Jurassic Fate

                        At first glance, there is little in common between Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but there are some aspects that are extraordinarily similar between the two.  

Jurassic Park is about the recreation of extinct animals in the modern world while attempting to control them, but that this plan would inevitably fail, regardless of the precautions taken. Frankenstein is about a man’s ambition to create life, and how it backfires on him, bringing misery into his life and cursing the day he ever created the creature. Starting to see a similarity between the two?

            The two stories bring up the idea of doing the impossible and creating something that has passed on and was thought to never be able to come back. In Jurassic Park, Hammond treats the animals like objects that are easily manageable and predictable enough to contain. Meanwhile, in Frankenstein, Victor treats his creation like an object, something that can just be brought back to life and then forgotten when he finally sees the monstrosity he has created. The creations of the two men, with their big ambitions, end up becoming the end of them, as Victor chases the creature to his deathbed, and John Hammond succumbs to a pack of compies (procomsognathus). The two men also die peacefully, knowing that everything will be all right.

            Furthermore, both the island of dinosaurs and the creatures end up getting destroyed after the death of their creator, with the creature leaving to kill himself and the island being destroyed by the military. Both stories also seem to show the inevitability of the outcome, with the island going to hell and the creature causing mayhem before his death. The idea of science being a powerful and misused tool is all too common in these two books, and they display this idea to the fullest extent possible.

            In short, both Frankenstein and Jurassic Park are books about the creation of life, and how the inevitability of how it will backfire. Whether it would be through revenge and hatred or through chaos theory, in the wise words of Ian Malcolm “Life will find a way.”