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Michael Crichton, Science Studies, and the Technothriller (2015)
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoSometimes 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
- zenbai 8y agoHis legacy will be that he was one of the most impactful climate deniers who influenced so many, including politicians and presidents, to ignore the issue of global warming precisely when there was still time to fix it.
- credit_guy 8y agoThere's a good chance those climate deniers would've gotten to the same point without Crichton. You can probably train a machine learning algorithm and see that there are traits that are highly correlated with climate denialism. If some person has (some of) these traits, then reading Crichton is only a trigger, but absent that there will be plenty of other triggers that will lead to the same conclusion.
- InfiniteBeing 8y agoyeah, it's called actually taking science seriously, but not being stuck in a false paradigm
- YouAreGreat 8y ago> traits that are highly correlated with climate denialism Sure. Since it is socially so much easier to be a secretly skeptic climate congregationist than an open climate denier, I'd bet one such correlated trait would be extreme honesty.
- jraby3 8y agoI wonder if he would still be a denier today. A lot has changed since he died, and I think the evidence is much clearer now. It’s easy to forget that.
- folli 8y agoOTOH, he gave us Jurassic Park, that likely influenced legions of kids to be interested in Science and Biology.
- mrfusion 8y agoI think this book and movie actually started the whole movement where the first HN or reddit comment on any breakthroguh is basically saying what could go wrong. And it sours the rest of the discussion trying to recover from that top comment. The majority of the world now believes that scientific breakthroughs offer more harm than good.
- ggm 8y agoI 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.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoI 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.
- tnecniv 8y agoYou 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.
- ggm 8y agoI 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...
- tnecniv 8y agoI 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.
- sanxiyn 8y agoIt's a fiction. Liking the author is optional, even if one likes the book. I do think there is heavy politicization of climate science going on, when reporting science to the public. For example, reporting is increasingly confident, while science is not. Climate sensitivity estimate hasn't improved at all for >10 years between TAR(2001) and AR5(2014), it's still from 1.5 to 4.5 C. Where is confidence coming from? Repeating things over and over should not make one more confident.
- whatshisface 8y agoWhy would you say that scientific confidence is increasing? The only change that I have noticed is that the public is slowly deciding that the believe the scientists. The public includes journalists from the scientist's perspective.
- rtx 8y agoIt's one of my favorite books. The economic model discussed in there tells us lot about humanity. Everyone with an openmind should give it a read. The biggest demonstration of the model you can see today in, environmentalist opposing nuclear power
- jasonkester 8y agoMy personal favourite conspiracy theory is that Michael Crichton was actually murdered by the “fear industry” because he hit too close to the truth with that book. I don’t actually believe it, but the timeline works out so nicely. I keep waiting for the crazy people to take up the story and run with it, but thus far nobody has.
- jhbadger 8y agoAlthough "State of Fear" was horrible, it really isn't inconsistent with the rest of his novels. Crichton never liked science and scientists. It and they are always villains in his books. The heroes always have to destroy the findings so the world won't know of the new discovery of genetic engineering, nanotech, time travel, alien artifacts, etc.
- lowken10 8y agoState of Fear is a great eye opening book. The parts about how the news media exists to keep is scared is very enlightening and true.
- gopstopushka 8y agoa very good book, one of his best. it wouldn't cause so much butthurt if it wasn't relevant
- vixen99 8y agoWhich particular charts and graphs did you take issue with? It's great to see critical takes on anything but they're fairly pointless (we're anonymous here) unless you offer some reason to believe. For all I know all his data was cherry-picked to fit an anti-CAGW agenda but someone merely claiming this doesn't make me any the wiser.
- courtneypowell 8y agoI 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.
- breatheoften 8y agoI 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.
- delibes 8y agoI haven't read it, but enjoyed The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park. Perhaps I have no taste. What's so bad about his writing?
- gadders 8y agoEaters of the Dead is one of my favourite books. Quasi-historical mixture of vikings, arab travellers and Beowulf.
- tokyodude 8y agoI 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/
- humanrebar 8y agoTimeline wasn't his best. As Ant-Man and The Wasp lampoons in the subgenre, there is a habit of just throwing the word "quantum" on things instead of explaining them. Most of his other premises are much more grounded. Some are actually fiction and not science fiction. In general, he finds something technical and complex he enjoys and finds ways to explain them through a narrative, often with unintended consequences as a unifying theme.
- linksnapzz 8y agoI'd call him a prose stylist at least as good as JK Rowling; but I suppose that's the textbook example of damning with faint praise... Also, SF authors don't have societal cachet. Joan Didion has cachet. Tom Wolfe has cachet. Arthur Miller has cachet. Kazuo Ishiguro has cachet. At best, SF authors have...an audience.
- losthobbies 8y agoAndromeda Strain is amazing and is one of my favourite books.
- efournie 8y agoI 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...
- dashmatte 8y agoI read Michael Crichton's "State of Fear" when I was young and impressionable. It made an elegant argument denying Climate change and it took me almost 10 years for myself to get back on the right side of the argument. The argument centered around a lack of sample size to make a judgment on climate change. He testified in front of Congress just as convincingly in 2005. Both the right and left both agreed that climate change was real and needed to be addressed quickly until the mid 2000's then the right did a 180 on the issue. The right still uses his argument against climate change to this day and his books are recommended to young people. Let's fix the damage he's done before celebrating him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/sep/29/comment.bookscomment https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/sep/29/comment.... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/michael-crichtons-state-of-confusion/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/michae...
- darkpuma 8y agoI don't recall enough about Timeline to recall that plot element, though I remember thinking it was a weak novel in general. But I consider Sphere and Andromeda Strain his best novels and neither are about parks.
- atombender 8y agoAmong 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.
- joezydeco 8y agoAnother 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.