quote:Michael Crichton does his homework, which is a good thing, because his novels depend entirely on his ideas for their success.
It's not as if he's ever created a memorable character in his writing career. But that's a moot point: He doesn't try to write the kind of novel that depends on character.
Instead, with State of Fear, he may have written the most important novel of his career.
There are those who will take this book as an anti-environmental screed. Certainly his villains are eco-terrorists, and the bulk of the novel is devoted to exploding the global-warming bubble that is the current religious craze that inspires the credulous of the world.
But Crichton's real opponent is ignorance, laziness, and fanaticism. He doesn't attack the global-warming myth because he wants the world to bake to death under a carbon-dioxide lid. Rather he attacks it because it's merely the latest in a long and humiliating string of intellectual fads that have led to bad policy and, yes, crimes against humanity.
quote:If the writer has a preconceived conscious plan for how to present a particular philosophical point, he will start to ignore his own unconscious ideas and will force the characters to act out his little allegory. The result is: Bad fiction, and therefore an ineffective presentation of the theme.
Clearly OSC has changed his views on what makes a worthwhile story. Something tells me he was closer to the truth in 2000 than he is now.
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I like both approaches, as long as they are well-written. I will even enjoy a book whose message infuriates me, if it is well-delivered. This is one of those cases where style is more important than content.
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He acknowledges the fundamental underlying truth of the 2000 statement when he says, "It's not as if he's ever created a memorable character in his writing career."
And, he doesn't call State of Fear good fiction, he calls it important.
Crucial differences.
I'm still not reading the book unless I get stuck in an airport.
posted
Actually, I haven't read a Crichton novel in many, many years. Maybe this is the time to try one again, since this one is garnering so much attention.
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I fail to see where the two statements are in conflict.
Crichton isn’t trying to present a philosophical point. He’s telling a story about a philosophical point. Which according to his research is bogus.
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Actually, some of the complaints I've heard are that he isn't really telling a story. He's got a point to make and he sticks in barely enough plot and cardboard characters to say what he thinks need saying.
I've already read his speech on the subject, I've got no interest in a thick, badly written version of the same thing.
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That's why I won't read it. Rising Sun turned me off of him forever, and Airframe (read under trapped in the airport conditions), while not as bad, made it clear that characters are good or bad, and never a shade of gray shall be evident.
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Jurassic Park was good (though its sequel was a more forgettable affair). And while I have only the vaguest memories of Congo, I seem to recall enjoying it also. Sphere wasn't half bad either.
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I'm interested: everyone, what books do you consider "preachy" that you like anyway? Which ones do you dislike?
I liked Robert J. Sawyer's "Hominids" series even though I though he was laying it on pretty thick about religion being a neurological need (and I'm not a fan of religion).
I do and I don't like Robert Heinlein's later books where he was getting openly preachy about libertarianism and social structures. Love the writing, got a little tired of being hit over the head over and over by how things should be, even when I agreed with him.
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The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man were good for the time they were published. The movie, which I have on LaserDisc, is still masterful at setting suspense, even in a science movie.
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Chris, I'm reading Les Miserables right now. It's not only preachy in places, but there are chapters and chapters of material that has little or nothing to do with the plot, which are basically essays that go on for hundreds of pages. Alot of these are putting foth Hugo's own theological, psychological or sociological views, many which I disagree with utterly. But I am still thoroughly enjoying it.
Other "message" (or preachy) books that I completely disagree with, but nevertheless enjoyed : Albert Camus' L'Étranger, Herman Hesse's Demian. I'll try to think of others.
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I agree with you about Heinlein. And David Weber's Honor Harrington series was another one for me. I enjoyed the books, but every now and then I wanted to yell at the book "enough with the heavy handed economic/political commentary already!"
Actually, I think I did yell that a few times.
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quote: what books do you consider "preachy" that you like anyway?
I liked The Chronicles of Narnia and The Worthing Chronicle. Beyond that, preachiness leaves me pretty cold.
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It really pissed me off when liberal messages were spouted in books I read. When I read Tom Clancy and he started going off on conservative rants that I agreed with him on, I decided I still prefered that politics and fiction should be kept seperate.
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More than that, I wonder what various believers in global warming-Crichton's case against it is pretty damning, in my biased and non-science oriented opinion-think about the book.
I'd be interested to hear perspectives from someone who read it and didn't come away thinking global warming is a warm pile of poo.
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Rak, it's been my observation that people who actually know something about science think Crichton's book is full of crap, whereas those who do not, and are already personally biased against the topic, think it's full of challenging truths. We've already had a thread debunking the novel, though, so I won't go into it here.
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Rakeesh -- go read the thread we had on the subject, it should pop up in search. While I haven't read the book, I have read a Crichton essay which makes the same arguments (in a non-fiction setting).
Most of them are laughably easy to puncture, simply because a lot of what he bases them on is just plain wrong -- for instance, that the models are not being verified against data, and that the same people verifying the models are the ones creating them, both ideas just, well, wrong, as can easily be shown by linking to numerous papers by people verifying the models against data and verifying other people's models.
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quote:He acknowledges the fundamental underlying truth of the 2000 statement when he says, "It's not as if he's ever created a memorable character in his writing career."
And, he doesn't call State of Fear good fiction, he calls it important.
But even your reading of Card seems incompatible with his view (ca. 2000) that a polemical story will fail not only as fiction but as an attempt to present an argument. To say that State of Fear is an important work implies that it succeeds on at least some level.
Also, from some of Card's own recent fiction (e.g. Shadow of the Hegemon), I get the feeling that he's no longer holding himself back from inserting ideology into the story. Witness Petra's random anti-psychology tirade while she's being saved, or Peter's mom's long speech about why reproduction and child-rearing is the point of marriage.
As far as "preachy" books that I nonetheless enjoyed, I would put David Brin's Earth (whose preachings I agree with) and John C. Wright's Golden Age (which I disagree with) on top of that list.
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quote:But even your reading of Card seems incompatible with his view (ca. 2000) that a polemical story will fail not only as fiction but as an attempt to present an argument. To say that State of Fear is an important work implies that it succeeds on at least some level.
I think it's pretty clear that OSC thinks this is the only way these ideas will get expressed to the general public. In other words, not the best way it could be expressed, but perhaps the only way it could be heard.
Again, he acknowledges flaws in the story while still thinking the book important:
quote:So when this novel devotes most of its serious content to conversations between people who are flying or driving from one place to another, it's not an accident. The action sequences are there so that somebody will make a movie out of the book. But the conversations are the reason the book exists.
I get the impression OSC thinks the books importance is primarily a result of 1) the fact that millions of people will read it and 2) the essay at the end.
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I was also going to bring up Hugo, dh. That's what the man did - social crusades - and I think he's one of the best 19th century authors. Dickens is the same case - totally had an agenda with works like Nicholas Nickelby but managed to create stories that were transcendently endearing.
What about authors whose works are popular in spite of their agenda? Here I'm thinking of poor old Upton Sinclair who caused a revolution of sorts where nobody cared about his real cause at all.
Oh, also, I really loved Michael Crichton's Travels. It's autobiographical short stories, and it gets really wacked out and new-agey, but it's really interesting and well-written.
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quote:Rak, it's been my observation that people who actually know something about science think Crichton's book is full of crap, whereas those who do not, and are already personally biased against the topic, think it's full of challenging truths.
Since I'm one of the people who opposed you in that thread, I thought I should toss something in.
I think the main challenging truth in Michael Crichton's book — that science is supposed to work a certain way, and that people who put idealogy ahead of science, by definition, screw up the science — is, in fact, true, and applies in a lot of situations outside the narrow focus of the book. The book made me think of a lot of conversations I've had with people into Creation Science, for instance, or people who insist that certain idealogically-correct theories about human behavior should be treated as fact.
The actual narrow focus of the book — global warming — can't be proved or disproved only by the data provided by the book. So if someone thinks they're reading an exhaustive explanation of "The Truth" then they are likely to come away just as ignorant as they went in, only with a different opinion.
Similarly, if someone reads the book with a firmly-established opinion on the matter based on other sources (as both you and Card did), then they are likely to come away with exactly the same opinion they had when they went in.
When I read the book, the main things I got out of it were (1) rah-rah enthusiasm about the scientific method, and about impartiality while evaluating evidence, and (2) a healthy dose of skepticism about what I hear on the news
Granted, I already had both, but this book really stirred me up about it. I thought back to the Y2K scare, and the fact that during the whole media hoopla, I sat there, trying to figure out a way that this bug could actually destroy civilization as predicted, and honestly, I couldn't come up with one. The stuff they presented on the news was all mysterious black-box stuff. "The dates are wrong, and then magically, EVERYTHING BREAKS!" It wasn't convincing, I doubted it, and I was vindicated.
Now, naturally, that doesn't mean I'll be vindicated every time I doubt something, but it does make me think twice when someone presents me with a situation, and says, "This big disaster will happen in the future if we don't do x, y, and z right now." I think that more often than not, such a person will be wrong, to some degree or another. To what degree, it's hard to say, and I'll have to take it all on a case-by-case basis.
But it means I'm less likely to jump on the "New York will be underwater in forty years!" wagon, too
I know that's not the position most scientists take, either, but ... well, I personally think that just about any long-term climate change that occurs over the next few hundred years will be gradual enough that we'll deal with it the way we deal with anything. I think that there are more pressing issues ahead of us — oil shortages, economic problems, food shortages — which are already on the cusp of becoming major disasters. The latter two of which already ARE major disasters in many places in the world, and whose solutions are sometimes seriously hampered by our reaction to scare issues like global warming and the ozone layer.
quote:he attacks it because it's merely the latest in a long and humiliating string of intellectual fads that have led to bad policy and, yes, crimes against humanity.
By making such a statement, Card shows that he is entirely ignorant of the issues involved and the history of Global Climate Change research.
If you call a scientific theory that has been under investigation for over a century and has been under intense study by thousands of scientist for the past 3 decades "the latest intellectual fad" seems more than unfair.
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People have been investigating Global Warming for over a century? Or is that just how long they've been recording the temperatures?
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quote: I know that's not the position most scientists take, either, but ... well, I personally think that just about any long-term climate change that occurs over the next few hundred years will be gradual enough that we'll deal with it the way we deal with anything.
Yes. And because this is your gut feeling on the issue, you go with it, ignoring the ample scientific evidence to the contrary.
Crichton's point is that ample scientific evidence doesn't matter because we can't count on scientists to be honest with themselves or each other -- or, most importantly, with us -- when money and reputations are on the line. And it baffles me, then, that more people do not recognize that this is, in general, both an unfair and inaccurate portrayal of scientific culture and the scientific method itself, which generally does a pretty decent job of culling out fads (which certainly do pop up; it would be silly to suggest otherwise) within a few years.
Crichton's argument speaks to you because it reinforces biases you already have and gives you both scientific and pseudo-scientific arguments that can be used to justify those biases. In this respect, I think it will be very popular; it will not convince people who already feel one way or another to feel any differently, but will serve as yet another unscientific tool used by unscientific people to contradict scientists.
In my opinion -- and your dad apparently disagrees with me on this one, Geoff, because being a science fiction author makes him an authority on science -- the world doesn't need more of that. Crichton's no more an "expert" on the issue than Card is on, say, the Muslim faith; they both know a little bit more than they have to know on the topic to sell their larger story -- or, if they're writing a polemic, their larger agenda. And in the latter case, part of that agenda is convincing us that they do know more than they're letting on, and that the rest of that agenda is something that they know, by dint of their hard-earned expertise, is good for us. Authors who use straw men -- like Crichton, for example, or Card (see that conversation with Peter's mom) -- know just enough to defeat weak opposition arguments and in this way attempt to sell us on the strength of their own expertise.
It's not uncommon. Voltaire, Hugo, Heinlein -- they all do it.
But it's demagoguery, pure and simple. It plays to the people who already lean in that direction, whips 'em up and gives them a focus, and attempts to sway people who've never really given the issue any serious attention.
It's important to remember, at the end of the day, that Crichton has not released an important book. His book is not being reviewed in scientific journals; it is not being vetted for truth or accuracy or even basic standards of fiction (like, say, competent dialogue). If it is "important," it is because people like Card are attempting to convince people that it's important -- attempting to sell it to an audience who couldn't be bothered reading the really important works in the field, and pandering to their egos by telling them that here, at last, is an "important" book that tells them what they already think.
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Oh yes, I'm reminded of another of Crichton's "points" in that essay -- when a large number of the experts in a field come to a consensus position and publish a report detailing large amounts of evidence about why they have arrived at a consensus we should . . . (wait for it) . . . be suspicious and pretty much ignore or automatically reject what they say.
I know that makes me take Crichton seriously. Experts are only correct when they all disagree about what's correct!
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First of all, my dad doesn't think that being a science fiction writer makes him an authority on science. He actually thinks he's an authority on everything, which is completely different
As I've said, I don't consider my knowledge of the subject to be sufficient for me to establish an informed dissenting opinion. In other words, I know what I don't know.
And I'm not sure what harm you think I'm going to do when I "run with" my "gut feeling". My "gut feeling" is to be cautious and not to panic when I read articles like this one, and instead, to ask questions, and not stop asking questions. My gut feeling is to weigh all the issues, all the costs and risks, rather than running off after chicken little and doing whatever he says just because he says the sky is falling.
There isn't anything wrong with this, Tom. You'll notice that I haven't gone off on a "Global Warming isn't happening, it's all a conspiracy!" tirade. Instead, this is a "Wait a second, let's think about this and make sure we know what we're doing" tirade. I have those a lot, and they aren't bad tirades to have, especially for those of us who don't "know a scientist" and therefore, are not entitled to opinions.
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quote:Oh yes, I'm reminded of another of Crichton's "points" in that essay -- when a large number of the experts in a field come to a consensus position and publish a report detailing large amounts of evidence about why they have arrived at a consensus we should . . . (wait for it) . . . be suspicious and pretty much ignore or automatically reject what they say.
That was only his "point" if you went in as a hostile audience. His actual "point" on that score was that when that happens, you should actually examine the evidence they present, and not just accept the report entirely on the value of it being a "consensus".
quote:I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
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"My 'gut feeling' is to be cautious and not to panic when I read articles like this one...."
And honestly, Geoff, I think most scientists out there who are actually researching global warming are doing exactly the same thing. The "panic" comes, I believe, from ascientific activism.
But here's the problem: Crichton lumps the two together. Instead of doing the responsible -- albeit boring -- thing and attempting to separate them, saying "Okay, yeah, there's something to this global warming, and we should be concerned, but let's not fly off the handle; let's try to determine exactly what we can do now to make it more likely that we'll have the leisure to study this more in the future," he conflates this view -- by far the more common one among the environmentalists I know -- with the "Oh my God, the sky is falling! Throw money at my pet cause!" loonies.
And I know why he does this. It's because the whole debate has been politicized. But instead of trying to depoliticize it, he lumps in the scientific establishment with the panicky pundits -- most of whom never understood the science in the first place -- and, in making them complicit pawns to this behavior, strips them of any real authority on this issue. Which leaves us with whom, exactly, to trust about global warming?
And when you ask that question, you realize that that question is, itself, a revealing one, one that speaks to the biases of the author and those readers swayed by his fiction.
If the Emperor genuinely had no clothes, why would Crichton need a work of badly-written fiction to point it out?
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Fugu, you're reading your interpretation into that. He's saying that the people (activists, politicians) who CITE consensuses, rather than CITING convincing evidence, are not to be trusted.
He's not saying that scientists themselves are automatically untrustworthy when gathered in large numbers.
Tom, it looks like we actually agree more than we initially thought. Even Crichton acknowledges in his final essay that he thinks global warming may well be occurring, and it may well be our fault ... but that he does not think we have enough evidence to make the statements that he sees environmentalist activists making.
And do note that every actual scientist he represents in the story is actually honest and rigorous with his work. In the story, it is the activists who try to turn the scientists' findings into marketable disasters.
Crichton makes his statement in an extreme way to give it weight. Hard to fault that too much, my dad does the same thing And I was annoyed by the fact that I wasn't in a position to check all of Crichton's sources, because I felt like I was simply being given the opposite skewed view to counteract the activist view, rather than being given a truly balanced evaluation of the evidence.
My position is, we should go where the science leads us, and should honestly weigh costs and risks as we do so. My position doesn't leave a lot of room, though, for hysterical activism, which is what I think this book was written to combat.
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I am not reading something into that. You are reading something into that. He neither states nor alludes to "citing". Not only that, but he was speaking to a scientist in the part of the article just before this which led him to the topic (as he states), not a politician or such.
quote:Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
Scientists talk about reaching consensus on things (including global warming (and relativity)) all the time. He specifically says that when one hears someone (unspecified, but the example he gives involves a scientist) speaking about reaching consensus, one is being had.
Furthermore, the global warming debate is partly built on a number of stated consensus papers (that is, they are called consensus papers by the scientific community) about what the nature of global warming is. If Crichton is ignorant of those papers, then he didn't bother doing the first bit of research on the topic and should be ignored. If he is not ignorant of those papers, then that statement clearly implicates them. There really isn't a middle ground, except for him just not thinking that statement through (which, for such a strong statement, should lead to him being ignored much as in the first condition).
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I guess we got different impressions from the same bit of text. Interesting, though, that the one of us who most strongly disagrees with him is the one taking the most literal, exacting, and extreme interpretation of his statements
As I said above, Crichton's book again and again absolves the scientists themselves of trying to screw up their own research, and rather blames the activists who preach about their findings for what he sees as mistakes and misrepresentations.
In other words, it's not the scientists who wrote the paper that you are being "had" by. It's the person you "hear" about it from, who uses it to justify their political agenda. (And I believe I am correct in quoting the word "hear" from Crichton's statement.)
If you want to pick apart a single line, and ignore the rest of the book as it doesn't suit your position, fine. Just don't expect to be persuasive.
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As I said, I haven't read the book, just the essay. And its hardly being overly literal to assume he's talking about scientists doing it when, unsurprisingly, he talks about a scientist doing it. You're adding stuff that's just not there, assuming he's really not talking about scientists, and that he really means in the absence of evidence when there's no statement even close to that -- he just says that when somebody talks about consensus among scientists, they're ignoring the truth.
Also, I've pointed out major flaws with other parts of the essay as well, and pretty much the entire thing has been picked apart by people on other sites. That's hardly picking one particular sentence.
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And perhaps I should rephrase the part about consensus among scientists.
You're saying Crichton is really saying "when people talk about consensus among scientists, except the most well known instances of when people talked about consensus among scientists in the global warming debate, they're having you on." Because the most well known instances of people talking about consensus among scientists in the global warming debate are the various consensus reports of conferences on the subject that have been published. All the instances I know of politicians, for instance, affirming consensus among scientists (as opposed to doubting it, which is the norm), have been in reference to such reports.
And yes, I insist that if he feels he has some pertinent commentary to make on the subject that he be educated on it.
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quote:Oh yes, I'm reminded of another of Crichton's "points" in that essay -- when a large number of the experts in a field come to a consensus position and publish a report detailing large amounts of evidence about why they have arrived at a consensus we should . . . (wait for it) . . . be suspicious and pretty much ignore or automatically reject what they say. (emphasis added.)
To support this you cite:
quote:I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
How exactly did you demonstrate the bolded portion?
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I suspect that Crichton did not intend that sentence to be universally applied to every imaginable instance of multiple scientists' opinions being cited to back up a claim Posts: 1539 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Yes. You can read something into it that makes the conlcusion absurd ("even when they present other things than what I said"), or you can read something into it that makes the conclusion reasonable ("when they only speak of consensus").
posted
Then what he's talking about is almost entirely irrelevant to the global warming debate, as pretty much all the instances of scientist consensus I can come up with are backed up by significant facts -- as I said, you're saying Crichton is really saying "when people talk about consensus among scientists, except the most well known instances of when people talked about consensus among scientists in the global warming debate, they're having you on."
That is, either he's intentionally making a point almost entirely irrelevant to the global warming debate here, or his intended interpretation does include instances where scientists have backed themselves up by evidence. Well, or he's just very ignorant of the global warming debate.
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quote:Then what he's talking about is almost entirely irrelevant to the global warming debate, as pretty much all the instances of scientist consensus I can come up with are backed up by significant facts
Not the ones I've seen. I've seen lots of claims about possible effects, intemringled with likely effects, with no relative weight to either give, all justified by "consensus." And this is from scientists.
quote: As I said above, Crichton's book again and again absolves the scientists themselves of trying to screw up their own research...
Geoff, I don't see that in the text. I agree that it's what he should have done, and agree that it would make both a better book and a better argument, but I believe that through the creation of his straw men and through his rather extremist narrative he manages to turn everyone who's anything but a determinedly hostile skeptic on the global warming issue into either a patsy or a willing participant in the "hoax."
While he rips the media and activists in general pretty hard, I don't see any evidence that he believes that scientists themselves are struggling to produce clear, unambiguous, and reliable data on the topic -- which is I think the single most important thing that people need to understand about the issue in the first place: that, underneath all this ridiculous politicization, there are real people doing real science with the best of intentions and using the best possible methods. And most of them do indeed think global warming is a reality.
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fugu, Crichton's main point is that we should distrust the motives of the activists and policymakers who use those "consensuses" as a bludgeon to make people accept their ideas and solutions without fully justifying them. I am willing to assume that most of the official "well-known consensuses" that you are referring to do not make claims anywhere near as certain and extreme as those often suggested by the activists ...
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quote:Geoff, I don't see that in the text. I agree that it's what he should have done, and agree that it would make both a better book and a better argument, but I believe that through the creation of his straw men and through his rather extremist narrative he manages to turn everyone who's anything but a determinedly hostile skeptic on the global warming issue into either a patsy or a willing participant in the "hoax."
I think you may have been reading it riled up, then, because I did see it. Crichton again and again portrays individual scientists as honest and rigorous, but describes a larger system that he feels lends itself to mistakes and misrepresentation based on idealogy. There were several conversations in which the Skeptic character says, "You mean all these scientists are lying? Or conducting bad science?" and the Crichton Advocate says, "No, they're doing nothing of the sort, there's this other thing going on over their heads that leads to the misconceptions. We need to change the way science is funded and publicized." Etc. He's not blaming the scientists.
In fact, the whole idea of portraying all of one's opponents as idealogical hacks was soundly debunked several times near the end of the book.
posted
Okay, but in the interest of being open-minded here, I can see how someone who actually IS involved in environmental science could totally feel slighted by this stuff. It's kind of similar to when someone points out to me what they see as inconsistencies in the Mormon faith. They may have the best of intentions, and their concerns may be totally supportable. But it still can feel like an insult. Like they're saying, "You're not smart enough to judge your own faith, so I'm going to do it for you."
I can see how Crichton's comments could come across to environmental scientists as accusations that they don't know how to do their jobs, or that they are contributing to worldwide ignorance, when actually, they have devoted themselves to the opposite. That would feel pretty bad.
Doesn't mean his concerns are totally unwarranted, however. Or that he actually intends to insult scientists.
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Geoff, I don't think you can successfully divorce a scientific consensus from the scientists who've reached that consensus. I think Crichton tries to do so, no doubt out of respect for individual scientists and/or to keep himself from sounding too unsympathetic, but the implication is still there: these people are letting themselves be manipulated, and/or don't understand the ramifications of their own research as well as he does.
If I say, on the subject of the Mormon faith, that I'm disinclined to believe that its doctrines have been handed down from God, I do not then attempt to soften the blow by saying "But I'm sure a bunch of individual Mormons are still communing with God on their own time and getting good information; it's just the larger system that's flawed." Precisely because the larger system is predicated in its entirety on the correct functioning of the smaller system in this case, I imply -- despite my own claims to the contrary -- that the smaller system has broken down in some way, as it's the only way the larger system could also be broken. In the same way, scientific consensus is predicated upon the correct functioning of the scientific method within a given field of research. To suggest that a given field is no longer practicing good science, but that all of the individual scientists within that field are still practicing good science, is as meaningless a sop as questioning the Prophet's authority while recognizing the Priesthood.
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Let me just say that I understand why Crichton's villains are cartoons, and their schemes nefarious, and their concerns for the environment either patently absurd or transparently self-interested: it makes for more drama. And in a situation where the worst you can say is that people who care too much on both sides of the issue tend to exaggerate, a little additional drama is probably necessary in order to produce a readable book of fiction. But he errs in trying to have it both ways: he exaggerates both sides of the argument, making angels out of the side on which he falls and devils out of the other, and thus creates only further ammunition for the exact kind of politicization that's really at fault, here.
Honestly, I'm surprised that Card -- who wrote, after all, quite wisely about the difference between Demosthenes, Grego, and Locke -- doesn't see the Grego in this: for his own self-promotion, Crichton has actually done harm to the cause he's trying to advance, assuming of course that he does want the country's politicians to engage in honest dialogue on this issue.
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