User blog:BastionMonk/Jurassic Park just Science Fiction?

Jurassic Park is a science fiction franchise. Its creator, Michael Crichton, mostly wrote science fiction novels. His novels feature time travel, cloning dinosaurs, schrinking humans and alien pathogens.

Nonetheless, many of his future history novels have medical or scientific underpinnings, reflecting his medical training and science background. Crichton often performed years of study before writing a novel (see Jurassic_Park_(novel)).

Because Michael Crichton made sure he was very informed about the latest dinosaur discoveries, his dinosaurs looked very different from what other media showed. The Brachiosaurus isn't a cold blooded slow creature that lives in a swamp. The Tyrannosaurus rex hasn't an upright wallaby/kangaroo posture. The dinosaurs are dumb lumbering giants. They are intelligent, agile, warm-blooded animals. Scientists and dino fans probably knew all this, but the general public was oblivious to this. was perhaps the most significant event in raising public awareness of dinosaur renaissance theories.

Since Jurassic Park III hit the screens we haven't seen a new Jurassic Park story. From that point, fans have started to speculate about new stories. Most fans, unlike Michael Crichton, have almost no scientific training. Therefore, most of the fan made stories I have seen are full with scientific nonsense or things that can never happen in real life.

When I confronted the creators with this, they all gave a reaction like "Dude, it is Jurassic Park". Jurassic Park is Science Fiction, Science Fiction is bullshit, so Jurassic Park stories are bullshit anyway.

When Colin Trevorrow announced that Jurassic World would not have feathered dinosaurs I was, and still am, very disappointed. The discovery that most theropods were feathered is one of the biggest discoveries of the past decade. Why should Jurassic Park, which was praised for its scientifically accurate portrayal of the dinosaurs, not incorporate this discovery?

Most fans responded like before:

And don't forget in Sci-fi movies, anything is possible.

it's a science fiction franchise that has about as much bearing on paleontology as Star Wars does on astrophysics

So, the reasoning goes like this. There are only two types of media. You have movies and documentary films. Documentary films are scientifically accurate, films are only for entertainment and can contain any random crap that the producers want.

This simply isn't true. There are different kinds of Science Fiction. Wikipedia gives a detailed description of these {{w|Science_fiction#Subgenres|subgroups). The question we have to answer is: what kind of Science Fiction is Jurassic Park? With that I mean the novels and first three movies.

Some have compared Jurassic Park with Star Wars. Star Wars belongs to the subgroup {{w|Space opera}}. Most media in this genre has improbable plots, absurd science, and cardboard characters. This doesn't really sound like the work of Michael Crichton.

I haven't been able to find how Crichton or Spielberg classied Jurassic Park. Neither have I found someone who made a classification. I am convinced that Jurassic Park is, or was intended as, {{w|hard science fiction}}. Hard science fiction is characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both.

I have no time to finish this blog right now. Please give me the time to make my case. I hope you can at least extract one interesting thought from it.