Michael Crichton Dead At 66 388
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.
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.
"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:5, Insightful)
Lost World (Score:3, Insightful)
Poor dude getting reamed by some on the left (Score:2, Insightful)
I've seen the global warming killed him on other sites and similar cracks on this very site.
Much of his career he wrote very thoughtful science-based pulp fiction that was very influential to many of us. Time and again he was very skeptical of many of the uses of technology and almost universally anti-corporate and anti-military with his evil characters. He was a friend to the techno-luddite left until he wrote one damn book that dared questioned the religious-left's view of climate catastrophe and questioned the role of science propaganda used by both the left and right. Sadly damned him forever in many eyes.
Re:I don't think there's consensus (Score:5, Insightful)
extraordinary author? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe his work isn't bad for reading that you don't have to think about, but the man was barely a cut above John Grisham as a fiction writer.
anti-technologist FUD-mongerer (Score:4, Insightful)
I read the book (SPOILER) (Score:4, Insightful)
I found the book Andromeda Strain entertaining, it was something that was easy reading and there was a puzzle to unravel. Then I reached the end of the book and thought, "That's it?". Usually the protagonists are somewhat involved in the solution to the problem.
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.
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:Recently finished reading Travels (Score:3, Insightful)
It was hard to escape the conclusion that Crichton was a guy who would believe literally anything anyone told him...I was somewhat surprised to see him arguing in favor of more objective thinking in the global-warming debate
Have you considered that, well before the time Crichton wrote State of Fear, climate change denialism had become the woo-woo position?
For whatever reason, climate change denialists got to him first, and made him feel cleverer and more imaginative than everyone else for listening to them. What if climate change is a conspiracy of poor environmental interests? Well, what if a powerful woman sexually harassed a man?
Could have been much worse-- could have been 9/11 truthers.
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.
Travels (Score:2, Insightful)
Then again, there's the part about the bedroom conquests.
disagree strongly (Score:1, Insightful)
if we do not take an affirmative stand against racism we are implicitly supporting it.
we tried ignoring Adolf Hitler and look what happened: 6 million jews were gassed while we sat idle.
we must never let the holocaust happen again.
never liked his writing... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Sad. RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:4, Insightful)
The basic premise of Jurassic Park wasn't dumb. The science background was, and the "chaos theory means that they must run amok and kill us all!" part was just utterly nuts.
Re:extraordinary author? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:2, Insightful)
And really, he hadn't written anything worthwhile in the last 20 years. And some really awful stuff, most notably "State of Fear", a very dishonest attack on the global warming idea, presented as fiction, so his bogus science can't be questioned, yet often cited as fact.
Nothing worthwhile? "In December 1994, he achieved the unique distinction of having the #1 movie (Jurassic Park), the #1 TV show (ER), and the #1 book (Disclosure, atop the paperback list)." I can only assume that you're not talking about popularity or influence. As far as opinions go, I personally liked Jurassic Park tremendously because it came out right when I was in the "Dinosaur phase" as a young boy. Sure, the other day I was talking about all the stuff it gets wrong, but it was probably the first exposure I had to genetics (my eventual concentration).
As for State of Fear, while I thought the plot was mediocre, I found the arguments quite thought provoking. I started the book as an alarmist, ended as a skeptic. It caused me to read more on the matter, and now I'm more in the middle. In any case, the book doesn't hide behind fiction, as all the anti-global warming stuff is properly cited and logically argued. It's also quite good in exposing many of the misconceptions that people have/had about the topic, hence what makes it effective in convincing skeptics and pissing off alarmists. A point that needed addressing regardless of the author's opinion and the book's conclusion. Although, "global warming is a myth" isn't even the conclusion of the book, it was essentially "politics needs to be removed from science" and global warming was the case study.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:2, Insightful)
There's the basic premise of scientists bringing dinosaurs back from the dead and build an amusement park around it. Perhaps a bit silly but nothing really bad. And then there's the explanation for it, involving mosquitos trapped in amber, frog DNA spliced in, and all the rest, which is simply ridiculous. If he had simply said that they had been cloned from recovered DNA and not gone into all the mechanisms behind it then it would have been much better off.
Re:Lost World (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah yes, that passage has stayed with me over the years.
Thatâ(TM)s a passage from The Lost World, by Michael Crichton. I read it when I was 11, and this lesson stayed in my mind for years. Eventually, with Americans going berserk with panic over Muslims after 9/11, I somehow remembered this moral out of nowhere. I actually went to the library and tried finding books about Islam. In retrospect, nearly everything I learned about Islam and Muslims was exaggerated, or misunderstood, or just plain fantasy. It made it all the more frustrating to explain to people, since they refused to part with those notions.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless I missed something, he only wrote one sequel to Jurassic Park...The Lost World. And I liked it much better than the first. The movie version of that one was absolutely horrible. Almost as bad as the Sphere movie, which I thought was his best book, personally.
Sounds like you just got pissy that his views on global warming didn't line up with your own and found reasons not to like him before that.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that there are a lot of people out there who have no clue what the science actually is, have not studied the issue beyond readying a few Web sites, and then claim to be informed skeptics. In fact, most of them are just denying something that they barely understand, which is not skepticism. Denial is a good term to describe many of the people who claim that they do not believe in climate change. Belief has nothing do do with it. It is a matter of science, not belief.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:5, Insightful)
Degrees in medicine and biology do not make one an expert on climate change. We wouldn't be having this discussion if Crichton had written "GOTO Considered Just Fine, Thankyouverymuch."
Crichton botched [realclimate.org] the science [realclimate.org] that he was trying to criticize. I think that's a much stronger condemnation than the presence or absence of any given piece of university-derived parchment.
The first article disputes his 0.8C prediction, pointing out that the trend he attributes his predicted rise to should actually have a bit of a cooling effect.
Here [realclimate.org] is a list of other, specific rebuttals to Crichton (primarily his novel "State of Fear"), in case you're interested.
Re:anti-technologist FUD-mongerer (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe a story about scientists being cautious and thoughtful doesn't lead to dire consequences which just doesn't make a good book.
chapter 20: After verifying his results once again the scientist then circulates his findings amongst peers to scrutinize his work from a different perspective.....
Yeah, I'm gonna preorder that puppy!
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:3, Insightful)
There was no excuse for Prey...IMO it desperately sucked..especially as the laypersons introduction to the nascent field of Nanotechnology at the turn of this century.
Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:3, Insightful)
I won't miss the books themselves, or his anti-science agenda.
He wasn't anti-science; He was pro-science ! However, the theme that came through in his books was that of man's hubris in thinking that because you understood science and developed technology through it, you were ultimately never 100% in control of that technology. In other words, all real-world systems have a flaw, and humans always seem to stumble over that flaw at some point. His books made an entertaining plot point out of that and for a while he was my favourite author.
His speeches such as 'Aliens Cause Global Warming' and 'Why Speculate' are must-read too, IMO.
Re:Sad. RIP (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, yes, it was a faithful transcript of the book. But the book was as boring as bat shit, and the movie was worse.
Re:anti-technologist FUD-mongerer (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the usual crypto-Luddism common in lots of hack sci-fi writing. And kind of common on Slashdot, too: How many stories every week get the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag?
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:4, Insightful)
The grandparent is correct, I was mistaken and there is only one sequel to Jurassic Park, I got confused with the movies. Yet, I stand by my point that a) Lost World sucked and b) Crichton was a hack.
You talk about it being neat that studying the behavior of dinosaurs is nearly pointless because of these dinosaurs had no mothers to learn from. Do you know what how much "nature vs. nuture" was in dinosaurs, i.e., genetic vs. learned behavior? Considering we don't even know how much is even in humans, talking about it being pointless to study recreated dinosaurs for their behavior is itself pointless. If we were to do recreate dinosaurs and study them, it would be just about as good a guess as studying the long dead bones of dinosaurs to get clues about behavior, which is precisely what we do right now because we have nothing else (mostly we just infer anatomy, but sometimes we get some ideas about behavior). Writing that book, he forgot that he's supposed to be entertaining us, not getting on a soap-box about his paranoid beliefs about science.
Anyway, this is all fine until you start applying this clever, but incorrect logic to the real world instead of your private science fiction --it's called pseudoscience and the U.S. is rife with it. For State of Fear, my opinion of Crichton was only lowered a little bit when he testified, it was already low because of Lost World. I was more annoyed at Inhof and the members of congress and the administration about their denial about the possibility of climate change at first, then their stonewalling to keep from doing anything about it.
As for Crichton being a hack, let's put it this way, if I read a Jack London novel, even a not so good one, it's still pretty entertaining. If I read a lesser known Hemingway or Steinbeck I am still entertained. I was not entertained by Lost World, and I was not entertained by him again putting those idiot children in those books, and I was not entertained in the least by Westworld because I had seen that movie before, the same way that Lost World was sorry and predictable. From reading this thread, some people are entertained by his other novels, so maybe I'm wrong and he is a good author, but I would bet dollars to doughnuts that Jurassic Park won't make it into any school reading lists the way H.G. Wells stuff does or George Orwell, or some other science fiction by truly great authors.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:3, Insightful)
Except for, you know, the SCIENTISTS.
And they really don't tend to fall in the "skeptic" camp.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a stupid comment. GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, SURVIOR, CAST AWAY, LOST -- "exact same plot". JURASSIC PARK is about genetic science, DNA, dinosaurs, some Chaos Theory and a little bit of computer engineering. WESTWORLD is about grown men wanting to live out a wild west fantasy.
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.
You don't know what you are talking about.
There was only one sequel to the novel JURASSIC PARK. It was called LOST WORLD, and LOST WORLD the movie bares little resemblance to the novel. JURASSIC PARK 3 was a movie, not a book.
Besides, Crichton was as much about movies as he was about novels. Crichton wrote the screenplay for WESTWORLD and TWISTER, he wrote and directed COMA and THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, and he created ER. It's no wonder his written work has appeal as movie and tv projects.
Focusing on whether the consensus view is necessarily correct or not has nothing to do
Crichton's point is it doesn't matter how many people *think* he's is wrong about climate change, it only takes one person to *prove* him wrong. Science isn't consensus, and nothing has been proven. Every computer model has been shown inaccurate, and now the environmental lobby are explaining away our years of stable weather and record low hurricanes as the result of lack of sunspots.
with the irrefutable evidence that the climate is changing and the likely probability that humans are causing it completely or contributing to it.
I've been around for a while, and I've seen this happen before. Now that the Republicans are out of the White House, expect the climate change crisis to conveniently fade away from the public consciousness. Everything will be hunky dory for about eight years until another Republican gets elected and then the next great fabricated crisis will raise its head -- maybe they'll say we're running out of clean water, or that the rubber we use in tires is evil or something, and those damn Republicans won't spend the billions of dollars needed to make the problem go away! -- and it'll get pounded into the minds of young people and the environmentally sensitive until the next Democrat gets elected and everyone will breath another big sigh of relief and move on.
While I have very fond memories of how cool it was to read Jurassic Park the first time
JURASSIC PARK is still a very strong novel. Probably one of the best techno-thrillers ever. It holds up. As does A CASE OF NEED, DISCLOSURE, SPHERE, PREY, and TRAVELS was a fascinating autobiography.
my opinion is that the guy was a hack, a very very clever one, but a hack nonetheless.
A HACK? Your opinion is wrong. Crichton was thought-provoking and insightful, and he was a gifted story-teller
He won't be remembered as one of the "great authors", in my opinion.
Do tell.
Environmentalists (Score:4, Insightful)
Notice how most of the posts mocking, belittling and having fun with the man's death are coming from the "How dare he question Global Warming" crowd.
State of Fear had hundreds of footnotes referencing the 3rd IPCC and actual scientific studies from actual scientists.
Regardless your view on Global Warming, he has a valid point in the book:
*Enviornmentalists feed on fear.
*The media feeds on fear.
*Politicians feed on fear.
Results in
*Echo chamber effect.
It's hard to get elected saying or to get a story on the news about how: "The sky is NOT falling, or not falling that fast, or it's not our fault that it's falling".
Apparently that is all it takes to get the altruistic, gentle Green movement dancing on your grave.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:3, Insightful)
Read the real peer reviewed papers, and you will see that Skepticism is entirely justified.
No, I will see no such thing. Perhaps if I pick and choose a few papers presented to me by those who want to promote the denial of global warming, I might think so, however.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:4, Insightful)
I have come across, the ones lacking seem to be the "skeptics".
So Al Gore piece was what? Its politics, and its going both ways. Mention anything against AGW and BAM your getting paid off by oil companies. No evidence required. Or your not a real climate scientist etc. The opposite is also true. But really the debate even here where we are suppose to be just a little more technically inclined, the dissuasion is no more informed. The whole thing is political not scientific. I think that was the point about science is not a consensus by M.C.
Having worked with climate scientist I can assure you that the general options are far from general consensus. So why do you think its trolling to ask for your sources?
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:3, Insightful)
So, if you have, can you cite some examples for actual scientific journals, then?
And can you show that those are in any way not just a few exceptions?
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:3, Insightful)
But please realize that media and other popular source overstate confidence in science all the time.
You're the only one who's bringing up the media. I've been following this since long before it was even a media topic, you know.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I read the book (SPOILER) (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Speaking of adapting books to movies, and deus ex machinas, the film Adaptation [imdb.com] neatly ties this all together. Brian Cox plays a veteran screenwriter who offers the following advice to a depressed, panicky Charlie Kaufman:
"I'll tell you a secret. The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end, and you got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you've got a hit. Find an ending, but don't cheat, and don't you dare bring in a deus ex machina. Your characters must change, and the change must come from them. Do that, and you'll be fine."
I wonder what Crichton would've thought of THAT!
I mean, when he wasn't busy attempting to debunk global warming.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:3, Insightful)
Having worked with climate scientist I can assure you that there is a general consensus. So why do you think its trolling to ask for your sources?
Here is a clue, show some studies that show a different cause. Show some good papers explaining why the studies are wrong.