Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

Crichton was a prolific and incredibly successful author whose books lived on the best-seller lists. Going by the numbers, he wrote 22 novels that sold over 150 million worldwide. The 13 movies made from his novels and screenplays grossed 2.8 billion. As a film director (Westworld, The Great Train Robbery, and Coma) Crichton was one of the first to use the new CGI technology, and in his spare time he created and co-produced "ER". I guess you'd put Crichton somewhere between "genius" and a "damned smart guy".

And for all that, none of Crichton's novels or movies ever engaged me emotionally.

Part of the problem I had with Crichton was that I didn't think he was a good science-fiction writer. Sure, in the mainstream literary world his fans were impressed by how Crichton mixed technical jargon into his fiction, but these were people who probably never picked up an issue of Analog either. "Hard" science guys like Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov, or Kim Stanley Robinson were much better writers but since they were trapped in the sci-fi ghetto, the quality of their work was dismissed. Next to these giants, Crichton's work is rather mundane.

And I have to add that Crichton never created a character that I believed in, so no matter how skilled he was in constructing a compelling narrative, I just didn't care. Science-fiction writer Spider Robinson once wrote that a good character is a guy that you can sit in a coffee shop and talk with until 3 o'clock in the morning. In Crichton's novels, however, I couldn't wait until his stereotypes died because they bored me into a narcoleptic coma. One big reason I think "ER" was so good was because, mercifully, Crichton never wrote an episode.

What's more, some of Crichton's novels were sexist, xenophobic, and narrow-minded. If it wasn't the feral, manipulative, sex-crazed female executive in Disclosure, it was the Yellow Peril propaganda in Rising Sun. State of Fear was the worse, because it questioned the validity of global warming and portrayed environmentalists as superstitious, homicidal loons. What does it tell you that it won an award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists?

Still, it doesn't matter what I think since we're traveling in the realm of the subjective. One person's hackwork is another person's winner of the Pulitzer prize. Although I personally disagreed with his ideology and his artistic merit, millions of readers and movie goers found great value in Crichton's work, and anything that keeps people reading and away from their damned XBoxes is a good thing. It's a special legacy to leave behind.

My condolences to Michael Crichton's wife and his daughter.