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Michael Crichton Dead At 66
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Nov 05, 2008 09:39 PM
from the velociraptors-confirm-it dept.
from the velociraptors-confirm-it dept.
Many readers have submitted stories about the death of Michael Crichton. The 66-year-old author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain died unexpectedly Tuesday "after a courageous and private battle against cancer," a press release said. In addition to writing, he also directed such sci-fi classics as Westworld and Runaway. Crichton was married five times and had one child.
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Sad. RIP (Score:5, Interesting)
Andromeda Strain was an excellent scifi movie.
Re:Sad. RIP (Score:5, Informative)
Stay the fuck away from the TV remake. Forgive me for beint this blunt, but it really is that bad.
The 1971 is perhaps the most accurate book-to-movie conversion i've seen. I first saw it arround 5 years ago, and it found it gripping. There was little a remake could improve over it.
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Re:Sad. RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I read the book (SPOILER) (Score:5, Insightful)
Usually the protagonists are somewhat involved in the solution to the problem.
Meh. Not in The War of the Worlds, and that's an acknowledged classic.
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Re:I read the book (SPOILER) (Score:5, Insightful)
Usually the protagonists are somewhat involved in the solution to the problem.
You must be new to Michael Crichton's work. See also Sphere, Congo, Jurassic Park, etc. All of them have a major deus ex machina component to their endings. (Technically, in Sphere, they remove themselves from relevance to the problem.)
The man knew how to write towards a climax damned well but has no idea how to resolve the story afterwards. Andromeda Strain is just one of the most jarring in that regard.
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Sad news ... Michael Chrichton, dead at 66 (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think there's consensus (Score:5, Insightful)
I really don't think there's consensus on whether he's actually dead or not.
Further study is required.
Re:I don't think there's consensus (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I don't think there's consensus (Score:5, Funny)
I would suggest preserving some of his dna for later cloning but chaos theory dictates that something bad would happen if we tried that. Not sure why, I'm not an expert on chaos theory.
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For those that don't get the joke (Score:5, Informative)
For those that modded the parent "Troll": Michael Crichton's Web site seems to be down now, but he gave a speech called "Aliens Cause Global Warming" [crichton-official.com] in which he claimed to debunk "consensus science." The gist was that political discussion of global warming too often invoked "scientific consensus," where he argued that science was not consensus-based and that such claims were therefore meaningless.
Similarly, though we may not have consensus that Michael Crichton is dead, it makes absolutely no difference to him.
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Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:5, Insightful)
.
Consensus is meaningful when you have to make decisions.
In 1952 there were 58,000 new cases of polio reported in the U.S. and over 3,000 deaths.
The vaccine that most everyone agrees will probably be ready for distribution before 1955 gets more resources than the one which most won't likely become available before 1960.
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Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:5, Interesting)
However, there were three points where I lost a massive amount of respect for Crichton. The first was when I saw the movie westworld on an airplane once, for which he wrote the screenplay. It's the exact same plot as Jurassic Park, only substitute dinosaurs with robots. Exact same plot. The second and third books after Jurassic Park were so bad that I don't think I even finished them, that's the second point, it was obvious he was writing books to get made into Spielberg movies.
The third was when he wrote State of Fear and testified before congress. I never read the book, but just to watch the kind of anti-intellectuals like Inhof invite a science fiction author to be regarded as an expect on climate change. Focusing on whether the consensus view is necessarily correct or not has nothing to do with the irrefutable evidence that the climate is changing and the likely probability that humans are causing it completely or contributing to it.
While I have very fond memories of how cool it was to read Jurassic Park the first time (way way before Spielberg got his dirty little paws on it), my opinion is that the guy was a hack, a very very clever one, but a hack nonetheless. He won't be remembered as one of the "great authors", in my opinion.
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Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:5, Insightful)
I wasn't actually referring to people with legitimate skeptical opinions. There are in fact a few scientists who potentially know what they're talking about (given education, etc) that don't buy the consensus opinion. I think they're wrong, as do most climate scientists around the world, but that's how science works - people have theories they try to test and poke holes in.
I'm talking about denialists, people whose response to the (fairly overwhelming) consensus that exists is to say stuff like "the geocentric universe and flat earth views were also scientific consensus, once upon a time." That's true as far as it goes, but it utterly fails as a critique of the science, the theories, or the models. It's not skepticism, it's just ignoring and refusing to discuss. Similarly, when people latch on to localized variations in temperature as proof that global warming doesn't exist. That's shutting down debate before it begins - it's not the presentation of an argument, or evidence, or meaningful flaws in existing theories - it's ignoring the issue, declaring victory, and plugging one's ears.
This latter category of person is primarily who you find here, and in most places on the intertubes.
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Re:I don't think there's consensus (Score:5, Insightful)
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"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:5, Insightful)
Jurassic Park succeeded because of Spielberg and CGI, not really much to do with the story, which was, if you think about it for a moment, dumb. But some of his early stuff -- books and movies like Andromeda Strain, Westworld -- was really entertaining and had a few decent ideas.
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Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:5, Informative)
"chaos theory means that they must run amok and kill us all!"
And also happened to be an embellishment of the film.
People should really learn to read again.. the book series was much better than the Hollywood treatment.. as is often the case.
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Recently finished reading Travels (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm somewhat confused by why his books spend so much time writing about science (or at least science fiction) when he appears to have been personally bent on the unscientific new-age mysticism activities. Travels talks extensively about his beliefs in fortune tellers, auras, astral planes, and spending two weeks talking to a cactus. It seems contradictory to build a career on science and not approach mysticism with a more cynical eye.
Then again, the science in Critons' books usually end up trying to kill man, so perhaps it's not his love of science that drove him to write, but rather his belief that science with have its retribution on man.
You had it backwards (Score:5, Interesting)
It was hard to escape the conclusion that Crichton was a guy who would believe literally anything anyone told him. That's one reason I was somewhat surprised to see him arguing in favor of more objective thinking in the global-warming debate.
It's not so much that Crichton believed anything people told him so much as he didn't believe in science. While his science themed books show a great interest in reading about science, the conclusion is always that Science is Wrong and Scientists are Evil or Recklessly Stupid. The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and Prey are all about the futility of trying to contain living things. In Next, the drug that saves his brother makes him age and die early. State of Fear is no different, really. It's more strident than the rest of his books about how scientists are all arrogant fools who will destroy the world, but it really matches the theme of the rest of his work.
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The Wikipedia on Michael Crichton... (Score:5, Funny)
Michael Crichton has died on November 5, 2008 after a long, private battle with a velociraptor. [wikipedia.org]
RIP Mr. Crichton (Score:5, Interesting)
For any of you folks who have only seen some of MC's movies, don't judge his storytelling ability without reading the books first. The Andromeda Strain is clearly a classic, but some of his later books like "Airframe" and "The Rising Sun" are good reads too.
I've don't know why, but for whatever reasons, Hollywood has slaughtered just about every title they tried to turn into a movie. The ~1970 Andromeda Strain is probably about the only one where they came close (including Jurassic Park).
Rest in peace, Mr. Crichton.
Best "Common Sci-Tech" Writer (Score:5, Insightful)
At least of modern times, anyway. He was writing "techno-thrillers" before critics coined the term for Tom Clancy... he gave incredibly descriptive narratives about telecom technology in Congo, years before Clancy wrote The Hunt For Red October. Like many great genre authors, he could also write outside his genre... see Eaters of the Dead and The Great Train Robbery. I was completely unaware of his battle with cancer, and news of his death made an already rotten day worse.
Re:Funny how you never see... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, at least one reputable news source [theonion.com] has done so.
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Re:Lost World (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember reading "The Lost World" when I was a under-read, newly minted college graduate.
After four years of being required to read every crappy book ever written* in high school I was pretty much burned out on reading. (I always liked reading, ever since I was young... I even remember reading Iacocca's biography instead of whatever I was supposed to be reading at the time.) But by the time Hight School was done I was only reading car magazines and stuff like that.
The summer after my first year in college I found (literally--someone left it behind in the movie theater where I was working) a copy of Jurassic Park and I started reading it. I got sucked in right away, literally to the point of hiding it in my cash drawer and reading it at the concession stand that I was working at when it was slow. I burned through it in no time, then started reading his other stuff. I remember reading Andromeda Strain and Terminal Man early on and reading Congo and Sphere later on. (Sphere and Jurassic Park are my favorite books by him and I've read and re-read them both several times.) Then I remembered liking some Stephen King stuff that I had read in the past so I went and looked for more by him (Christine, Firestarter--his early stuff) and then I found more and more authors and I got back into reading and I've been reading steadily ever since. But I'll always remember that it was him and Jurassic Park that got me back into reading for fun. Thank you, Mr. Crichton. You will be missed.
* a couple, like Mosquito Coast, were OK, and I loved Catcher in the Rye, but overall, I hated all the selections at my HS. About 10 books a year, including 2 or 3 to read over the summer. The Guns of Navarone, On the Beach, stuff like that.
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