Yeah, I remember that one. In that case I sort of understand why they did it – making a stable time loop where the past is unchangeable avoids the paradoxes of time travel, but yes, it doesn’t make it particularly fun.
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Oh, not do-able then.
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not his best work. good recommendation for anyone into olde armor and weapons though.
airframe is still my favorite of his. read it yet?
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“Eaters Of The Dead” is pretty good too, Islamic philosopher/scientist extraordinaire Ibn Fadlan narrates his participation in a Viking brouhaha around 900 A.D.
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He once wrote an article in 2004 for Parade “Candid Royal Christening Photograph Unveiled!” Magazine titled, Let’s Stop Scaring Ourselves (PDF), in which he advised an anxious nation, “Although concern about warming remains, the prospect of catastrophic change seems increasingly unlikely.” He went on to pan concerns about resource depletion and increases in global population.
That was when I decided he’d jumped the shark.
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I read one of his early medical thrillers, I think it was A Case of Need. In the edition I read (Michael Crighton writing as Jeffery Hudson), the publishers had redacted a section of the book that described how to synthesize LSD that had apparently appeared in some earlier printings. Instead, there was a footnote explaining the redaction. You don’t see that sort of thing much in grocery store novels.
I recall it was a pretty standard medical thriller. Tight writing and a good enough story to read all the way through in a few sittings.
Did that become the 13th Warrior?
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I know that a lot of people were shocked by that article and his later climate change denial novel “State of Fear”, but really, it was clear well before that that he was pretty reactionary politically. “Rising Sun” in 1992 with its stereotypical view of the Japanese as scheming workaholics working to undermine America and 1994’s “Disclosure” which implied that women use claims of sexual harassment to get back at men who spurn them kind of suggested that he wasn’t the most progressive of people.
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Love his writing if you wish, but he did have plenty of personal flaws, especially in the latter years. Writing a critic into one of his books as a pedophile is ‘off the rocker’ territory…
You forgot about his charming conservative streak in your hagiography - the ugly racism in “Rising Sun,” for example, or his delightful and inspiring novel “State of Fear,” about eco-terrorists who plan a series of murders to draw attention to the bogus theory of climate change (stuffed with a 20-page appendix of supporting “skeptical” arguments).
Crichton is like Frank Miller - good to admire in high school, but you should be embarrassed to praise him by age 25. “Sphere” is shameless ripoff of the far-better “Solaris.” “Jurassic Park” is a retelling of “Westworld.” “Andromeda Strain” is an unreadable mess.
“The Great Train Robbery” I grant you is pretty good - especially the Sean Connery film version.
Agree. Crichton is one of the (conveniently dead) non-expert experts trotted out by denialists who argue from authority.
If you have read The Andromeda Strain, you have read about 30% of Sphere. His highly stylised plots made it seem that he was over using the global replace function in his editor.
So, on second thought, I think I would most definitely kick him out of bed.
His denialism is certainly a motivation for me to avoid his work, but for me the worst part was his flagrant ignorance of mathematics and his portrayal of mathematicians in general.
At least he doesn’t snore.
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If we were having this conversation on goodreads, this whole thread may have been deleted by now.
Like a lot of people who are smart and/or talented at a lot of things, he ended up thinking that he was much smarter about many more things than he actually was.
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