Apparently I'm on a Crichton bender.

"Congo" is a lot better than I remembered.

Shocker, but I grew up in a family of readers. My dad and my older brother were always reading Tom Clancy, I personally didn’t get into that genre until just a little while ago. I remember my brother taking a copy of EXECUTIVE ORDERS to EFY in the late 90’s so he’d have something to do instead of dancing to crappy 70s songs with girls named Kelly.

One place my brother and I overlapped was with Crichton novels. Jurassic Park blew my 8 year-old mind at the drive-in theater in Vegas, so naturally I wanted to read the book. Then Hollywood started adapting more Crichton books into (bad) movies, and since JP was awesome, I figured the rest of his stuff should be as well. So it was that I read CONGO and SPHERE, both of which got adapted in the 90s, and neither of which were any good.

(They should have been, they had great casts and stuff, but the scripts were bad. I digress.)

I finished reading CONGO again the other day, for the first time in a good 25 years. Back then I usually read stuff all the way through, that’s just how I operated. A lot of the book went over my head, mainly the parts about corporate espionage and intellectual theft. Still, I learned a lot from the context of it, and that kind of became my preferred method of education.

Turns out, during the re-read I realized this is one of those really good sci-fis for learning. Crichton himself was a medical doctor who paid his way through school by writing cheap thrillers. I gather that he got good at doing research, and used that skill to brief himself on other fields of science so he could work them into his writing. CONGO contains of overlap of numerous areas of research and, in signature Crichton fashion, we the readers are treated to bits of info-dumping that explain the substance of what’s going on.

He did that stuff rather well. The man never really concerned himself with flowing prose or poetic verbosity; he had a cool idea for a story, he wrote it down, and he sent it off, and it was good. It’s like if Dan Brown had talent.

Okay so enough buttkissing on Crichton. What’s CONGO even about?

Short version: a team of explorers has to go into the Congo in search of valuable minerals. Their sponsoring corporation already sent in one team but they got wiped out by…something. Dunno. The only clue they have is a blurry image of what might be a gorilla. Thus they bring a gorilla expert with them on this journey. Hijinks ensue.

As the story unfolds, Crichton reveals the time and place to the reader with lengthy (but not overlong) background info on the nature of information technology, the earliest versions of the Internet, the history of central Africa (both political and natural), primatology and the science of teaching language to gorillas, and more.

Our protagonists are Karen Ross, a math prodigy who works for ERT. ERT is an American information company with teams all around the world. They have a presence in the Congo because of a rare type of diamond that can be used for energy and computation, which would give them a big competitive advantage over similar Japanese and German corporations. Karen is only 24 and so far has spent her entire career in a computer office, this is her first time leading a field team.

There’s Peter Elliot, a zoologist in charge of a sign language-speaking gorilla named Amy. She’s hitting some speed bumps in her development as she has started having dreams, but doesn’t know how to describe them. Since she’s originally from the same part of the Congo as ERT’s diamond expedition—and ERT funds Peter’s research with Amy—they bring her along.

The coolest supporting character is Captain Munro, an intelligent GigaChad mercenary who knows how to get the team through the jungles of central Africa to the diamond site. While your crappy airplane is getting shot at with Vietnam War leftovers, he’s strapping a parachute to your back and putting a boot in your ass because there’s no time for arguing. Ernie Hudson played him in the movie (they changed the name to ‘Monroe’ because whatever). Mismatched casting, even though he’s a fine actor.

(lmfao look at this…)

What I continually realized with my second reading of this book is that it’s a throwback to old 19th century exploration/adventure novels, where Westerners descend onto the Dark Continent and bring back wild tales of an unknown world, with previously unknown species. The diamond site happens to be in the middle of an ancient city swallowed up by the jungle 500 years ago, wherein an otherwise advanced civilization once trained gorillas to be their protectors.

Crichton gets into the science of generational behavior and training, and explains how primates pass learned behavior on to their children. After this old civilization died out, their trained gorillas kept teaching subsequent generations how to use weapons and protect the territory. Just awesome.

In the end, the team gets trapped by the gorilla protectors and have to fight their way out of the jungle with frickin’ machine guns and stuff. In the movie they also had a laser but that wasn’t in the book. Neither was the Tim Curry character, Skeezy Guy Who Gets Killed Whilst Being Skeezy.

(The movie also had Bruce Campbell, Joe Pantoliano, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje in it. Holy crap…)

I’m gonna get a hardcover copy for my library. I wish the movie had been better, but I guess you can’t win them all. Content warning, there are some brutal attack scenes and mentions of cannibalism among native African tribes. Other than that I think there were only a few S-bombs in it, the profanity level was really low.

Go read it.