Remember the first time you watched Jurassic Park on the big screen? Steven Spielberg created something like we’d never seen before, taking Michael Crichton’s masterpiece science fiction novel and giving it the visual spectacle it deserved. Remember the ice cream scene? When giant dinosaurs are after you, there’s nothing like ice cream. A new book will take you back to that magic, and teach you not how to walk like a Saurian, but to eat like one. In Dayton Ward and Elena Craig’s Jurassic World: The Official Cookbook, available now here at Amazon, fans of the original movie and the franchise finally get to sink their teeth into something straight out of the amusement park ride adventure, just as the latest movie, Jurassic World: Dominion, is being finalized for a summer 2022 release.
Take a look inside the book, released this week, courtesy of the publisher:
Did you know Jurassic World was a trilogy? The last film in the trilogy–and sixth in the Jurassic Park franchise–makes its way to theaters this summer. Jurassic World: Dominion, which sees a new trailer this week (watch it below) follows 2015’s Jurassic World and 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. It looks to be a franchise bookend of sorts, with Jeff Goldblum returning as Ian Malcolm–the character that would define Goldblum’s trademark style thereafter–and digging even deeper to bring back Sam Neill as Alan Grant and Laura Dern as Ellie Sadler. BD Wong is back, too, as Dr. Henry Wu. So far only the first movie, Steven Spielberg’s landmark 1993 CGI and special effects spectacle, Jurassic Park, has matched the excitement and thrills of Michael Crichton’s original novel. But what could executive producer Spielberg and director Colin Trevorrow do to light a fire under this franchise?
Remember the first time you watched Jurassic Park on the big screen? Steven Spielberg created something like we’d never seen before, taking Michael Crichton’s masterpiece science fiction novel and giving it the spectacle it deserved. A new book will take you back to that magic. In James Mottram’s Jurassic Park: The Ultimate Visual History, available now here at Amazon, fans of the original movie and the franchise finally get a behind-the-scenes chronicle worthy of the amusement park ride adventure, just as the latest movie, Jurassic World: Dominion, is being finalized for a summer 2022 release.
InColonyside, the third novel of Michael Mammay’s Planetside series, battle-hardened mastermind hero and retired marine colonel Carl Butler is “getting too old for this kind of thing.” With his notorious reputation and knack for getting people close to him killed–and getting alien inhabitants killed, too–his era’s equivalent of the prime directive is even named after him. Lucky for fans of Planetside (reviewed here) and Spaceside (reviewed here), Colonel Butler, now really just Carl, has a methodical approach to military, politics, and life that shows no signs of waning. But where Planetside was a military conspiracy-thriller in sci-fi dress, and Spaceside was a future noir mystery, Colonyside is more office politics and low-level squabbling power plays. The Aliens franchise Colonial Marines vibe of the first two books takes a shift here in a surprising direction. What begins as something like Predator, an intriguing story of a team going in to re-evaluate a prior action–here a mission gone bad resulting in the death of the daughter of an influential executive–ultimately doesn’t catch the intrigue of the earlier books.
Tor Essentials is a new library of backlist science fiction and fantasy novels from Macmillan Publishing’s Tor imprint, so far featuring 15 novels plucked from the past few decades. One of those 21st century titles is a well-constructed gem, Canadian author Robert Charles Wilson’sSpin. A broad, epic story that traverses literally billions of years from the vantage of a doctor living on Earth, the novel packs a lot of ideas into 300 pages. The sub-genres covered are a mix of apocalypse, speculative fiction, and Martians, but not quite the aliens of H.G. Wells or Robert Heinlein. Like the inexplicable monolith of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a giant black barrier has blocked the atmosphere so we no longer see the Sun, the Moon, or the Stars, but some secret force is protecting the Earth from the effects of such an occurrence. Somehow Wilson connects the dots between the absurd and the improbable with the realities of the human condition to arrive at a story similar to Daniel H. Wilson’s The Andromeda Evolution, another intriguing, creative tale that made readers believe the unlikely was possible.
Fans of James Rollins novels will be happy to hear the 15th novel in his Sigma Force series has arrived. Billed as a thriller, The Last Odyssey finds Rollins piecing together obscure and fantastical elements from the writings of Homer with his fictional version of an Illuminati. Think Knights Templar, the Holy Grail and other lost artifacts of lore, Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code or the secrets of Nicolas Cage’s character in the National Treasure movies. Rollins pulls in Leonardo da Vinci as a character, but his ideas are something more out of Erich von Däniken’s pseudohistory and pseudoscience or Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of–taking some of the most unlikely and untenable of possibilities from real history and connecting them together into an action/adventure story.
Coincidence after coincidence, characters there at the right time every time with knowledge of the most obscure data point necessary to move the characters to the next locale–for fans of Rollins’ brand of storytelling, it just doesn’t matter. The zanier the ideas the more they come back for more. And they’ll likely be pleased with this next installment.
The novel starts off well, with a promising opening act. Rollins presents a group of people who uncover a medieval ship inside a far-away Greenland iceberg. It contains Renaissance era and even ancient artifacts, items you might find in a roleplaying game or video game story like Assassin’s Creed or Tomb Raider, and you get the feeling this will be a romping fantasy quest. The reader is teased with the concept of the Earth opening up with Ray Harryhausen or Clash of the Titans adventure via a glimpse of a mythical creature and extrapolations of ancient technology in the form of automaton robots. But is that really what is going on?
The truth. Truth is the only way forward. Lies and misinformation can destroy any plan, even a good one. Created by writer Daniel H. Wilson in collaboration with the Michael Crichton estate, The Andromeda Evolution arrived last year 50 years afterThe Andromeda Strainwas first published, the book that launched Crichton’s fame as master of the technothriller. The Andromeda Evolution has all the components of Crichton’s best works–the trademark structure of a team of unique experts colliding to prevent catastrophe, the integration of cutting edge science to both inform the reader and carry the plot forward, and the surprising juxtaposition of the improbable and the unimaginable. The ripped-from-the-headlines timeliness was eerily creepy last year, and here in March 2020 with a real pandemic threatening the planet, it’s even more so. It all begins with a disaster in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, complete with lies–government clashes and misinformation campaigns–and ends with a surprise also ripped from last year’s headlines. The Andromeda Evolution is now available in paperback here at Amazon from HarperCollins.
The influences and now, unfortunately, familiarity for readers will harken back to many other fictional tales with virus or pandemic components in sci-fi, conjuring callbacks to Tom Clancy’sDebt of Honor, Isaac Asimov’sFantastic Voyage II,The Philadelphia Experiment, The Cloverfield Paradox, 2017’sLife, or Crichton’s own novels Sphere and Congo. More recent fictional touchpoints for addressing virus crises include zombies as in Netflix’s Kingdom, and The Living Dead, both reviewed at borg this week, and even aliens: Who now doesn’t feel like Donald Sutherland–suspicious of everyone who walks by–inInvasion of the Body Snatcherssimply visiting your local grocery store? More fantasy accounts can be found all over the origin stories of superheroes, like the Hulk, Spider-Man, Wolverine, the Fantastic Four, Deadpool, and in DC’s Swamp Thing series, where the environment itself fights back. Add these to attempts at more realistic stories, the modern, mainstream pandemic thriller, like Outbreak and Contagion.
But can we learn anything from science fiction to help us in the real world, right now?
Those watching the news, working in healthcare facilities, and sheltering at home can certainly find shared experiences as a starting point. But there may be even more. Like how not to handle crises. How the human condition delivers all kinds of different personalities, some who help, some who contribute, and some who hinder. Reading The Andromeda Evolution or revisiting any of the above books, movies, and TV shows may be something you’re not ready for yet. If you are ready, they also may provide ideas. Like anything we might be forgetting. They also may illustrate that no one can say “we never could have planned for this” or “nobody ever figured this could happen.” Those assertions may be said aloud, but science fiction proves them as falsehoods. And if you have kids at home, maybe the superhero stories listed above could help explain how viruses work in real life.
It’s as good as it gets for Michael Crichton fans. Not only is The Andromeda Evolution a new thriller being released more than a decade after the author’s passing, it’s a sequel to a Crichton classic novel–his original science fiction cautionary tale The Andromeda Strain. Created by writer Daniel H. Wilson(Robopocalypse) in collaboration with Crichton’s estate (CrichtonSun LLC), The Andromeda Evolution is nicely timed to arrive 50 years after The Andromeda Strain was first published, the book that launched Crichton’s fame as master of the technothriller. The Andromeda Evolution has all the components of Crichton’s best works–the trademark structure of a team of unique experts colliding to prevent catastrophe, the integration of cutting edge science to both inform the reader and carry the plot forward, and the surprising juxtaposition of the improbable and the unimaginable. And the ripped-from-the-headlines timeliness is eerily creepy–it all begins with a disaster in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, complete with government clashes and misinformation campaigns, and ends with a surprise that will stop you in your tracks.
Nothing defines Crichton’s storytelling as much as his interaction of characters, always an unlikely grouping of personalities that some far-off puppetmaster thinks is the right team to solve problems. A mix of the wise, the pragmatic, the cerebral, the sensitive, and the reactionary, common to the Crichton elite team are individuals who must struggle to get along like any group trying to complete a project in the real world. Everyone has a piece of the puzzle, but can everyone survive long enough to contribute their piece? In The Andromeda Evolution that first means introducing us to Dr. James Stone, son of TheAndromeda Strain bacteriologist Dr. Jeremy Stone. The son is a late addition to a core unit assigned to investigate and prevent the spread of what appears to be that dreaded, fast-moving viral strain his father faced so many decades ago that almost destroyed Earth. Haunted by a lifetime of living with the threat of the virus’s return, Stone has acquired expertise under his father’s wing. With the alert of a new threat, on a moment’s notice he’s dropped at Ground Zero with only hours to collect data with other similar elite minds to try to save the world again.
In The Andromeda Evolution, everything you think you know about the constructs of modern science and technology was a lie, dating back to the original Andromeda Strain virus, documented in Dr. Michael Crichton’s original account (recall Crichton was in medical school when he began his career as author). Hidden by world governments, never losing ground as the world’s primary threat to security and survival, the Andromeda Strain was real. NASA, the Center for Disease Control, all the framework for technological initiatives we think about every day from the 1970s forward have been preparing humanity for the return of the dreaded AS-1 and AS-2. And the biggest secret is staring us all in the face.
As you’re planning to attend the upcoming return of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park to theaters, a new book released this week is going to take readers of all ages on a tour of the history of real dinosaurs and the history of the study of dinosaurs itself. A fresh look at the science of paleontology and the resulting knowledge about the life, environment, and structure of the major species of dinosaurs is the subject of Dinosaurs: A Journey to the Lost Kingdom. Authors Christine Argot and Luc Vivès, researchers at The French National Museum of Natural History in Paris, use the museum’s own paleontology gallery as the starting point to tell how scientists developed the study and reconstruction of dinosaurs since the gallery first opened in 1898. Everyone has a favorite dinosaur, and whether yours is a stegosaurus, triceratops, diplodocus, allosaurus, iguanodon, brontosaurus, megalosaurus, or tyrannosaurus, you’ll marvel at the spectacular images of their skeletons on display as scientists have updated them consistent with improved knowledge and techniques across the years.
Interlacing the work of paleontologists, geologists, museum curators, and other scientists around the world, and changing views of remarkable fossil discoveries (like placement, stance, and presence of feathers) over nearly 150 years, the authors combine photographs of their collection with images resulting from digs, artists’ interpretations, magazine articles, and museum archives. From tales of dragons and mythical beasts to speculative works from John Milton’s Paradise Lost to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot, and Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder to Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, ideas of fantasy have informed science and vice versa. Movements and individuals have changed our outlook into history, via wealthy benefactors, scholars, educators, and artisans. From lost displays in the Crystal Palace to the artistry of Charles R. Knight, the history of dinosaurs is also the evolution of the thinking of mankind. The result will fascinate both young and old readers, whether Dinosaurs: A Journey to the Lost Kingdom will be your kid’s first book of dinosaurs or a companion book for a high school or college museum studies course, or simply a resource for you to enjoy.
One story recounts the misidentification of an iguanodon finger bone as a nose bone. Another story describes the excavation of a pit in Belgium in the 1870s that netted 130 tons of bones. Preservation and conservation methods are discussed throughout, plus improvements in museum display, like the use of 3D printing to allow an original tyrannosaurus rex from the States to be replicated and put on display at the Paris museum this summer.
Some of the very best genre favorites are heading back to the big screen in September and October, with many screenings celebrating some landmark anniversaries. All of the films are part of the Fathom Events series (see FathomEvents.com for local listings), bringing classic movies to theaters as a retrospective treat for fans and an opportunity to introduce a new generation to some of Hollywood and Japan’s significant achievements in film. So if you’re looking for your sci-fi/adventure/suspense fix, it’s on its way, along with one of the best fantasy films of all time, an animated movie milestone, and the film that defined cool in the 1960s.
First in theaters is Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Michael Crichton’s sci-fi novel of archaeology meeting the future in Jurassic Park. Throw all the sequels out the window, this is the only entry in the franchise you need to see. One of film’s greatest moments was Spielberg’s first full-screen of a modern Earth populated with dinosaurs. John Williams provided one of his most memorable themes. And Samuel L. Jackson told us all to hold onto our butts as he shut down the park’s security system. It’s really been 25 years since we first saw a dinosaur in the rearview mirror. You’ll have too many reasons to see this one on the big screen again or for the first time, and no reason not to. It’s showing Sunday, September 16, Tuesday, September 18, and Wednesday, September 19 nationwide.
Then, as part of Studio Ghibli Fest 2018, the enchanting and beloved Hayao Miyazaki anime classic My Neighbor Totoro is back. Join Satsuki, Mei, Granny, everyone’s friend Totoro, and the fantastic Cat Bus for an imaginative fantasy adventure story. It’s been called delightful, strange, extraordinary, and magical. It’s all that and more. Audiences will have two options for watching Totoro, either the original Japanese version with English subtitles on Monday, October 1, or the American dubbed version featuring the young sister voice actors Dakota and Elle Fanning, Sunday, September 30, or Wednesday, October 3.
Before there was a Fast and the Furious series, before Baby Driver, before Clint was Dirty Harry, before Smokey met the Bandit, or before Max ever got mad, there was Steve McQueen in Bullitt. You may try but you’re unlikely to conjure up a film that defines cool more than McQueen does as a San Francisco cop trying to protect a witness in a major case. For 50 years the Oscar-winning car chase (from editor Frank B. Keller) has topped best action scene lists from film critics and everyone else. Robert Vaughn was hardly better than as the demanding Senator Chalmers. The music of the great Lalo Schifrin (Mission: Impossible, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mannix, Starsky and Hutch, Planet of the Apes) perfectly encapsulates the era, complete with a jazz flute interlude. There’s a reason Hollywood kept returning to Schifrin for action movie scores, like Kelly’s Heroes, Enter the Dragon, Brubaker, Charley Varrick, Cool Hand Luke, THX 1138, and the Dirty Harry and Rush Hour movies–the music is that memorable. We are lucky to have a dozen great Steve McQueen movies to re-visit, and this is one of the best. Plus you can only look to James Bond movies for an opening credits montage as compelling as you’ll find in Bullitt.
