52 pages • 1 hour read
Michael CrichtonState of Fear
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 1 (Pages 5-38)Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Akamai”
Pages 5-23 Summary
After a brief introduction mentioning the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF) and the mysterious disappearance of its financial backer, Morton, State of Fear begins with story of Jonathan, a graduate student and physics researcher in Paris. He meets a woman named Marisa while she is having an argument with her boyfriend Jimmy at a café. Jonathan takes Marisa and Jimmy to his laboratory for a demonstration of his research equipment, a wave simulator. Marisa is particularly interested in what Jonathan tells her about the great height of tsunamis, gleefully noting, “So a person cannot run away from this” (11). Sulking, Jimmy departs, and Jonathan accompanies Marisa to her apartment, where they have sex.
Shortly afterwards, three men break into Marisa’s apartment. They pin Jonathan down and place an unknown substance against his arm (later, it is revealed to be a deadly poisonous blue-ringed octopus). After Marisa shoots a gun, the men disperse, and she insists on not calling the police. Jonathan asks to go, but he begins to feel ill and has trouble speaking and walking. He becomes paralyzed, but Marisa seems unconcerned. She drops his body into the river, and he sinks below the surface. Back at the laboratory, the research equipment starts up and transmits some data to an unknown location in France before erasing its hard drives.
Charles Ling drives a passenger calling himself Allan Peterson from the Kuala Lumpur airport to a site in the Malay rain forest. Allan claims to be a field geologist consulting for a Canadian energy company, visiting Malaysia to observe heavy industrial equipment for potential purchase. Charles notes that Allan traveled under an assumed name and has limited geological knowledge, however, and so doubts his story. After seeing a demonstration, Allan requests to purchase three cavitators (machines that form hollows in rock or soil), an unusually high number. He tells Charles he will only provide shipping information in five months, once the order is ready.
Pages 24-38 Summary
Richard Mallory is working the desk of the graphic design company Design/Quest in the Shad Thames district of London. An American man visits and asks about a secretive, prearranged package pickup. Richard takes him to the firm’s garage and shows him the delivery: 700 pounds of wire designed for use in anti-tank missiles. They load the wire onto the American’s van. The van’s driver, a woman dressed in military surplus gear, steps out and attacks the American with what, in retrospect, again appears to be a blue-ringed octopus. He stumbles out, and the woman orders Richard to keep quiet. She then leaves.
Unable to concentrate afterwards, Richard notices an accident on the Tower Bridge outside of his office. He goes outside to see what has happened and notices the bloody leg of the American, who has been killed after stepping out in front of a bus. The passport the police retrieve shows the “American” was actually German. As Richard leaves in a daze, he locks eyes with a man in a dark suit, who ominously nods at him.
In Tokyo, Akira Hitomi, director of the International Data Environmental Consortium (IDEC), gives a presentation to two visitors, Kenner and Sanjong. The IDEC is running a project called Akamai Tree Digital Network Solutions that surreptitiously tracks internet users searching for information on geology, civil engineering, ecology, and related topics. Akira reports the group has become especially interested in the activity of an “Alpha extremist group” with global operations (33). Later, this group is revealed to be ELF.
Two mysterious clients wanting to lease a submarine visit Nat Damon’s Vancouver company, Canada Marine RS Technologies. The clients claim to be part of an energy and mining company and plan to use the sub for undersea prospecting and offshore rig inspections. While this seems logical, Nat is surprised by the gaps in the clients’ knowledge. They do not know the weight of the devices the sub will carry, for instance. While Nat helps the clients select a sub, he suspects that they are lying about their intentions. This is confirmed after they agree to lucrative lease terms without hesitation. The next day, he asks a friend (John Kim) who is a bank manager to check the funds availability for the clients’ check.
Part 1 (Pages 5-38) Analysis
The first sections of State of Fear establish the book’s global scope, jumping from Paris, to Malaysia, to London, to Tokyo, to Vancouver. Rapidly shifting location sets a pace appropriate to a thriller and foreshadows the globetrotting that Kenner, Sanjong, and other main characters will do when pursuing ELF. Most of the people introduced in these first sections are minor characters, yet the people, places, and events they are connected to all reemerge to tie the novel’s various threads together.
The opening of the novel also makes clear that it is a thriller via the dark and mysterious twists of its plot: from the octopus attack on Jonathan, to the clearly deceptive agents that show up at Nat’s business, to the deadly plot that Richard has unwittingly embroiled himself in. Even Kenner and Sanjong, who later turn out to be protagonists, first appear involved with an organization (Akamai) that, although it may have good intentions, uses surreptitious methods.
Akamai pinpoints a network of eco-terrorists connected in a way that the isolated plot twists do not at first seem to be. Physical violence in these first parts of State of Fear is near and direct. For instance, the octopus is placed directly on Jonathan’s skin. By contrast, underground terrorists tracked based on their internet searches via “multilevel quad-check honeynets” (32) and other highly technical means, or global warming measured by miniscule rises in temperature or sea levels over decades, seem far less immediate.
In State of Fear, nature does not act alone to wreak havoc on humanity. The terroristic threats ever present in the novel, and indicated in its opening pages, arise at the intersection of technology, industry, and human nature. The cavitation generators Allan seeks, the submarine the agents in Vancouver want to lease, and more all involve the use of human-designed technological means of initiating what might oxymoronically be called artificial natural disasters.
The structural frame of State of Fear, whereby literary nonfiction narrative collides into something akin to journalism or a documentary, is important. This becomes most evident later in the novel, when Kenner’s actions and ideas exert a powerful influence on the plot and characterization. Yet State of Fear opens with something that purports to be a truthful, straightforward “Introduction” from Crichton concerning NERF and Morton, which in retrospect is clearly fictional. This subversion of reader expectations crystallizes a recurring theme in the novel, that how things appear to be is not necessarily how they truly are—a perspective that touches everything from its claims about global warming, to the Akamai project, to facts about whether its characters are alive or dead, to what is fiction and what is science.
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By Michael Crichton
