ABSTRACT
Portrayed as ‘ancestor of nature’, supreme ruler over Tumult, Confusion and Chance, imperial Chaos entered classic English literature in Milton’s Paradise Lost.1 Three centuries later, ‘chaos theory’ entered modern popular culture through the crash course offered to the mass readership of Michael Crichton’s bestselling thriller, and then through Steven Spielberg who likewise uses it to moralize the mythic fable of Jurassic Park. In overall outline as in incident, Jurassic Park replicates the ‘fractal’ structure (see below) of Paradise Lost which in turn replicates Genesis. For instance: in an introductory chapter entitled ‘Almost Paradise’ an innocent little girl gets bitten when she tries to play with an unusually intelligent and friendly little reptile that can, astonishingly, walk upright on its hind legs. It is a mini-dinosaur, and the scene, so obviously comparable to Eve’s meeting with the friendly, talking snake in Paradise Lost, is the first of our close encounters with the megaserpents re-created to inhabit a man-made Eden.
