The author is Michael Crichton, and the book is The Lost World. Many people have readthis book, along with its predecessor, Jurassic Park, and many people have been enthralledwith the thought of living dinosaurs in the 20th century. “What if the dinosaurs did notbecome extinct? What if they still exist?” (The Lost World takes off a couple years afterthe first book. A separate island is discovered, an island where the dinosaurs wereactually created. There are two different research groups sent to the island. One toobserve the dinosaurs in the wild and the other to bring them back for research purposes. The fighting starts from there. What many people don’t know, is that these books, alongwith countless other Crichton works, contain many of the same themes. One of thesethemes is that Technology will backfire if it is taken for granted. Also, he says that powercorrupts those who possess it. Chaos and randomness rule the world. Nothing can bepredicted, and nothing is as it seems. Last and not least, mother nature sits above all else. Technology plays a key role in many parts of society in today’s world. Computersrun everything from huge assembly lines to the light switch. Some hard-core proof thattechnology will backfire is the Year 2000 bug (Y2K). The Y2K bug will make manycomputers not work properly, and in many cases, they will shut down completely. Theproblem stems back some 50 years, to when the first computers were being made. It couldhave been fixed in the 1970’s, but nobody figured out that it would be a problem until afew years ago. People have taken for granted the use of computers for many years now,and only now will people realize that we can’t depend upon new technology so much. Thisis exactly what Michael Crichton means in The Lost World. The people who weredesigning the dinosaurs didn’t realize how powerful the dinosaurs really were, and thedinosaurs took over...
