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Michael Crichton and Computers
- kohanz 11y agoThanks for posting this. Crichton was my favourite author when I was a young boy (I still remember how engrossing Sphere was for me) and to this day I had no idea that he tried his hand at programming.
- Thirdegree 11y agoPrey is one of a very small number of books I never managed to finish because it scared me at the time.
- ergothus 11y agoInteresting - I greatly enjoyed Crichton's earlish work (e.g. Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain), but found his later stuff to be terrible in its scientific basis and _Prey_ was when I stopped reading because I found it too terrible to just enjoy. Glad someone enjoyed it, I may have been too picky.
- Sgt_Apone 11y agoHis early stuff is excellent, but the last Crichton book that I enjoyed was Timeline. I found Prey to be disappointing and State of Fear was just about unreadable with its complete misrepresentation of climate change science.
- DanBC 11y agoTimeline was fun, but there are much better examples of similar stories. Connie Willis's "Doomsday", "Black Out" and "All Clear" are better.
- jbenz 11y agoIf it makes you feel any better, I followed the exact same path. He was one of my favorite authors when I was a kid, but by the time Prey came out... yeesh. But I still love Sphere, The Lost World, and so many more. I even love Disclosure, with its hilarious take on virtual reality file storage.
- harryh 11y agoAirframe is pretty good too, even if the plot is eerily similar to Disclosure.
- dghf 11y agoMicro, his last novel, was utterly, truly dreadful. But it was posthumously completed by another author (Richard Preston, who wrote The Hot Zone, which I really enjoyed, in a freaked-out way), so I don't know where the blame should lie.
- jfoutz 11y agoI enjoyed a bunch of his books. Prey had problems, but i thought it was a fun read after i stopped worrying about power. I gave up on him after http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2006/12/michael_crichto.html http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2006/12/michael_crichto.ht... It's so dirty and underhanded. He seemed like a really interesting guy from the window of his books. Perhaps he just got a little off track at the end there.
- brwnll 11y agoGiving a bad guy's background in a fiction novel a similar some similar traits someone you don't like for openly being critical of your work is "so dirty and underhanded"? This feels utterly backward. If you gave me the option of: A) Having a person publicly criticize my work saying things such as: "I found a man who has long yearned for intellectual stature beyond the realm of killer dinosaurs and talking monkeys" B) An author will write a d-bag into one of his novels and say he went to the same college and works in the same field as me. I find "A" much more appalling.
- jfoutz 11y agoA) is forthright. Standing up and saying, "hi, i'm bob, and joe sucks" is clear and unambiguous. B) is an underhanded rhetorical trick. "Hi, i'm bob, let me tell you a story about Moe. For convienence, Moe looks talks and acts just like Joe. Moe is a child molester." See, there's this internal conflict, either the mythical Moe is just like Joe, and Joe is a child molester, or Moe isn't just like Joe. Just stand up and say Joe sucks. Leave Joe out of the story you're trying to tell.
- volaski 11y agoIt's ludicrous to even think of this as an "attack". Just sounds like some conspiracy theory based on this guy's insecurity. Let's say Crichton did mean to use this as an attack. How did it hurt this critic guy? After all, no one would have recognized that it was him if this guy didn't go through all the trouble to come up with his "theory". Even after this guy wrote this blog post, how did this theory hurt him? Based on what you say you did, it just sounds like it was Crichton who's the casualty from this event. Lastly, I think it's stupid to stop reading an author just because of something like this. Let's say everything on that post is true. (Although it only sounds like this guy's theory) Even then this is just some childish personal behavior you can laugh over (It's not like Crichton attempted to bury this critic guy with "underhanded" tactics), it has nothing to do with his ability to write good books.
- jh3 11y agoI remember reading Timeline and Prey in high school. They were amazing books to me at the time. I just couldn't put them down. I never cared too much about how scientifically accurate they were though. That's like complaining about the plot holes in Back to the Future. It's entertainment, so to me he did his job well.
- veidr 11y agoWell for me (and I presume at least some other people) bad science in works ruins the entertainment value. For example, if in an otherwise realistic military thriller, the hero finds the runway blocked by a tank, so he throws his F-16 into reverse and takes off backwards, that would completely take me out of the story, destroy the suspension of disbelief, and ruin (or at least severely degrade) the book. Some of Crichton's books do that for me, as does almost every movie in which they use computers, and the computers are all like, bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep! whzzzzt! and sounding like R2D2 with every normal user interface action, such as scrolling text and opening windows.
- bduerst 11y agoPrey has a great story to it, and is pretty free of any political bias.
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoI loved "State of Fear" because he overtly used the techniques of propaganda almost as a parody. Don't know why, but that was just deeply entertaining. But I also share his concern with the politicization of science.
- aws_ls 11y agoI read "State of Fear" about two years back. The novel (story line) was very interesting. And it convinced me for a while, that 'climate change' is over-rated and a lot of propaganda. I remember his protagonist, scientist who is busting the myth/propaganda in the story, lives in a 900 sq ft. home. Juxtaposed against the lavish life style of those who are propagating 'climate change'. Crichton is a writer who takes a very macro view of the timeline. Lets not forget, he wrote Jurrasic Park, and hence the entire franchise owes him that credit. In this book, he says that this micro environmental changes, don't matter when compared to macro stuff like Ice age, which happens every some 10,000s of years. Also he gives a lot of data in the book. For e.g. Historical temperature charts of various cities etc. to make his case of 'climate change' being over-rated & driven by ulterior motives, than substantive in itself on merits to call such a drastic action. I am just a layman on this. But truth be told, the book did impress me at that time. Which is not a long time ago. And please understand, I am totally not a nutcase who denies science.
- snowwrestler 11y agoI recently went back and reread Jurassic Park. It was still an exciting story, but Crichton's strongly negative view of science and scientists shone through brightly to me now. It's really quite shrill in parts.
- bduerst 11y agoI'm still waiting for a movie adaptation of Prey :/
- intruder 11y agoI know, right? You'd think they would jump on that story. Especially since so many of his books were made into films.
- tnecniv 11y agoGood thing you stopped. The ending is terrible. It seems that Crichton always had a problem with endings. He always wrote 90% of a book and then vomited up the last two chapters.
- kijin 11y agoThat seems to be a common issue with novelists who have big ideas. Too many loose strings, brain stack overflow. For example, I'm not terribly fond of the way Stephen King ends his stories, especially the longer ones. J.K. Rowling also always seems to hurry too much at the end of her books. And both are much better writers than Crichton.
- myth_buster 11y agoSame here. He seems to be the antithesis of William Gibson! :)
- mattgodbolt 11y agoThere's a typo in the heading "Chrichton" should be "Crichton".
- adefa 11y agoThanks for pointing that out, should be fixed now. :)
- Zikes 11y agoI remember when someone posted here their javascript project demonstrating how you could make ads and modals pop up when the user's mouse left the page. There were a lot of comments about the potential for abuse, but ultimately it was decided that like all science it could not be inherently evil. Still, I sometimes wonder if they feel any remorse.
- melling 11y agoMichael Crichton once intentionally plagiarized George Orwell while at Harvard and got a B- http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/george-orwell-got-a-b-at-harvard.html http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/george-orwell-got-a-b-at-...
- sperling75 11y agoThat wouldn't fly today. I wonder how his career would have been altered if he had tried that now.
- Aqueous 11y agoAccording to the Wikipedia entry on Michael Crichton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton), he actually told another professor about his suspicions, and more importantly his intention to submit an Orwell essay under his own name. If he were to get caught, informed consent from another member of the faculty may have been a mitigating factor.
- marincounty 11y agoIn college, I feared taking English classes. The only courses I feared more were Public speaking courses. I really feared public speaking, but that's another story. I knew my grammer was horrid, and I just wasen't interested in writing. I was interested in science--and girls? Well, I remember this one English 101 instructor. No one in the class could please this guy. His favorite saying was, "I don't grade on the curve, because I've had too many stupid classes!" We all nervously laughed, but we were scared. Everyone seemed to try, but all our papers were given back with so much red felt tip graffiti; everyone just wanted to get through his class. We just wrote short choppy sentences, and tried to keep the grammatical errors down. He once had the nerve to say, "Most of you are passing, but your papers are so boring!" I remember thinking, whenever we get slightly creative, you beat the hell out of our papers? I personally think he would have liked to fail all of us, but he didn't have tenure? Well I got through class, but with some horrid memories. Well, I needed four, or five (He taught us to write out numbers under 10. I'm still not sure about that, but do it out of fear) English classes in order to graduate. I took all the courses in my last semester of college. My other instructors were great. This one guy scared me so much, I just figured everyone in the English department was like this guy. Well, they weren't. The other instructors were great. They weren't easy, but sincerely wanted to help. I had one instructor tell us I've met very few natural writers. It's a craft. Yes, like woodworking. (It wasn't a cliche back then.) I'll always remember that advice. Plus--he told us his personal story. When he was in school he hated writing, but with the right training, and encouragement, he went from a science major, to a Engish major. I think he had a PhD, but didn't want us to call him doctor. He had such a thick Indian accent, I really had to pay attention in class, but learned more in one week in his course than all the rest. I forget his name, but I remember him saying, "My name rhymes with Desi--from the Lucy show." He was a really good person/teacher.
- hyperbovine 11y agoThis site is weirdly reticent about the fact that he's been dead for years...
- wila 11y ago2nd link at the top left, "Biography" is quite clear about that -> http://www.michaelcrichton.com/biography/ http://www.michaelcrichton.com/biography/
- lost_name 11y ago> Amazon was released in 1982 for the Apple II Computer—that’s seventeen years ago. The article is from 1999, based on this quote from the article.
- roghummal 11y agoHe's a brand.
- hyperbovine 11y agoAgreed; it's just a little off-putting to see whoever it is keep flogging the corpse for more $$$.
- sperling75 11y agoWhich of his books were pioneering or futuristic in how they showed people using computers ?
- pa5tabear 11y agoPrey "The book features relatively new advances in the computing/scientific community, such as artificial life, emergence (and by extension, complexity), genetic algorithms, and agent-based computing."
- ergothus 11y agoNot remotely pioneering though. Being 5-20 years (or more) behind the curve might be insightful to the average reader, but is in no way pioneering. That'd be like saying Dolly the Sheep was pioneering in ideas about cloning humans. The ideas/ethics/concerns were around for decades. That average people willfully ignored them doesn't make the ideas new.
- SapphireSun 11y agoFor what it's worth, when I was a kid, I loved Prey and it was my first experience with nano-technology. You only have to be pioneering to the right audience. ;)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sperling75 11y agoThanks! Will look at prey. I read a few of his others but missed this one.
- jbenz 11y agoDisclosure! Yeah, the one that became the movie with Demi Moore and Michael Douglas. A man is sexually harassed by his female boss. The book is kind of about that, but also about technology. It was published in 1994 and I would say it was futuristic, if not a bit misguided. Crichton envisioned a virtual reality tool where -- if you wanted to find a certain file on your computer -- you would run down the halls of a huge virtual library, opening virtual filing cabinets and picking through files by hand. I think this was supposed to make finding your digital files "easier"... but seems hilarious now. Who knows, maybe some version of that will still come true. It's been a while since I read it, so I might be mis-remembering. Almost all of his books had some futuristic technology involved, including Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Timeline, etc.
- thorin 11y agoIf you want to find out more about him read his book Travels, is a very interesting take on an autobiography type novel. Its one of my favourites but I don't know anyone else who's read it.
- guscost 11y agoCool, thanks for the recommendation. Been a fan of his work as long as I can remember.
- CamperBob2 11y agoThat was a fascinating book, all right. The idea that the author of the hyper-rational The Andromeda Strain could be so credulous is still something I struggle with. He comes across as someone who automatically believes anything suggested to him until it's proven wrong. There were at least two people inside Crichton's head, maybe more.
- Elrac 11y agoFor someone so concerned with the future, he was (for my tastes) entirely too instrumental in working against a viable future for humanity. I'm referring to his public support of Jack Inhofe's climate change denial. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/michael-crichtons-state-of-confusion/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/michae...
- Pinatubo 11y agoBurn the heretic!