Michael Crichton

He Brought Science to Life

Michael Crichton was a master of the unputdownable novel -- the kind of book whose story is so good it's almost impossible to stop reading. His best-selling thrillers are magnificent mind candy for cross-country flights or days at the beach. Moviemakers have found them irresistible: "The Andromeda Strain," "Jurassic Park" and "Congo" were winners on the printed page as well as blockbusters on the big screen. Authors aren't often cover boys for Time these days, but Mr. Crichton made the cut in 1995 and posed with a T. Rex skeleton. The magazine dubbed him "The Hit Man."

Mr. Crichton, who had just turned 66 when he died of cancer last week, was a pop-culture phenomenon. Perhaps for this reason, many critics refused to take his books seriously. When they bothered to read them at all, they complained about cardboard characters and preposterous plots. They regarded his novels as highly putdownable -- that is, worthy of putdowns.
Yet selling more than 150 million novels is nothing to mock. Mr. Crichton's success certainly owed a lot to skillful storytelling. At the same time, he aspired to be more than a mere entertainer. Mr. Crichton was fundamentally a novelist of ideas -- a public intellectual who wrote potboilers. He took on big subjects, such as bioengineering and climate change. He wasn't afraid of slowing down the action to teach a scientific concept. When he wanted his readers to understand something, he would devote a couple of paragraphs to explaining it.
Nor did he shy away from controversy. Sometimes his concerns were flat-out wrong: In "Rising Sun" (1992), he worried about the menace of Japanese capitalism and the threat of foreign investment. A few angry readers even accused him of xenophobia because he explored the sensitive subject of cultural difference. He seemed to relish these uproars. In "Disclosure" (1994), Mr. Crichton flabbergasted feminists by having his tale turn on a boss who files a fake sexual-harassment claim against her male subordinate. In "State of Fear" (2004), he portrayed global warming as an elaborate hoax perpetrated by dastardly environmentalists. The greens despised it. President Bush generated further bad feelings by apparently enjoying the book and having Karl Rove arrange a White House meeting with the politically incorrect author.
A lot of good science fiction takes a dim view of technological progress, and much of Mr. Crichton's work fits easily into this dystopian tradition. On one level, "Jurassic Park" (1990) is an adventure story about resurrected dinosaurs on a remote jungle island. Yet it also warns about scientific hubris and genetic manipulation. It may not rank with prophetic classics such as "Frankenstein" and "Brave New World," but it features velociraptors that chase and kill -- and so it's a heck of a lot more fun to read. There are probably graduate students digging up duck-billed dinosaur fossils right now because Mr. Crichton helped them fall in love with paleontology years ago.
Mr. Crichton was both unusually tall (6-foot-9) and smart (a degree from Harvard Medical School). While studying to become a physician, he scribbled on the side. In 1969, the Mystery Writers of America gave an Edgar Award for best new novel to "A Case of Need," a medical thriller. It wasn't actually Mr. Crichton's first novel, but it was the first one he published as "Jeffery Hudson," a pen name he used in honor of a 17th-century English courtier who was also a dwarf.
Although Mr. Crichton occasionally issued a dud -- "The Lost World," a 1995 sequel to "Jurassic Park," was a disappointment -- he mostly seemed blessed with a golden touch. He not only released "The Great Train Robbery" as a novel in 1975, but he also wrote the script and even directed the film starring Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland in 1979. The screenplay earned him another Edgar Award. When he turned his attention to television, he created "ER," the long-running hospital drama.
His workaholic habits were legendary, and he must have been a hard man to live with. Four of his five marriages ended in divorce. He displayed a vindictive streak, too. In 2006, Michael Crowley of The New Republic wrote a negative critique of Mr. Crichton's work. Rather than responding with a letter to the editor, Mr. Crichton retaliated in "Next," a novel about transgenic animals. It included a minor character named Mick Crowley, a child rapist who, like the real Mr. Crowley, had attended Yale.
If Mr. Crichton simply had sold a lot of forgettable books, the pundits probably would have seen fit to ignore him. Yet he demanded their attention. "State of Fear," the cautionary tale about global warming, grew out of an address to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. "Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists," he said in the speech. "If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st-century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths." After "State of Fear" came out, Mr. Crichton testified before a Senate committee and delivered remarks at the National Press Club.
At the end of "State of Fear," Mr. Crichton included an extensive and opinionated bibliography, plus an "Author's Message" in which he spelled out his own views on the environment in a series of pithy statements. "I am certain there is too much certainty in the world," he wrote, which is true enough. Yet he probably wore a smirk when he composed his final line: "Everyone has an agenda. Except me."
We can be certain of this: Mr. Crichton had an agenda. It was to make us think a little harder about our changing world, and to keep on turning the pages.