Review: Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton
Blurb:
The year is 1876. Warring Indian tribes still populate America’s western territories even as lawless gold-rush towns begin to mark the landscape. In much of the country it is still illegal to espouse evolution. Against this backdrop two monomaniacal paleontologists pillage the Wild West, hunting for dinosaur fossils, while surveilling, deceiving and sabotaging each other in a rivalry that will come to be known as the Bone Wars.
Into this treacherous territory plunges the arrogant and entitled William Johnson, a Yale student with more privilege than sense. Determined to survive a summer in the west to win a bet against his arch-rival, William has joined world-renowned paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh on his latest expedition. But when the paranoid and secretive Marsh becomes convinced that William is spying for his nemesis, Edwin Drinker Cope, he abandons him in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a locus of crime and vice. William is forced to join forces with Cope and soon stumbles upon a discovery of historic proportions. With this extraordinary treasure, however, comes exceptional danger, and William’s newfound resilience will be tested in his struggle to protect his cache, which pits him against some of the West’s most notorious characters.
A page-turner that draws on both meticulously researched history and an exuberant imagination, Dragon Teeth is based on the rivalry between real-life paleontologists Cope and Marsh; in William Johnson readers will find an inspiring hero only Michael Crichton could have imagined. Perfectly paced and brilliantly plotted, this enormously winning adventure is destined to become another Crichton classic.
Review:
Michael Crichton is (or was) one of the modern era’s foremost authors of speculative fiction. Crichton amassed an astounding body of work over his decades as a writer, including not only best-selling novels and their myriad blockbuster feature-film adaptations (Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, Timeline, Congo, I could go on); but also his own original works for the silver screen like Coma, Westworld, and the award-winning television drama ER. And so, with such prestige attached to the very idea of “Michael Crichton”, it was not altogether unsurprising to me that shortly after his death in 2008 I saw his name once again adorn the tomes of the “New Releases” section of our local Barnes and Noble.
The idea of posthumously publishing an author’s works (or at the very least the idea of getting someone else to carry the torch of a given author’s original works based on notes, journals, etc. discovered in the years since an author’s passing, i.e. the non-Frank Herbert Dune titles) was not new to me then, I’d heard of it happening before; and though I am wary of such efforts given that I myself am a writer and am personally horrified by the idea of somebody rooting through my Google drive of WIP stories after I die and deciding, “Hey, this one is good enough to publish!” (because, dear reader, I can assure you it is not), I had been and still am an avid collector of Crichton’s fiction and so picked up 2009’s Pirate Latitudes just to see what there was to see.
But it was clear to me, even then - having, at that time, not yet written any of my own fiction apart from hastily hand-written scripts for dumb home movies - that Pirate Latitudes was certainly an incomplete work. Or, more correctly, a good first draft. And two years later I ended up feeling similarly about 2011’s Micro, which, unlike Pirate Latitudes, wasn’t even a complete manuscript when his estate found it. Micro was completed by The Hot Zone author Richard Preston prior to its publication (though in my estimation Micro suffered from far different issues than Pirate Latitudes, chief among them the feeling that I could tell exactly which parts of the story had been penned by Crichton and which had been penned by Preston, though I lack any evidence to back up those feelings). And so in 2017 when I once again saw Cricthon’s name attached to a new book, Dragon Teeth, I bought it; but, because of my previous encounters with Cricthon’s unpublished works, it stagnated on my shelf, unread, in the years that followed.
So I must then direct attention to friend of SFF Insiders BiblioTheory for recently making (in their video review of Crichton’s Sphere) an offhand comment praising Dragon Teeth, which finally coaxed me to pull this third posthumous Crichton novel off my shelf and explore it for myself.
And I was immediately reminded of why I love Michael Crichton.
For those unfamiliar with his work, Michael Crichton has a distinct knack for tricking the reader into thinking the book they are reading is actually non-fiction, and not a masterwork of speculative imaginings - because nearly all of Crichton’s fiction has, in fact, been born out of some real-world thing or another. Crichton leverages this grounding in reality in his introductions, which are written so as to deliberately blur the line between Crichton, the real man; and Crichton, the diegetic narrator of the story. Your typical reader will open to the first page of a book - let’s use Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead as an example - see the text “Introduction”, read “The ibn Fadlan manuscript represents the earliest known eyewitness account of Viking life and society,” and immediately begin to wonder, “Wait, has the book started yet? Is this part of the text? Should I be paying attention?” Or, as is the case with The Andromeda Strain, see that the opening chapter is “Acknowledgements”, read “This book recounts the five-day history of a major scientific crisis,” follow the remaining meticulous contextualization of the story, and see that Crichton has signed these Acknowledgements “M.C., Cambridge, Massachusetts January 1969” and subsequently spend the rest of the book thinking to themselves, “Wait, did this actually happen?”
Dragon Teeth offers up, from its opening words, this same delicious blurring of reality.
Crichton introduces us to our protagonist William Johnson, the fictional son of a rich shipping merchant in 1870s Philadelphia, whom Crichton is about to throw into the tumultuous rivalry of real-world paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.
I knew in 2017 that this book was about paleontology - and it was, honestly, that knowledge more so than Crichton’s name alone that got me to purchase the book back then, despite the two lackluster novels that preceded it - because I have always loved the world of paleontology.
Jaws author Peter Benchley wrote in 2002 that, “I believe implicitly, though without a shred of evidence, that every male child on earth is, at some period in his life, fascinated - enraptured! enthralled! - by sharks or dinosaurs or both” (Shark Trouble, 2002) - and I was and am decidedly in the camp of both. A massive collection of National Geographic VHS tapes inherited from my great-grandfather fed these interests all throughout my childhood, and two in particular fostered my fascination with the digging up of dinosaur bones: 1997’s Dinosaur Hunters (about an Oviraptor dig in the Gobi Desert) and 2000’s Dinosaur Giants: Found! (which included a feature about the discovery of, legal battle surrounding, and eventual public debut of Sue, the largest and most well-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found). Jurassic Park, both the book and the movie, would continue to feed this fascination; though my academic pursuits would eventually steer much closer to the occupational path of Steven Spielberg than the fictional Alan Grant.
Dragon Teeth is full of the same rich texture contained in my childhood National Geographic tapes; and if I had one complaint about this book, it would be that there is actually not nearly enough digging in it. Though the prospect of the dig serves as an inciting incident to the whole story, once the dig is completed, the story takes a turn into rougher narrative and geographical territory.
Perhaps it is a symptom of Dragon Teeth existing within the storied confines of Crichton’s posthumous canon, but Dragon Teeth as a whole reads very much like myriad other Western stories wherein the protagonist discovers some valuable resource or another (often gold), and thusly has to somehow or another safely make their way out of the lawless West with their newfound treasure. Subsequently, Dragon Teeth feels almost as though Crichton were in the midst of converting a more traditional Western tale (maybe a spiritual successor to his own The Great Train Robbery) into a slightly more unique setting. My speculation as to the reality of this theoretical story development comes from the Afterword of Dragon Teeth, written by Sherri Crichton, where - though she does not cite the exact year in which the manuscript was written - claims that its origins run all the way back to 1974, and that it was “...a very important book for Michael - it was a forerunner of his ‘other dinosaur story’.” So you can see why I’d like to believe that Crichton had maybe, at one time, written a more simple Western tale, but then - once the nugget of the story that would eventually become Jurassic Park had planted itself in his mind - began reworking said Western story into Dragon Teeth.
But, of course, such headcanon’d development and conversion is irrelevant. Maybe my speculation is accurate, and maybe it isn’t. Regardless, this is the novel we are left with: a treasure hunting Western set against the backdrop of early American paleontology.
Dragon Teeth’s treasure then is dinosaur bones, chiefly the teeth of a Brontosaurus. And though the teeth are not the typical loot known by other protagonists of the genre, the story eventually - as previously stated - frustratingly falls into the same genre beats of Western narratives that came before it; to the point where even the side characters in this tale refuse to accept the reality of Dragon Teeth’s focus on fossils. We’re introduced later in the text to an assortment of miscreants that assume the contents of Johnson’s unmarked crates of fossils can’t possibly be bones, and that Johnson must be trying to obfuscate their true nature (which, like any reasonable ruffian in a story like this, think Johnson’s thousand pounds of mysterious booty must be gold! Why else would he be trying to protect it? Who would protect bones?). And so the narrative continues to devolve down familiar genre paths, with Johnson hunted through the territory by these and other low-lifes on his way back to the East Coast.
And Johnson himself feels a bit flatter than Crichton’s more fully developed protagonists, though this could very well be deliberate, as Johnson seems, at times, to only exist to give us a window into the far more compelling characters of Marsh and Cope and the conflict between them. And Crichton seems to have known that Johnson was the least interesting character in the book, as, when Johnson is separated from the paleontologists at the end of the second act, Crichton serves us up a prolonged cameo from real-life gunslinger Wyatt Earp, who joins Johnson’s journey to nearly its conclusion.
But all that said, the worst Crichton book (and this is not the worst Crichton book, not by a long shot) is still leaps and bounds better than most others. Dragon Teeth offers, if nothing else, a richly textured introduction to the broader fiction of Michael Crichton; and a direct springboard to his most famous works. And like nearly all of Crichton’s novels, Dragon Teeth comes with an extensive bibliography for those who wish to further explore the real-life inspirations of the text. As Sherri Crichton correctly observes in her Afterword, “You always [come] out of a Crichton novel, film, or television event smarter and wanting more.” And Dragon Teeth is no different.
