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.

Sad news ... Michael Chrichton, dead at 66

[Anonymous Coward]

I just read some sad news on Slashdot - Sci Fi writer Michael Chrichton was found dead in his Los Angeles home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.

I don't think there's consensus

[greg_barton]

I really don't think there's consensus on whether he's actually dead or not.

Further study is required.

Re:I don't think there's consensus

[fyoder]

I would suggest preserving some of his dna for later cloning but chaos theory dictates that something bad would happen if we tried that. Not sure why, I'm not an expert on chaos theory.

"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag

[bipbop]

At the risk of being modded troll or flamebait, let me be the first to say that whoever put that tag on this article is an asshole.

Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag

[1u3hr]

Well, he's dead. His feelings can't be hurt. And really, he hadn't written anything worthwhile in the last 20 years. And some really awful stuff, most notably "State of Fear", a very dishonest attack on the global warming idea, presented as fiction, so his bogus science can't be questioned, yet often cited as fact. Like a lot of thriller writers he started with some great ideas and treatments of old themes, then with his name established and fat advance checks guaranteed for anything he put his name to, ended up with tedious sequels and curmudgeonly diatribes. (c.f. Frederik Forsyth, Tom Clancy.)

Jurassic Park succeeded because of Spielberg and CGI, not really much to do with the story, which was, if you think about it for a moment, dumb. But some of his early stuff -- books and movies like Andromeda Strain, Westworld -- was really entertaining and had a few decent ideas.

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.

Re:Funny how you never see...

[Foobar of Borg]

They never say stuff like "after capitulating to cancer like a big pussy,"

Well, at least one reputable news source has done so.

The Wikipedia on Michael Crichton...

[Mish]

An earlier Wikipedia entry that told the truth about his death has been 'corrected'...

Michael Crichton has died on November 5, 2008 after a long, private battle with a velociraptor.

Re:Sad. RIP

[Lisandro]

Stay the fuck away from the TV remake. Forgive me for beint this blunt, but it really is that bad.

The 1971 is perhaps the most accurate book-to-movie conversion i've seen. I first saw it arround 5 years ago, and it found it gripping. There was little a remake could improve over it.

For those that don't get the joke

[PCM2]

For those that modded the parent "Troll": Michael Crichton's Web site seems to be down now, but he gave a speech called "Aliens Cause Global Warming" in which he claimed to debunk "consensus science." The gist was that political discussion of global warming too often invoked "scientific consensus," where he argued that science was not consensus-based and that such claims were therefore meaningless.

Similarly, though we may not have consensus that Michael Crichton is dead, it makes absolutely no difference to him.

Re:For those that don't get the joke

[Reality Master 201]

I wasn't actually referring to people with legitimate skeptical opinions. There are in fact a few scientists who potentially know what they're talking about (given education, etc) that don't buy the consensus opinion. I think they're wrong, as do most climate scientists around the world, but that's how science works - people have theories they try to test and poke holes in.

I'm talking about denialists, people whose response to the (fairly overwhelming) consensus that exists is to say stuff like "the geocentric universe and flat earth views were also scientific consensus, once upon a time." That's true as far as it goes, but it utterly fails as a critique of the science, the theories, or the models. It's not skepticism, it's just ignoring and refusing to discuss. Similarly, when people latch on to localized variations in temperature as proof that global warming doesn't exist. That's shutting down debate before it begins - it's not the presentation of an argument, or evidence, or meaningful flaws in existing theories - it's ignoring the issue, declaring victory, and plugging one's ears.

This latter category of person is primarily who you find here, and in most places on the intertubes.

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.

Re:For those that don't get the joke

[scottrocket]

One could say the same thing about Jules Verne: Protagonists embark on a fantastic journey (center of the earth; submarine; airborn), encounter fantastic things (new environments with: giant lizards; giant squids; dinosaurs), then escape at the last minute following some cataclysm and have a great story to regale to their peers. Although a bit formulaic, that doesn't make the stories any less compelling or romantic to read.

Re:For those that don't get the joke

[An Onerous Coward]

Degrees in medicine and biology do not make one an expert on climate change. We wouldn't be having this discussion if Crichton had written "GOTO Considered Just Fine, Thankyouverymuch."

Crichton botched the science that he was trying to criticize. I think that's a much stronger condemnation than the presence or absence of any given piece of university-derived parchment.

The first article disputes his 0.8C prediction, pointing out that the trend he attributes his predicted rise to should actually have a bit of a cooling effect.

Here is a list of other, specific rebuttals to Crichton (primarily his novel "State of Fear"), in case you're interested.

Re:I read the book (SPOILER)

[Valdrax]

Usually the protagonists are somewhat involved in the solution to the problem.

You must be new to Michael Crichton's work. See also Sphere, Congo, Jurassic Park, etc. All of them have a major deus ex machina component to their endings. (Technically, in Sphere, they remove themselves from relevance to the problem.)

The man knew how to write towards a climax damned well but has no idea how to resolve the story afterwards. Andromeda Strain is just one of the most jarring in that regard.

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.

easy solution

[circletimessquare]

just make all of the clones of michael crichton you create female so they can't breed. of course, this approach ignores the possibility of spontaneous hermaphroditism or parthenogenic reproduction in a given population of unmonitored feral michael crichtons on say a large remote tropical island