11.06.08
michael crichton
Author Michael Crichton died today, aged 66. He had suffered from cancer for a number of years. For those who don’t know of the man, he wrote the novels on which movies like Jurassic Park and Rising Sun were based, and was one of the creators of long-running medical drama ER.
I haven’t felt quite as conflicted over someone’s death for quite a long time.
I absolutely loved Crichton’s early work - I remember having those massive two-books-in-one editions of stuff like Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain and Rising Sun when I was a teenager, and they were pretty influential on the kind of things I got interested in and started reading science-fact work about. It’s entirely fair to describe Crichton as an inspiration, someone who showed me that a love of science and a love of literature didn’t have to be mutually exclusive - a torch now carried by wonderful authors like Neal Stephenson.
(Lots of his early books were poorly converted into movies, sadly - I think one of my favourites is Congo, which is desperately underrated after being made into an utterly awful movie.)
Then… Well, then it went to shit. The man turned into a massive, epic, neo-con twat, and the quality of his books plummeted at the same time. From being someone who would inspire you to look into a field of science you didn’t know about and broaden your horizons, he turned into someone who was genuinely anti-science - a naysayer and fearmonger who might as well have walked out of the pages of a tabloid newspaper, rather than spinning great fiction from cutting edge research. Next, a thriller about the biotech / genetics industry, was awful. Prey, which dealt with nanotechnology swarms, was passable - and then became awful by the end.
State of Fear was… Well, it was pretty much the end of his career, and for good reason. It was practically the book in which he “came out” as a neo-con - taking an extremely dim view of the science behind global warming, so much so that it made him into a darling of the Global Warming Denial movement in US politics (especially Senator Jim Inhofe, a serial abuser of science and bare-faced liar on the topic of global warming).
It’s not that he took a controversial (and largely unsupported) view of the science, it’s that he took it so damned seriously. He didn’t, in interviews or in the text, present this as being a deliberate provocation to try to stir up debate - he presented it as being God’s own fucking truth, and everyone who disagreed was a brainwashed idiot. Pretty rich for a man essentially promoting a ridiculous conspiracy theory. The end result was a passage in one of his books where he depicted one of his outspoken scientific critics, in extremely thinly veiled terms, as a “child rapist” - one of the most infantile and disgusting things I’ve seen an author do in modern times.
So, mixed feelings. One of my favourite authors as a boy, and one of my most disliked literary figures in later years. Rest in peace, Michael - but part of me is glad he won’t be ruining my memory of his brilliant early books any further, too.
