Michael Crichton

I was deeply saddened to hear yesterday that Michael Crichton died of unspecified cancer at the age of 66. Back in the early-90s I was a huge Crichton fan. In short order I had read Jurassic Park, Sphere, The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, Congo, and The Thirteenth Warrior (known back then, I believe, as Eaters of the Dead). The man could tell a story. Each novel was pure perfection, in a way: some crazy weird but possible science, a bunch of more-or-less likeable people, and something that goes really south really quickly in a really, really bad way.

I've read that he wasn't the greatest of writers. With that, I'd tend to agree. But I also affirm wholeheartedly that he was an idea man of unparalleled genius. Each of those six books I just mentioned is so unique, so packed with juicy science fact and science fiction, that, even if not truly original they still defined the genre. Never again can dinosaurs be written about as being genetically engineered without an obligatory nod towards Jurassic Park. Never again can a strange disease wipe out a small, out-of-the-way town without one thinking of The Andromeda Strain. I sort of modeled my very first novel on Sphere, where I took a group of people, submitted them to the unknown, and threw some worse and worser things at them at every junction. And Eaters of the Dead has to be, without a doubt, one of the most original novels I've read. Not quite SF, not quite fantasy, not quite historical fiction. Something so different that only an established writer like Crichton could get it published.

What struck me most about the man, I think, was his drive. He was trained as a doctor and graduated with all kinds of honors. Most men - 95% perhaps? - would be content with that. Earn their $30,000 to $50,000 a month salaries (today’s dollars), get on a couple of boards, gray their hair and mentor the newbies. But not Crichton. He wrote. He wrote a couple of early novels under pseudonyms before hitting it big with Andromeda. And he got his visions onto film, directing a couple of movies and writing screenplays before the age of 40. Incredibly inspiring. What a drive on the man. What self-assured vision. How enviable.

In 2003 he spoke at length on the fallacies and pseudo-science behind the global-warming hysteria, cited often enough on the internet. I read it back then and will probably re-read it again in the next few days. (Oh – haven’t heard much of global warming lately? Now it's refered to as climate change ...) He was also one of the driving forces behind the show ER, a show my wife was an early devotee to but which I have never watched.

Good luck and fare well, Mr. Crichton. Hopefully we'll meet on the other side where you can critique my stories, should you even bother, rightly so, to read them.