State of Fear

State of Fear is a techno-thriller by the American writer Michael Crichton, published in 2004 and his fourteenth novel under his own name.

The plot follows a group of eco-terrorists who are arranging a sequence of engineered disasters, dramatic enough to be attributed to climate change and alarming enough to push the world towards action. The campaign is the work of a man who understands how environmental foundations and their donors operate, and it uses money, media attention and a good deal of technical equipment. A lawyer, Peter Evans, is drawn into the trail after the death of a friend, and the task he is given is to establish who is behind the events and how the projections and warnings he keeps being handed relate to what actually happens. The novel was published with graphs, appendices and a long bibliography attached to a work of fiction, which is why it was read as an argument as much as a story.

Crichton wrote repeatedly about new technology arriving faster than the institutions meant to manage it, and this novel applies that habit of mind to the politics of the climate debate.