Dead, of cancer, at 66. I know people never really respected him, but for mass-market thrillers, his books were really good. I’m speaking here of books like Congo (hyperintelligent gorillas!) and not books like State of Fear, which was maybe the world’s only global-warming-denial thriller, and which won him an award from oil companies. The book Jurassic Park, much more than the movie version, is a really fucking great thriller. That’s not an easy thing to write.

27 replies on “Michael Crichton”

  2. He does write a good thriller. Jurassic Park was a great book. One of his best and it rightly loved by the masses. I always say that Dan Brown is the poor man’s Michael Crichton.

  3. He told me he wrote potboiler prose on purpose–his role model was H.G. Wells (who actually had a far superior style). He wanted to use mass entertainment to hawk scientific ideas. Check out S.J. Gould’s New York Review essay complaining that the movie version of Jurassic Park sold out the book’s message, which was about the crucial importance of contingency. Spielberg et al. imposed a pop mad-scientist moral formula on the novel.

  4. He told me he wrote potboiler prose on purpose–his role model was H.G. Wells (who actually had a far superior style). He wanted to use mass entertainment to hawk scientific ideas. Check out S.J. Gould’s New York Review essay complaining that the movie version of Jurassic Park sold out the book’s message, which was about the crucial importance of contingency. Spielberg et al. imposed a pop mad-scientist moral formula on the novel. Also, Spielberg cast a director as the mad scientist, and made him nicer–he identified with him.

  5. He was the sf thrillers’ Evelyn Waugh, becoming a hateful conservative as he got old and rich. Don’t forget, though, that that guy once wrote “The Andromeda Strain”.

  6. I’ve loved several of his books (the utterly bizarre Travels among them), but damn, I wish he had lived to offer me a personal apology for Disclosure.

  8. He’ll be missed. Some of his earlier works (the andromeda strain, terminal man) were way outside the box at the time they came out. I hope nobody gives a sh*t about “State of Fear”.

  11. “He wanted to use mass entertainment to hawk scientific ideas”. (Tim)

    It certainly worked with me. I learned so much from his books. Like what the NTSB does from “Airframe”. And how nanotechnology works in “Swarm”. He will be missed.

  14. Screw Jurassic Park. The Lost World was superior in every way. (Confidential to Jenn: the fractals and computer cube stuff is all in The Lost World, not Jurassic Park. In your face!)

  18. The reports I read said he died “unexpectedly.” Anyone else feel like that’s pretty much how his novels ended, too? Quickly, abruptly, and unexpectedly. Maybe it was a fitting way to go.

  20. Jurassic Park is one of the few books I’ve read straight through in one sitting. An excellent read.

    Congo, on the other hand, is time I wish I could have back.

  21. @18, yes. I think his novels have almost uniformly terrible (perfunctory, random, suspense-killing) endings. What happened to the alien growth in The Andromeda Strain — it just mutated and blew harmlessly away on the breeze or something? How undramatic. Jurassic Park’s ending was weak but not enough to ruin the book. Sphere was almost even better than JP, then the last 50 pages wreck the whole thing. Congo and Eaters of the Dead were terrible from start to finish.

  22. Jurassic Park blew my 12-year-old mind, and I thank my dad for making me read it before we saw the movie. I liked Rising Sun as well, but the rest of his books were meh.

  24. I don’t mourn now, because I think he was well past his prime (sometime in the mid-90s); I didn’t expect him to come out with anything I’d want to read anyway. But I loved Andromeda Strain, Congo and Sphere when I was little.

  25. I don’t mourn now, because I think he was well past his prime (sometime in the mid-90s); I didn’t expect him to come out with anything I’d want to read anyway. But I loved Andromeda Strain, Congo and Sphere when I was little.

  26. I first read Jurassic Park in the 3rd grade right after the movie came out. It took me a month to read (I had to look up the word “paradigm” like 4 times before I got it) and gave me nightmares but I still read the same, battered, falling apart copy once a year.

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