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People slag on him for his more recent work and speeches, but at least for me, his books really made me interested in the science presented in them. Even stuff

People slag on him for his more recent work and speeches, but at least for me, his books really made me interested in the science presented in them. Even stuff like Timeline, which piqued my curiosity in everything it talked about.

pistoriusp 18y ago
I read "Next" earlier this year. Whilst it wasn't the best book I've ever read I certainly enjoyed the ideas he brought to it and it must have taken a considerable amount of research and understanding to write. Pretty sad.
cdr 18y ago
Timeline was the last book of Crichton's I read. It really turned me off. I had been a fan from a young age, but that was it. He ignored or twisted science, reason, and logic just for "cool" plot points, far more so than in any previous book.
- SapphireSun 18y ago
  Timeline wasn't about the mechanisms of time travel, it was about the past. He may have gotten some physics wrong, but it was the historical stuff that stuck with me. While I agree that some of his newer stuff wasn't so good, his older stuff really turned me on to certain fields like archeology, physics, nanotechnology etc. My mouth literally dropped open when I saw the headline. I wish his family well. :(
  - swilliams 18y ago
    I enjoyed the first half of Timeline, and like I said, it was my first exposure to the quantum physics presented there. The second half (after everyone was trapped in the past) seemed kind of cliche. I didn't find Prey too interesting though. I'd already known about nanobots and at that point was a professional software developer, so the programming aspect didn't have the same "magical" appeal as the others. Perhaps if you're already familiar with the area he covered, it doesn't hold as much of an appeal?
    - SapphireSun 18y ago
      Undoubtedly. The reason Timeline held (and does hold) such an attraction for me is that it helped me realize that the people in the past weren't stupid or maybe even misguided compared to our current selves. They were just working with different sets of information. A professional historian would not find something like this new at all, so your perspective does matter.
Prrometheus 18y ago
His most recent work and speeches support the idea that we should be skeptical of popular opinion, as wildly popular opinions in the past were both popular and wrong. This includes opinions held by the scientific community. That strikes me as a good point to make. He gets flack because he applies that skepticism to mainstream views on Global Warming, which many people insist should not be criticized because it is really really right and ought to be beyond skepticism. I guess time will tell who was right. I was always a fan of his work. I loved the idea-centric fiction style that he pioneered and that authors like Neal Stephenson still use today.
- Alex3917 18y ago
  He gets flack because he applies that skepticism to mainstream views on Global Warming, which many people insist should not be criticized because it is really really right and ought to be beyond skepticism. Most people get their views on global warming from the media, and our media is controlled by corporate interests who profit from being allowed to dump unlimited CO2 into the atmosphere. If people are discouraged from criticizing global warming, it's not because global warming is beyond reproach but because every individual criticism is picked up by the media and given equal credibility to the scientific consensus.
  - byrneseyeview 18y ago
    How does CBS benefit from people not thinking that Exxon should be more regulated?
    - Alex3917 18y ago
      Companies that benefit from the status quo won't buy ads on networks that advocate change. It's not that Americans have suddenly gotten genetically less intelligent in the last fifty years, but rather the reason our political system has fallen apart is (largely) because corporations came to control the media. Noam Chomsky has something to say about this in Manufacturing Consent. In fact until fifty years ago working class Americans used to read the paper as much or more as upper class Americans. What happened is the papers of the rich started being subsidized by advertisers, so the working class papers couldn't compete and all went out of business. (Ads are worth much more in papers that target the wealthy, so the papers of the wealthy had a bigger ad subsidy, and thus sold for less money at the newsstand than the papers of the working class.) That's why poor people are largely illiterate and uneducated today, whereas only fifty years ago it was the working class that drove the progressive movement.

pistoriusp 18y ago

I read "Next" earlier this year. Whilst it wasn't the best book I've ever read I certainly enjoyed the ideas he brought to it and it must have taken a considerable amount of research and understanding to write. Pretty sad.

cdr 18y ago

Timeline was the last book of Crichton's I read. It really turned me off. I had been a fan from a young age, but that was it. He ignored or twisted science, reason, and logic just for "cool" plot points, far more so than in any previous book.

SapphireSun 18y ago
Timeline wasn't about the mechanisms of time travel, it was about the past. He may have gotten some physics wrong, but it was the historical stuff that stuck with me. While I agree that some of his newer stuff wasn't so good, his older stuff really turned me on to certain fields like archeology, physics, nanotechnology etc. My mouth literally dropped open when I saw the headline. I wish his family well. :(
- swilliams 18y ago
  I enjoyed the first half of Timeline, and like I said, it was my first exposure to the quantum physics presented there. The second half (after everyone was trapped in the past) seemed kind of cliche. I didn't find Prey too interesting though. I'd already known about nanobots and at that point was a professional software developer, so the programming aspect didn't have the same "magical" appeal as the others. Perhaps if you're already familiar with the area he covered, it doesn't hold as much of an appeal?
  - SapphireSun 18y ago
    Undoubtedly. The reason Timeline held (and does hold) such an attraction for me is that it helped me realize that the people in the past weren't stupid or maybe even misguided compared to our current selves. They were just working with different sets of information. A professional historian would not find something like this new at all, so your perspective does matter.

Prrometheus 18y ago

His most recent work and speeches support the idea that we should be skeptical of popular opinion, as wildly popular opinions in the past were both popular and wrong. This includes opinions held by the scientific community. That strikes me as a good point to make. He gets flack because he applies that skepticism to mainstream views on Global Warming, which many people insist should not be criticized because it is really really right and ought to be beyond skepticism. I guess time will tell who was right. I was always a fan of his work. I loved the idea-centric fiction style that he pioneered and that authors like Neal Stephenson still use today.

Alex3917 18y ago
He gets flack because he applies that skepticism to mainstream views on Global Warming, which many people insist should not be criticized because it is really really right and ought to be beyond skepticism. Most people get their views on global warming from the media, and our media is controlled by corporate interests who profit from being allowed to dump unlimited CO2 into the atmosphere. If people are discouraged from criticizing global warming, it's not because global warming is beyond reproach but because every individual criticism is picked up by the media and given equal credibility to the scientific consensus.
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  How does CBS benefit from people not thinking that Exxon should be more regulated?
  - Alex3917 18y ago
    Companies that benefit from the status quo won't buy ads on networks that advocate change. It's not that Americans have suddenly gotten genetically less intelligent in the last fifty years, but rather the reason our political system has fallen apart is (largely) because corporations came to control the media. Noam Chomsky has something to say about this in Manufacturing Consent. In fact until fifty years ago working class Americans used to read the paper as much or more as upper class Americans. What happened is the papers of the rich started being subsidized by advertisers, so the working class papers couldn't compete and all went out of business. (Ads are worth much more in papers that target the wealthy, so the papers of the wealthy had a bigger ad subsidy, and thus sold for less money at the newsstand than the papers of the working class.) That's why poor people are largely illiterate and uneducated today, whereas only fifty years ago it was the working class that drove the progressive movement.