Michael Crichton Dead At 66

Many readers have submitted stories about the death of Michael Crichton. The 66-year-old author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain died unexpectedly Tuesday "after a courageous and private battle against cancer," a press release said. In addition to writing, he also directed such sci-fi classics as Westworld and Runaway. Crichton was married five times and had one child.

Comments

Sad. RIP

[zymano]

Andromeda Strain was an excellent scifi movie.

Recently finished reading Travels

[joeflies]

I'm somewhat confused by why his books spend so much time writing about science (or at least science fiction) when he appears to have been personally bent on the unscientific new-age mysticism activities. Travels talks extensively about his beliefs in fortune tellers, auras, astral planes, and spending two weeks talking to a cactus. It seems contradictory to build a career on science and not approach mysticism with a more cynical eye.

Then again, the science in Critons' books usually end up trying to kill man, so perhaps it's not his love of science that drove him to write, but rather his belief that science with have its retribution on man.

You had it backwards

[Valdrax]

It was hard to escape the conclusion that Crichton was a guy who would believe literally anything anyone told him. That's one reason I was somewhat surprised to see him arguing in favor of more objective thinking in the global-warming debate.

It's not so much that Crichton believed anything people told him so much as he didn't believe in science. While his science themed books show a great interest in reading about science, the conclusion is always that Science is Wrong and Scientists are Evil or Recklessly Stupid. The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and Prey are all about the futility of trying to contain living things. In Next, the drug that saves his brother makes him age and die early. State of Fear is no different, really. It's more strident than the rest of his books about how scientists are all arrogant fools who will destroy the world, but it really matches the theme of the rest of his work.

Re:For those that don't get the joke

[je ne sais quoi]

Once, when I was younger I had great respect for Crichton. I read Jurassic Park in high school and was so amazed by it I had my mother arrange for me to go talk to a paleontologist about what was right and wrong in the book. Most of it was wrong, rather not at all probable, but the journey of discovering why it was wrong was fascinating. I also saw a talk by the T-Rex expert after who the paleontologist in the book was modeled. Those experiences along with one or two other things led me to become a geology major and 15 years later I'm still at it.

However, there were three points where I lost a massive amount of respect for Crichton. The first was when I saw the movie westworld on an airplane once, for which he wrote the screenplay. It's the exact same plot as Jurassic Park, only substitute dinosaurs with robots. Exact same plot. The second and third books after Jurassic Park were so bad that I don't think I even finished them, that's the second point, it was obvious he was writing books to get made into Spielberg movies.

The third was when he wrote State of Fear and testified before congress. I never read the book, but just to watch the kind of anti-intellectuals like Inhof invite a science fiction author to be regarded as an expect on climate change. Focusing on whether the consensus view is necessarily correct or not has nothing to do with the irrefutable evidence that the climate is changing and the likely probability that humans are causing it completely or contributing to it.

While I have very fond memories of how cool it was to read Jurassic Park the first time (way way before Spielberg got his dirty little paws on it), my opinion is that the guy was a hack, a very very clever one, but a hack nonetheless. He won't be remembered as one of the "great authors", in my opinion.