Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park is a science fiction novel by the American writer Michael Crichton, published in 1990. The book warns about genetic engineering: a zoological park stocked with recreated dinosaurs collapses, and the failure is used to work through the mathematical idea of chaos theory and what follows from it. A sequel, The Lost World, followed in 1995, and the novel was adapted into a 1993 film directed by Steven Spielberg.

In 1989, strange animal attacks are reported across Costa Rica, and the evidence collected points to a dinosaur that has been extinct for millions of years. A billionaire has bought an island off the coast and filled it with dinosaurs cloned from blood preserved in amber, intending to turn it into the most profitable theme park in the world. Before opening it, he invites a palaeontologist, a palaeobotanist and a mathematician whose speciality is chaos theory to sign off on the safety case.

The gaps in the recovered DNA have been filled with code from other species, and the animals have been engineered to be docile and countable list entries. The systems that keep them contained rest on assumptions nobody has tested against a living population, and the mathematician is there to say the park cannot work. The book spends its second half showing why, and the failure comes from several small things going wrong at once rather than from one obvious mistake.

Crichton wrote the novel after research into genetic engineering and computer systems, and he included charts, diagrams and citations in the text. The film franchise that followed diverged from the book in several respects, and the novel remains a standalone story continued in one direct sequel.