by Crichton, but clearly it’s a shlock disaster adventure by Patterson. He’s “the most popular storyteller of our time,” according to the jacket, and Crichton held similar status when he was alive. We’ve fallen a long way.
“Eruption” (2024)
Author: James Patterson, working from an uncompleted manuscript and notes by Michael Crichton
Setting: Big Island of Hawaii, 2025
A dormant adventure
The novel’s most fascinating aspect is accidental: It functions as a stark illustration of why Crichton left this project dormant. The science and history of volcanoes are fascinating, and the chunk (perhaps penned by Crichton?) explaining why a virulent brand of nuclear waste is stored near Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii is a sharp critique of bureaucratic absurdity.
My guess is that Crichton couldn’t figure out how to mesh the build-up to an impending eruption with the notion that it would threaten lives when it finally does erupt. Patterson starts with “Time to eruption: 116 hours” for the reader’s benefit, but it’s not long after that that hero scientist Mac and his team have a strong estimate of the eruption time.
Yet there’s hardly any writing about the evacuation of the Big Island, which has a population of only 200,000. Through much of the adventure, the protagonists (scientists and military people) believe the eastern side will be threatened, particularly the town of Hilo, which has a population of 44,000. The island is sparsely settled in part because people aren’t crazy about the vog (volcanic smog).
I suspect this is why Crichton toyed with the nuclear-waste virus pandemic idea; he wanted a way for the eruption to threaten the world since it seems the death toll on the island could never be all that big in historical terms if there was advance warning. (And if it’s a surprise eruption, then we wouldn’t have the mood-setting Crichtonian buildup.)
At any rate, in Patterson’s finished work, somehow many people are still on the Big Island, unable to be evacuated, when the eruption happens. Granted, when the town of Na’alehu’s citizenry is wiped out because no one told the mayor the warning scale had switched from Code Yellow to Code Red, that’s again a good slice of bureaucratic parody.
A passable premise
But while Crichton was suspicious of governments’ and corporations’ ability to control nature, that was rarely his overriding point. Here, large-scale incompetence is the major thematic takeaway, if one wants to be generous and argue that Patterson is making any kind of statement.
Similar to “Micro,” but at a less successful level, “Eruption’s” best scientific jaunts are up front. This primarily consists of Crichton/Patterson giving a rundown of eruptions of the Big Island volcanoes through the decades of documentation.
Then we get the scientists’ measurements of where the lava might emerge and the military’s plans to bomb parts of the volcano to send the lava in desired directions. This is OK stuff. But once the earthquakes start, the only theory that’s relevant is chaos theory.
The storytelling should not be so chaotic though. An example of sloppy writing: Despite all the buildup in the discussions between Mac, military leader Rivers and other key players, titanium sheets to slow the lava’s flow are not mentioned. But then suddenly they are in play amid the book’s falling action.
I’m not saying I won’t take away any neat information about volcanoes. Because of the creation of several characters money-hungry or fame-hungry enough to fly helicopters and planes into these conditions, Patterson firmly demonstrates the atmospheric dangers. These sequences are OK from a literary perspective, and could be great on screen.
It might lead to a good movie
Since this is such an obvious sell-out project anyway, the Crichton estate might as well allow a film to be made (going against Crichton’s post-“Timeline” wish that his work no longer be adapted). Indeed, Sherri Crichton recently sold the rights. Even if the movie doesn’t coalesce, I admit to a low-level desire to party like it’s 1997 and rewatch “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano” again.
“Eruption” reads like a novelization of such a movie, loaded with underexplored real science and lazy wackadoo sci-fi. None of which ultimately means anything, because … (SPOILER WARNING) … the lava flow is stopped by a pre-existing wall of hardened lava – something none of the scientists or Army engineers mentioned as a possibility beforehand. (END OF SPOILERS.)
The plot is dumb, but the technical achievement of this novel isn’t all bad. The copy editors deserve a nod for artificially creating a sense of pacing that Patterson’s prose fails to achieve. They split the 419 pages into 109 chapters, an average of 3.8 pages per chapter. The copy-editing team made this shlock sci-fi adventure as readable as it could be.
Patterson will come off as a hack to those new to his catalog, and some might see him as a bad guy for accepting this project. He’s a millionaire hundreds of times over; he’ll be fine. But passing “Eruption” off as “a Michael Crichton novel” – thus wrongly putting it under CRI at the library instead of PAT — is a transparent and failed bit of trickery by his estate.
I want a new Crichton novel as much as the next person, but if they don’t exist, we can’t force them into existence.