Character Description
One of Crichton’s go-to uses for simile is to add a descriptive layer to character. Early on, he describes a character who actually is not all that he appears:
"He looked like a pig trying to appear scholarly."
Relational Comparison
Simile is also engaged regularly in this particular book to create a comparison that makes scientific facts more relatable:
“People have no perspective on Antarctica, because it appears as a fringe at the bottom of most maps.”
Global Warming: The Myth
State of Fear is Crichton’s most controversial book because it stands a direct contradiction of the scientific consensus on the state of climate change. One of the characters in particular expresses the perspective proffered by book as a whole:
“The notion that they were paying for weather research struck him as the same sort of ludicrous excess as the six-hundred-dollar toilet seats and thousand-dollar wrenches that had become so notorious.”
Don't Trust Statistics (Except Those in My Appendix)
The characters supporting Crichton’s contention that global warming is a manufactured crisis spend a great deal of time engaging metaphor to show why people should be wary of statistics. (Though Crichton himself includes an appendix which includes thousands of statistics figures.) One of the denser examples:
“Next, they’ll bring out a chart showing a football field. And they’ll say, Imagine the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere as a football field. So, starting from the goal line, nitrogen takes you all the way to the seventy-eight-yard line. Oxygen takes you to the ninety-nine-yard line. Only one yard to go. Argon brings you within three and a half inches of the goal line. One inch. That’s how much CO2 we have in our atmosphere. One inch in a hundred-yard football field.”
“Climate is not a tax return.”
The point of this metaphor also has to do with statistics. A statistical error of 300% on a tax return would indicate that the preparer may not have any idea what he is doing because while hardly first-grade math, tax preparation is also not exactly rocket science. A statistical effort of 300% in predicting climate change, however, might not necessarily be an indication of the lack of ability of person doing the calculations because it is such an exponentially more complex endeavor than calculating a tax return form.
