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.
Sad. RIP (Score:5, Interesting)
Andromeda Strain was an excellent scifi movie.
Re:Sad. RIP (Score:4, Interesting)
The 1971 version was one of my favourites as a kid... haven't seen the remake yet.
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.
Re:Sad. RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, yes, it was a faithful transcript of the book. But the book was as boring as bat shit, and the movie was worse.
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.
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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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 chan
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It was here that he first discovered the formula he would use over and over: humans discover science - humans abuse science - humans pay.
He did cop out the ending of that one, but it was an early novel. I like to think of him as mostly a sci-fi writer, because the ideas were more important than the characters.
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The Terminal Man was interesting reading. Many of the ideas in it are starting to poke onto the feasability horizon now.
(anyone else want to get electrodes wired into their brain?) ...
(would you reconsider if it made your response time quicker in an FPS?)
-ellie
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: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I don't think there's consensus (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't think there's consensus (Score:5, Funny)
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.
easy solution (Score:5, Funny)
just make all of the clones of michael crichton you create female so they can't breed. of course, this approach ignores the possibility of spontaneous hermaphroditism or parthenogenic reproduction in a given population of unmonitored feral michael crichtons on say a large remote tropical island
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.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
I'm sure whomever modded the grandparent "troll," knew to what the post was referring. In case you hadn't noticed, there's not a small population of vocal anthropogenic global warming skeptics and denialists here at Slashdot.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:4, Insightful)
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: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?
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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.
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.
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Except for, you know, the SCIENTISTS.
And they really don't tend to fall in the "skeptic" camp.
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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.
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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?
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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: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.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:5, Insightful)
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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: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.
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Agreed. For one thing, they completely ignored what was an essential plot point of the book -- that studying resurrected dinosaurs to learn more about them was nearly pointless. They wouldn't act like dinosaurs did because they had no other dinosaurs to learn behavior from. The dinosaurs in the book were out of control, with r
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:5, Interesting)
Crichton predicted future warming at 0.8 degrees C.
So taking out that "irrefutable" phrase out of your statement since Michael Crichton (in his book or in real life) wasn't even trying to refute that part of it in the first place.
We're left with:
Michael Crichton spoke on "the politicization of Science". Here is the google-cached written reproduction [209.85.173.104] of that talk (which I found on his site, but his site is currently down). And here is the educational background of Michael Crichton. That being said, don't just rely on his educational background. And don't rely on the fact that he was seen testify in front of an idiot. His talk speaks for itself. It's quite short, and to the point.
Crichton graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, received his MD from Harvard Medical School, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, researching public policy with Jacob Bronowski. He taught courses in anthropology at Cambridge University and writing at MIT. Crichton's 2004 bestseller, State of Fear, acknowledged the world was growing warmer, but challenged extreme anthropogenic warming scenarios. He predicted future warming at 0.8 degrees C. (His conclusions have been widely misstated.)
Crichton's interest in computer modeling went back forty years. His multiple-discriminant analysis of Egyptian crania, carried out on an IBM 7090 computer at Harvard, was published in the Papers of the Peabody Museum in 1966. His technical publications included a study of host factors in pituitary chromophobe adenoma, in Metabolism, and an essay on medical obfuscation in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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.
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One of the links from the RC wiki was broken, and (despite being a wiki) I couldn't fix it. Here:
http://audubonmagazine.org/profile/profile0505.html [audubonmagazine.org]
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, both of those predate science, and have not been consensus for over two thousand years.
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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"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:5, Insightful)
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I was about to post the same. An extremely insensitive tag. I understand some morons may be trying to rant against the commercialisation of the "Jurrasic Park" franchise, but you can't pin that on this extraordinary author. I doubt anyone who marked that tag up actually read any (of his, in particular, but not necessarily exclusively) books.
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.
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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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If anything, making it a pop culture movie diminished its reputation as an interesting piece of fiction.
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:"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.
Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:4, Informative)
Was it? I read the book many years ago so it all sort of runs together for me, but I distinctly remember each chapter beginning with a picture of successive iterations of a fractal, and I'm pretty sure that this tied in somehow with chaos theory. Wikipedia says:
Both are pessimistic, but Malcolm, having been consulted before the park's creation, is emphatic in his prediction that the park will collapse, as it is an unsustainably simple structure bluntly forced upon a complex system.
Is it not so?
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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
Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:5, Informative)
I said "worthwhile". Bestsellers are mostly just ways to pass the time on a commute.
all the anti-global warming stuff is properly cited and logically argued.
Bullshit. [realclimate.org]
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I call "Bullshit!" on the articles I've read on that realclimate.org website...
They do a great job at debunking other theories but they still fall flat on two very basic scientific premises:
1) You cannot use a data set to predict anything with a greater accuracy than the accuracy of the worst data in your set. The accuracy of estimated temperatures just 200 years ago are bad and the guesses on temperatures a millennium ago are just that - barely qualified guesses.
2) Any theory that tries to explain somethin
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You cannot use a data set to predict anything with a greater accuracy than the accuracy of the worst data in your set.
This is wrong, and indeed is elementary statistics. For example, do a regression with some data points that have small error bars and some that have large. The large-error data points have little influence on the prediction (for better or worse); since they're so uncertain, they're mostly irrelevant.
The correct statement is that the worst data in your set doesn't help you as much as the best data: if some data is much worse than others, then its importance gets downweighted.
The strongest evidence in favo
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.
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Travels talks extensively about his beliefs in fortune tellers, auras, astral planes, and spending two weeks talking to a cactus.
That was Marge Simpson, you insensitive clod!
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.
It worked out rather well for Isaac Newton.
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He's an odd character. His books are all man vs science and science is always the villain. I think its sad that he will be remembered as the guy who wrote a discredited book on how global warming is a myth. Heck, Rising Sun is just an anti-Japanese screed.
I think of him as something of tragic figure. A sad person who fears science, foreigners, foreign investment, global warming, etc but had a built-in audience that agreed with him. I think at one time, especially in his early works, he was talented but fel
Re:Recently finished reading Travels (Score:4, Informative)
I didn't exactly respect him more after reading Travels. 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. His bio made him sound like a real New Age woo-woo type.
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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
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.
A Giant Has Passed (Score:4, Funny)
Michael Crichton was great author, but also a scientist. He was one of few people who warned about the the dangerous trend of mixing politics into science, especially in regards to global warming.
His Aliens Caused Global Warming speech is a must read. [michaelcrichton.net]
berry fuddy (Score:4, Funny)
A Giant Has Passed
Now, there's no need to poke fun at his height.
Funny how you never see... (Score:2, Informative)
"after a courageous and private battle against cancer,"
They never say stuff like "after capitulating to cancer like a big pussy,"
But anyway, to employ another cliche-- he will be missed. Forget Jurassic Park- I still get creeped out by the proto-Terminator robot in "Westworld". And who can forget the classic 1981 cloning/CG extravaganza, "Looker". Well, everyone.
Here's an hour-long video interview [google.com] with him on Charlie Rose.
Re:Funny how you never see... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, at least one reputable news source [theonion.com] has done so.
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]
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Is there a wiki page that catalogs these types of edits? The ReiserFS one comes to mind as well.
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Re:The Wikipedia on Michael Crichton... (Score:4, Funny)
Now there's a real tribute. Add in a few XKCD [xkcd.com] comics and you've got a proper shrine.
Lost World (Score:3, Insightful)
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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Ah yes, that passage has stayed with me over the years.
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 question
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.
Next (Score:2)
I only read his most recent book, Next, and found that it didn't really live up to what I'd hoped from the dust jacket. It was full of interesting ideas, but eventually it just wandered off and I wondered what the point was. It also confirmed what I suspected about Crichton before I'd read anything of his -- that his books are basically plot-driven, which explains their success at airports etc. But he was clearly a modern man who liked to think and discuss ideas, and I think any Slashdotter should be able t
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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.
For those who have, read the books anyway.
There's one thing I've always admired about Crichton, and that's his willingness and ability to write on just about any subject. His thrillers cover the whole range of modern science and medicine, and while no one would call his work "hard science", it's still extremely well researched by NYT-bestseller standards.
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Anybody else think The 13th Warrior [imdb.com] (based on his Eaters of The Dead [wikipedia.org]) is actually a good film?
I liked it. Still do. I think it's unappreciated.
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The ~1970 Andromeda Strain is probably about the only one where they came close (including Jurassic Park).
The "Great Train Robbery" (1979 - also directed by Crichton) was an enjoyable film. Here's the trailer:
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=h_QathS_8Ok [youtube.com]
anti-technologist FUD-mongerer (Score:4, Insightful)
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"Surely there is some good that can come out of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, outsourcing, etc...??"
Of course there is, but that doesn't mean we should rush into doing it just because we can without any concern for consequences and ramifications.
Also, Timeline was shite, and the movie was even worse than the book.
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!
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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?
reading the summary... (Score:3, Funny)
I expected it to end with ...There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
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.
Crichton Was A Supporter of Tech Tips Website (Score:3, Informative)
Travels (Score:2, Insightful)
Then again
Terminal Man (Score:2)
I have mixed feelin
never liked his writing... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry to hear it... (Score:5, Informative)
... one of the first full-length books I read was The Andromeda Strain.
Later, I read the condensed version of The Terminal Man, and remembered (and loved) the line where a doctor explains to a policeman that the subject had a radioactive battery, making him a possible contamination threat. The policeman's response was "Alpha or beta particle emitter?" When the doctor looks surprised, he adds, "I went to college. I can even read and write."
That was where I learned that even cops could have the geek nature.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
P.S: Did he Grave Descend by overdosing on his Drug of Choice?
P.P.S: Too soon?
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.
Why... (Score:4, Informative)
The thing people are forgetting (Score:3, Interesting)
Michael Crichton used to write articles for computer magazines. I remember reading one where he talked about the timing how long it took you to type your name and password to determine if it was really you.
http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/index/index.php?author=Michael+Crichton [atarimagazines.com]
Not every great author has to be a GREAT author (Score:3, Informative)
So Crichton isn't Hemingway. Big deal. He wrote enjoyable books, for the most part, and did so for decades. He wrote stories that kept you thinking about them after you put the book down, even if they had flaws.
Books, like movies and even food, don't have to be "art" to be worthwhile and worthy of some respect.
As a (hack) writer myself I have much respect for authors like Crichton, (old) King, and even Dean Koontz. Their works won't be taught in school, but they sweep you away for a few hours, and get under your skin. And for me anyway, they make me want to write a book myself.* They make it look easy, in the way only real talent can.
Compare Crichton to a real hack like Robin Cook. Ugh!
I will be lifting a glass in his memory tonight, and I rarely drink. The world's a poorer place without him and his tales of Science Run Amok.
* Not that I have written a book lately because hey, I am lazy, but that's another story.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:disagree strongly (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Divorced twice: you make bad choices.
Divorced three times: you're a ... challenge to get along with.
Divorced four times: you're a colossal dick.
Just some observations I've made about human nature throughout the years.