How do ya'll feel about Michael Crichton?

I was a big fan of Crichton when I was younger, because those were some of the first adult books that I was allowed to read. I started with Jurassic Park and ended with Timeline.

Timeline's the book where you know a guy's crazy about the Medieval period because he tells everyone he's crazy about the Medieval period. Seriously, he tells a person that he doesn't have a beard because beards aren't in fashion.

"Well, I don't know, beards are kind of popular now-"

"No, you idiot! I'm talking about the fourteenth century, dumbass!" (I'm paraphrasing slightly.))

Then there's the side plot about the damaged time machine- the water tanks have bullet holes in them, and nobody knows what to do. Seriously. And every time they mention this problem, the local viewpoint character starts thinking about tires for some goddamn reason, and can't figure out why. Gee, Crichton, why is this dipshit thinking about tires, hmm? Are they supposed to... rotate the tanks, perhaps? Oh! Maybe they're going to re-align the tanks.

Oh.

Oh wait.

They're going to patch the tanks. They're going cover up the friggin' bullet holes after waiting most of the friggin' book for all the friggin' water to leak out. Just like tires!

Anyway, that was the most recent Crichton book I've read. I think younger me enjoyed his books because I didn't understand enough about the subject (computers, airplanes, diamonds, etc.) to call bullshit. But when characters spend three quarters of a book trying to figure out what to do about a damn hole in the wall, well, it's time to reconsider your fandom.

Incidentally, I think I enjoyed Jurassic Park so much because I skipped over the boring parts, namely, whenever Malcolm was talking.

edited 5th Nov '14 9:46:21 AM by JBC1187

I like him, but I never quite forgave him for State Of Fear. Also known as 'Global warming isn't real you stupid hippies'

Still at least he respond to criticism about it maturely >_>

edited 3rd Nov '14 10:17:57 PM by joeyjojo

He had a very anti-scientists bend to him. I won't say he was truly anti-science, he was just against corporate scientists doing shit for profit or to see if it could be done. Unfortunately, we all know how the world works. Most shit ain't getting done unless it has a corporate stamp of approval and has a way of making enough profit to cover costs triplefold.

he is a writer, first and foremost, who uses the superficial catchwords that are on the "cutting edge" of science and writes a fantasy story out of it.

it's not remotely hard science or factual. scientific words are just a schtick for him, the same as "spell" or "demon" would be for a fantasy story.

You make him sound like a science fiction writer. He was writes technothrillers. There's a difference. For some reason.

Meh, technothriller is just SF dressed up for the mainstream.

To the credit of the man it takes balls to take stuff like dinosaurs or flipping time travel and selling it matter-of-fact it the front of the bookstore.

Congratulations are in order to him for getting the public the aware of such concepts. Even if it is on the hysterical side of cautiously pessimistic.

Regarding chaos theory. If anything, Jurassic Park is about Murphy's Law.

Mmm, yeah and naw. It's also about "DO NOT PISS OFF YOUR COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS, YOU DIPSHIT". Or at least that's one of the take-home messages from the movie.

I think the guy with a doctorate from Harvard probably knew a thing or two about science. But I don't think you get to be a best-selling author by saying "here are all the reasons why we can't clone dinosaurs." You simply use your knowledge then baffle the masses with bullshit. It sounds perfectly plausible to 99% of readers.

And that is why Crichton was good at his job.

edited 28th Nov '14 4:23:11 AM by Nikkolas

Crichton became a best-seller by exploiting an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism and anti-science. Also, his degree was in medicine not science, very different. Graduating from Harvard means you're probably smart, and he certainly was smart, but he was anti-science. Writers of airport thriller novels make money by feeding into their audience's existing fears, fox news style, and that was what Crichton did.

I guess you never read A Case of Need or Airframe then. I had this same talk earlier with a guy who went so far as to call Crichton a "Luddite."

Airframe is entirely about how airplanes are the safest mode of travel and the panic around them has been exploited by the media. A Case of Need was all about how Abortion is actually a very safe operation and it's all thanks to the advances made in science. (and considering when it was written, this was a pretty progressive opinion)

Crichton was not Fox News - he was a writer. This is like those people who watch anime and thus deduce they know all about Japanese culture. An author's works should never, ever be used to say you know anything about the author. Two of Crichton's books directly contradict what you say he did. Hell, others might contradict it too, I haven't read all of his work.

Well, if you want to count Congo, where laser beams were used to fight off the evil gorillas, I don't see any sort of "anti-intellectualism" or fear exploitation there. Are people afraid of super-intelligent gorillas crushing their heads with stone paddles?

Also "anti-intellectualism" is one helluva stretch when an astronaut complimented the details in Crichton's book. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/shortstack/2008/11/why_readers_loved_michael_cric.html

Even in Jurassic Park he was never preaching "science is bad." He was telling a story about how corporate greed is bad.

edited 28th Nov '14 9:38:36 AM by Nikkolas

His speeches on climate alone are convincing enough for me that he was a dishonest anti-scentific asshole. State of Fear was absolutely eviscerated by the scientic community. I have no desire to read books written by such a person.

Your loss then.

I seriously doubt it.

EDIT: Went back through this thread, and he was an MRA too? That is despicable.

edited 28th Nov '14 11:17:11 AM by mrshine

Yeah, State Of Fear is pretty much unforgiveable. Especially since he treated it all as factual, with a 20 page bibliography and author's rantsnotes and multiple appendicies.

Are you basing the MRA stuff off of the BS about Disclosure being full of sexism?

I know what MRA stands for but hell if I know why it's so bad. My guess would be because a lot of people view it as synonymous with misogyny, kinda like how people view White Pride as being the same as racism.

I have yet to read any sexist messages in his books, especially since they tend to be full of strong, independent women..... And his first notable book was blatantly Pro-Choice....

I always love to compare Book!Sarah Harding with Movie!Sarah Harding too. In Book Lost World, she was by far the most physically capable figure, surviving in choppy seas even after being pushed overboard and driving a motorcycle after a raptor. She was also actually good at her job and knew about animal behavior.

Movie Lost World Sarah was the biggest idiot in a cast full of idiots.

edited 28th Nov '14 12:00:36 PM by Nikkolas

MRA's are bad because they are basically In Name Only. A better designation would be AFRA, Anti Female Rights Activist, because they basically cite Men's Rights as a justification for active misogyny.

And, sorry, but how is White Pride not another word for Racism?

That might work in theory, but in practical use...

edited 28th Nov '14 3:22:00 PM by 3of4

Presumably in the same way that Gay Pride isn't the same as anti-hetero.

When talking about Disclosure many people forget the characters of Louise Fernadez, Sander's attorney, and Stephanie Kaplan, the CFO of Digi Com. They are both characters who succed WITHOUT any special considerations for their gender, and show that the book is all for EQUALITY feminism, which is the school of feminism that believes NEITHER gender should recieve special privilage. The type of feminism the books bashes is PROTECTIONISM feminism. The problem with protectionism feminsim, which creates a culture of victomhood, is that it "mirrors the ...traditioninal claim that women are children... [and witholds] from women the right to be held accountable" a quote from Fire With Fire by Naomi Wolf

edited: Added an extra and corrected spelling

edited 11th Feb '15 11:12:40 AM by animalia

That's based off of the same sort of vocal minority the Feminists have who claim men should be reduced to breeding stock only. It's not actually representative of the entire movement, just the ones who get heard because they scream the loudest. It's like the old 90s PC propaganda about how women would abolish wars if they were in charge. It's complete nonsense, because women aren't much more peaceful than men, and wars are usually fought because people feel justified in fighting them. Women might fight for different reasons, but they'd still fight. Or send us to do it, at any rate. Not every woman wants to be a soldier, after all, and there are enough spoiled people of both genders to institute a draft if there aren't enough volunteers.

I wonder what Crichton would think today if he saw how the other Jurassic Park movies turned out. On the one hand, Lost World switched around who was bad and who was a victim for a good part of the movie, but on the other they were kind of doing what Crichton himself had been. PETA and Environmental Rights groups were getting annoying at the time. Just like the books were feeding off of Anti-Corporatism, the movie might have been feeding off of the growing view of those groups as nothing more than a pack of Ecoterrorists going about it the wrong way. And JP 3? Other than setting up the backstory, the Corporation wasn't really anything to the movie. That was just a personal "Get off the island before natural predators eat you" story. The same sort of threatening escapism that those airline novels thrive on. And Jurassic World is running right back to the old Anti-Corporate mode that Crichton loved to use back then. I think if he could get over the details involved, Crichton might actually have approved of the other movies.

So I'm late to this but I mainly listen to audiobooks because my eyes are shit and it's just being more practical. Anyway, a lot of Crichton's novels, last I checked a few years ago, weren't available in "commercial" audio format. I mainly got them through a place called Library for the Blind.

More recently though, as in just now, when looking for The Andromeda Strain again, I found a brand new recording of it, Sphere, Jurassic Park and practically every other Crichton novel ever, including some I had never even listened to. I'm really excited for the audio version of "Travels" which sounds a bit lik ean autobiography of his and which I always wanted to read.

But yeah, searching Michael Crichton on Audible now will result in audiobook versions of practically everything he ever wrote and that's pretty awesome.

I haven't read any of his books since the critic incident. I did quite like Prey, though, and Timeline.

Critic incident?

A critic who panned his works got written into one of his stories as a pedophile.