RIP Michael Crichton

I actually just read “The Terminal Man” about 6 months ago. I hadn’t picked up a book by Michael Crichton since “Timeline” in early-2000, but I’d become fascinated with mind control recently. And I wanted to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently ripped him off in a script I’d written last winter. I hadn’t. At any rate, “The Terminal Man” is pure Crichton — briskly paced, accessible and loaded with ideas. The book reminded me why I’d dug his work so much as a teenager.

He didn’t write “hard sci-fi.” I tried reading William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” a month or so ago. I couldn’t do it. The techno-jargon became virtually unreadable. I made it through the first third before I realized I had no idea what was going on. Crichton wrote science fiction in English. He took the esoteric and made it something the average reader could understand. He brought the techno-thriller to the mainstream.

When I read “Jurassic Park” shortly before the film came out, it was magic. I enjoyed the movie — co-written by Crichton — even more. I spent the a chunk of my adolescence reading some of his other titles: “Sphere,” “Congo,” “Disclosure,” “The Lost World.” I regret having never read “The Andromeda Strain,” but will remedy that before the year is out.

I’d moved away from Crichton’s output by the time I graduated high school. I was caught up in the “Star Wars” expanded universe novels, reading official fanwank that had little to no bearing on the actual film series. I did, however, pick up “Timeline” in 2000 and enjoyed it immensely. The movie turned out to be bilge, but so were “Congo” and “Sphere.” Film adaptations of Crichton’s novels were a mixed bag. I think the lesser ones suffer from a lack of thunder lizards. Imagine the greatness of seeing Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes take on a T-Rex in the middling “Rising Sun.”

According the AP, Crichton has passed away at 66. I know that the author and I parted ways recently when it comes to global warming, but he nonetheless inspired me in my early teens to try my own hand at writing. He stoked my imagination in ways that few writers have and challenged me to create fantastical worlds, rooted in science fact, not fiction.

-Brad Lohan

If you like this post, share it!