
Michael Crichton, Science Studies, and the Technothriller (2015) - Hooke
http://histscifi.com/essays/radin/technothriller
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courtneypowell
I highly recommend Michael Crichton’s autobiography, ‘Travels’. It chronicles
his time beginning in med school, where he began writing on a whim, to his
post-fame struggles. Time periods are framed in short stories that are
entertaining and thought provoking. I never would have guessed he even had an
autobiography and now I find myself reading it once a year.

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NeedMoreTea
Sometimes all it takes is one novel to lose _all_ respect for an author and
any pretence about their relationship to science. One that's not mentioned in
this article. State of Fear, which had the added bonus of being a novel with
dozens of charts and graphs and incredibly heavy going. He should have stuck
with the sillier stuff.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear)

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ggm
I loved the book, but I utterly repudiate his denialist position espoused in
it. It feels to me like loving Ian Fleming but abhoring the sexism inherent in
James bond. Michael Chrichton wrote pot-boiler thrillers really well and to
relax on a long flight I still read them, including this one but the climate
denialism is a royal pain.

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NeedMoreTea
I enjoyed the likes of Jurassic Park, Timeline, The First Great Train Robbery
hugely. Found State of Fear too much like hard work.

I think I might be similarly disappointed with Fleming if he had held a well
publicised stance about equality and women's rights through his career, and
_then_ put out James Bond. Course the Bond movies were very different to the
books.

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tnecniv
You should definitely read Sphere and Prey if you haven't!

Also avoid the Timeline movie at all costs unless you are trapped on a flight.

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ggm
I rather liked the timeline book, but it's juvenalia. I liked his reasoned (if
entirely hypothetical) comments about the mistakes we make visualising the
past as white, because we see whitewashed walls, when they were probably as
polychromatic as they could be in the circumstances. And I liked his
characterisation of the poor as probably predating everyone they could, not
some robin-hood fantasy of nice people waiting for gifts of food. But the
whole quantum foam and nasty scientist at home angle was just trashy. Geniuses
like this don't rise to the top of corporations. Oh wait.. hang on...

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tnecniv
I did like the Timeline book as well, but I read it at around 13.

It did really change a lot of images I had of the period though. One thing
that sticks out in my memory was a comment on how much distance the average
serf could cover in a day from walking since it was their only mode of
transportation.

The movie, though, is just completely middling. It's not bad enough to be fun
but not good enough to be exciting. I watched it on a plane, which adds two
points to any score I would give a movie, but if I was at home I would have
probably turned it off after 45 minutes.

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efournie
I have trouble taking Michael Crichton's stories seriously partly because of
his odd obsession with theme parks.

In Westworld, androids indistinguishable from humans are used for an amusement
park. In Jurassic Park, it's engineering of fossil DNA to recreate dinosaurs
that is used for a theme park and in Timeline, if I recall correctly, the
first idea of a billionaire who manages to develop time-travelling technology
is to use it to open a medieval theme park.

Given any of those technology, I think this kind of use would lie pretty low
on the list of either interesting or profitable things to do...

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atombender
Among his 25+ fiction books plus screenplays, Crichton wrote just two books
(Jurassic Park, The Lost World) and one screenplay (Westworld) about theme
parks. Not sure how that's an obsession, especially he had to be talked into
writing The Lost World by Steven Spielberg, who wanted source material for a
sequel movie.

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losthobbies
Andromeda Strain is amazing and is one of my favourite books.

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joezydeco
Another overlooked work of Crichton's is his screenplay for _Looker_ , which
covers and pretty much predicts our media-obsessed society. Oh, and synthetic
humans replacing live ones on TV.

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breatheoften
I had to read a Michael Chrichton novel called 'Timeline' for a college course
once. Its insulting to have been raised in a society which perceives this
author with so much cachet ... Calling his writing 'not good' is ... overly
generous.

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delibes
I haven't read it, but enjoyed The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park. Perhaps
I have no taste. What's so bad about his writing?

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tokyodude
I never read the book but the 1971 Andromeda Strain movie is still one of my
favorite moves.

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066769/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066769/)

