I've been having trouble evaluating this book, primarily because the movie is already so pronounced in my mind, but also because the book was published in 1990, and it's hard to remember whether various concepts in the book were genuinely novel at the time.

Many scenes were rearranged for the movie, and although the book creates a terrific suspense, the movie effectively streamlines everything for double the punch. But that's no biggie. Let me get straight to the main problem:

If you think about the "moral" being presented by the time you get to the end of the movie, it seems to go something like, "Dinosaurs are far more terrible than some people imagined while bringing them back to life." It's hard for the message to be more damning than that because the critical sequence of problems that occurred was incidentally caused by one villainous person. Underneath the thrills and excellent visuals, Jurassic Park could almost be considered a formulaic "disaster" movie that shows how things could go wrong.

But the book moreso emphasizes errors made by uncharacteristically sloppy engineers as if such errors were inevitable. While unlikely, it is entirely conceivable that the billionaire founder of Jurassic Park could have hired only impetuous "hotshots" without knowing how to really evaluate their skills. That kind of BS happens in real life way more often than you might expect. Yet, despite that all the mishaps and treacheries were avoidable, the book has a much more explicit message than the movie: "People can't handle bringing dinosaurs back to life, because things not only could go wrong in this situation, they always will go wrong, and 'math' can prove this is so. Not only that, but the arrogant practice of science itself is intrinsically flawed, because science has limits, and we've already reached them. It's downright foolish for science to try to explain some things."

So I'm afraid the book's message is, well, stupid. The author plays with several scientific topics that were rather fresh at the time, yet doesn't seem to understand what "science" itself means. Science does not mean to contrive a means to an end. Science does not dictate a religion or a philosophy or a mindset perpetually prone to absent-minded mistakes. Science wouldn't still be around if it wasn't inherently useful. Why does the author think that fractals control people's fates? Why does the author think we're stupid?

I sure am glad the movie watered down the message! (Even if it did have that girl who thought she was a hacker...)