A while back I made this blog post about the Lincoln Child novel, UTOPIA, and talked generally about the story, which was a thriller about terrorists holding a huge indoor theme park sort of built into a canyon near Las Vegas hostage. It was a good taut story, in my opinion, with interesting characters, from a really good thriller writer (Child is well known for his collaborations with Douglas Preston, stories featuring Agent Pendergast). One of the major characters in this book is not a person at all, but the theme park where everything takes place. Child delves into the details of the place, and I have always found it to be a repeatable read for me.
This is a scan of the drawings at the beginning of the book, depicting the park as it is designed. You can see that there are four distinct areas to the fictional park. The first, Boardwalk, is sort of a carnival area with thrill rides and an aquarium. From there you can go to Camelot, which is sort of self explanatory. Gaslight, a third area, is an area themed to a part of London, England, and last is Callisto, a space station/skyport futuristic area. A fifth area is scheduled to open, themed to Atlantis.
I think that the detail of the drawing is really well done. It's a very thoroughly thought-out concept brought into book form. According to Child, there are no plans for future novels set in Utopia. But I wonder about Child's obvious fascination with the art form known as the "theme park". Where did his inspiration for this come from? There are some obvious (to Disney fans, anyway) comparisons to be made between the found of this park and Walt Disney.
I'll just reiterate: it was a fun read and I probably will read it again someday soon.
*****
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment