Congo (novel)

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Congo
First edition cover
Author	Michael Crichton
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Publication date	1980
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	348 pp (first edition, hardback)
ISBN	ISBN 0394513924 (first edition, hardback)

Congo is a 1980 novel by American writer Michael Crichton. The novel centers on an expedition searching for diamonds in the dense rain forest of Congo.

[edit] Plot summary

The novel starts with an abrupt end to an expedition in the dense forests of Congo when the team is attacked and killed by an unknown foe and all contact with them is lost. The expedition, searching for deposits of valuable diamonds in the world, discovered the legendary lost city of Zinj. A video image taken by a camera there, and transmitted by satellite to the base station in the United States, shows a peculiar race of gorillas to be responsible for the murders. Those gorillas are different from normal gorillas in their appearance and odd life styles. They are gray and rather small, and they seem to communicate via wheezing sounds.

Another expedition, led by Karen Ross, is launched to find out the truth and to find the city of Zinj, and the deposits of the new type of diamond that would change the shape of technology and the world as we know it. This time the searchers bring along the famous White African mercenary Munro, as well as a female gorilla named Amy (who has been trained to communicate with humans using sign language) and her trainer Peter Elliot. Time is of the greatest essence, as a rival consortium of European and Japanese corporations has also set off into the jungle after the diamonds, turning the entire expedition into a race to the city of Zinj. Unfortunately for Ross and her team, the American expedition encounters many delays along the way, including plane crashes, native civil wars, and jungle predators.

Eventually, Ross and her expedition reach the City of Zinj and discover the consortium camp, like the original expedition's camp, in ruins and devoid of life. Ross and her team then first encounter the killer gorillas and are attacked. A brief battle ensues and several gorillas are killed. After studying the corpses, it is concluded the animals are not "true" gorillas by modern biological standards, but presumably a gorilla-chimpanzee or gorilla-human hybrid. Peter Elliot intends to name them Gorilla elliotensis after himself. Afterwards, Ross, Elliot, and Munro explore the ruins and discover that the killer gorillas were bred by the ancient inhabitants of Zinj to guard the diamond mines from intruders. After several more attacks, Elliot, with the help of Amy, finds a way to tame the new gorillas (she refers them as "bad things"), but their victory is cut short by the eruption of the nearby volcano, accelerated by the explosives placed by Ross for her geological surveys, that buries the city, the diamond fields and all proof of the "new" species under 800 meters of lava. Ross, Elliot, Munro, and the rest of the team's survivors are forced to run for their lives. The team then manages to find a hot air balloon in a crashed consortium cargo plane and uses it to escape. In an epilogue, it is revealed that Munro was able to retrieve several of the valuable diamonds and sold them to Intel for use in a revolutionary new computer processor, while Amy was reintroduced into the wild and was later observed teaching her offspring sign language.

[edit] Place in literature

Congo is a Lost World novel in the tradition founded by Henry Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and featuring the mines of that work's title.^{[citation needed]}

Congo has been accused of stealing the plot of HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness: explorers go to a remote location and find a ruined city, but dangerous non-human creatures which were bred by the former inhabitants remain there after thousands/millions of years and attack the party.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

In 1995, a film version of Congo was released, loosely based on the novel. It starred Laura Linney, Tim Curry, and Ernie Hudson.

v • d • e Michael Crichton

Bibliography

Novels	The Andromeda Strain (1969) • The Terminal Man (1972) • The Great Train Robbery (1975) • Eaters of the Dead (1976) • Congo (1980) • Sphere (1987) • Jurassic Park (1990) • Rising Sun (1992) • Disclosure (1994) • The Lost World (1995) • Airframe (1996) • Timeline (1999) • Prey (2002) • State of Fear (2004) • Next (2006)

Novels written under pseudonyms	Odds On (1966) • Scratch One (1967) • Easy Go (1968) • A Case of Need (1968) • The Venom Business (1969) • Zero Cool (1969) • Grave Descend (1970) • Drug of Choice (1970) • Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1970) • Binary (1972)

Nonfiction	Five Patients (1970) • Jasper Johns (1977) • Electronic Life (1983) • Travels (1988)

Film adaptations	The Andromeda Strain (1971) • Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1972) • The Carey Treatment (A Case of Need) (1972) • The Terminal Man (1974) • Rising Sun (1993) • Jurassic Park (1993) • Disclosure (1994) • Congo (1995) • The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) • Sphere (1998) • The 13th Warrior (Eaters of the Dead) (1999) • Timeline (2003) • The Andromeda Strain (2008)

Film writer and director	Pursuit (1972) • Westworld (1973) • Coma (1978) • The First Great Train Robbery (1979) • Looker (1981) • Runaway (1984) • Physical Evidence (1989) • ER (1994) • Twister (1996)