Age of Anxiety

The power of two,which we celebrate in this issue of Eye,is that it is a binary.

The power of two,which we celebrate in this issue of Eye,is that it is a binary. In binary notation,two is a perfect 10. Thats what the relatively unsung writer John Lange scored in 1972 with his eighth novel,Binary Alfred A Knopf,which sold so well that its still in print. In the Christmas season the same year,Michael Crichton released the film Pursuit,whose plot was suspiciously like that of Langes book. But even more suspiciously,he didnt seem to mind the coincidence. The mystery was resolved two decades later in 1993,when Knopf reissued Binary under the name of Michael Crichton. He had published eight works of speculative fiction under the pen name of John Lange. In short,Binary was a double binary.

Decades before 9/11,Binary explained the reason for the subsequent curbs on liquids and gels carried by passengers. It is because innocuous precursor chemicals can be combined in an airplane loo to produce lethal compounds,explosive or toxic. Many chemical weapons are binaries. One example formally inducted by the US Army is M687,a 155 mm artillery shell containing methylphosphonyl difluoride,isopropyl alcohol and isopropyl amine in separate containers. When it is launched,the shock breaks the containers and the chemicals combine into the nerve gas sarin. Another example is the fertiliser bomb much valued by modern terrorists,a combination of ammonium nitrate and a tiny volume of fuel oil ignited by a detonator.

M687 was produced in 1976. Sarin was first used by terrorists in the 1995 Tokyo subway attacks by the Aum Shinrikyo group,now known as Aleph,and they used a crude non-binary method which could have killed the attackers rather than the targets. Binary,which detailed a safe,sophisticated method to combine chemicals to murder the president of the US and destroy the evidence too,was published in 1972,predating both events.

Crichton was reliably prescient. Though he was an inheritor of the tradition of Jules Verne,Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle,his work opened a new path using his scientific background. It was not speculatively optimistic like that of his predecessors. Rather,it was speculatively cautionary. Many of his novels predicted dangers that are still in the womb of time. He was one of the popular writers who marked the turning point between the age of progress,which looked forward to techno-utopias,to our present age of technological anxiety,which perennially anticipates dystopias.

Crichtons most prescient dystopia was The Andromeda Strain 1969,which posited a primitive,seemingly viral life form,which could mutate fast enough to defeat medicine. Somewhere in Africa,the HIV/AIDS pandemic had already begun,but medicine would have no knowledge of it until a decade later,when the murderous tidal wave reached US shores. Compared to the power of that prediction,Crichtons best-known work,Jurassic Park 1990,seems relatively unimportant. Flies in amber can be mined for the DNA of animals they bit millions of years ago? That isnt rocket science.

But Jurassic Park expresses the essence of Crichton. As a student of science and medicine he was a qualified doctor,he warned of the unknown dangers predicted by complexity theory. A system may be lethal even if its components are harmless. And those components may be nested systems themselves,concealing unseen levels of complexity with hazards that are not immediately obvious. The chemical binary offers the simplest form of concealed hazard two innocuous substances which combine to form a lethal entity.

Michael Crichtons last work was a binary,too. Sort of. Micro,discovered in his archives after his death in 2008,was finished by Richard Preston best known for the 1994 bio-thriller The Hot Zone,who was chosen for the job by Knopf and Crichtons agent,Lynn Nesbit. Eerily,the novel mentions a Latin inscription at the base of a waterfall: Nunquam obliviscemur Michaelis Crichtonis. Slightly dodgy Latin for: Never shall we forget Michael Crichton.

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