The Novels of Michael Crichton

i saw him give a pretty fascinating talk at the field museum in chicago just after jurassic park came out, and i left thinking "jesus christ, that dude is tall."

he's dead?

that's a relief

^^^ very much in character.

Shakey Classic

i read a few of his books when i was a kid and i honestly remember nothing about them.

i gotta rep for the andromeda strain even though i haven't read it since i was a tween.
i recently read one of his books as john lange -- grave descend. it managed to be both a page turner and completely vapid at the same time. fascinating. why did someone reprint this? the level of suspension of disbelief required is inzane.

The one where he included a critic of his previous book as a character who is a pedophile.

Or Congo, just for the insane movie it birthed.

i only remember jurassic park at all and all i remember are the differences between the novel and film (hammond is not an avuncular visonary but more of a harry lime type, malcolm dies, gennaro is a complex flawed character and not a generic slimy lawyer.)

this is the first time i've seen his books placed w/ a timeline and i really like the idea of him spending 7 years writing Sphere

funnily enough a week or two ago i started hunting used bookstores for a copy of 'sphere' or 'the andromeda strain' to read in the summer sun. i remember liking those as a kid. i reread jurassic park like three years ago and probably posted about it on ilx but mostly i enjoyed that it had lots of charts - 'data' i think - in place of exposition.

i was reading through synopsis of his books on wikipedia and of the ones i haven't read 'eaters of the dead' seemed p cool, was also intrigued about the similarities to gg kay's 'last light of the sun', wonder if there are more books in this budding minigenre

guys did you know global warming is a hoax

I remember thinking Eaters of the Dead was pretty cool. IIRC it's basically a short trial run for Congo, with Vikings and mysterious cave men instead of technology magnates and super-gorillas. Totally forgot it was made into a movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_13th_Warrior

The Terminal Man is full-on bad ass and I heartily recommend it to everyone

still kind of furious at the movie version of Congo

read a lot of crichton stuff when I was in middle school and even then the pulpiness was really obvious. to an extent he was a product of the times when it comes to gender/race relations, but his prose and pretensions are horrible

list is missing 'travels,' his autobiographical work from 1988 that somehow manages to be written in the same style as the rest of his work yet even more vapid

do you guys remember the deep mathematical/diagram page interludes in jurassic park

Terminal Man is great. I remember thinking Great Train Robbery was his real overlooked one once he became THE techno-thriller guy - it's a pretty darn good Victorian train-robbery yarn.

I thought about including "Travels" but didn't, since it's not a novel. I remember an elementary school teacher reading us excerpts of that for reasons which totally escape me.

there should be a grisham/clancy/crichton poll

Half the appeal of Jurassic Park (and Crichton in general I guess) are the pointless interludes into technical topics of dubious relationship to the story or the momentum of thriller-dom. Like, there's not really any reason to show, on paper, what the park computers' primitive GUI looks like. This kind of thing also shows up in The Great Train Robbery, with huge digressions into Victorian fears of being buried alive, and the phenomenon of "railway sway," and so on. I think it also explains why I took so much to Neal Stephenson later on.

xxp was it the part where he was at a spoon bending party because, mind-blowingly, spoon bending is totally real, man?

I feel like Crichton's work is really a battle between how good his pitch for the book was ("man with electrodes in his brain to cure something actually turns him into a killer!") was in a battle with his actual ability to tell a story using stock characters

I think Crichton made half of the stuff up, though, with no real scientific grounding. "dna in amber... yeah, that's the ticket, I can pull a book out of this"

Also whatever he got really jazzed about in Popular Science that year. I love how the whole plot of Jurassic Park ends up hinging on something he read one time about how all-male populations of frogs could change sex, or something.

eaters of the dead is kinda interesting

yes, popular science would have been about the level of research! man, I had a subscription to that when I was around that age, too, I think

I read Sphere and The Lost World. Sphere is entertaining enough. TLW is seriously terrible. Like, it has the author-insert spouting some creationist nonsense (the "how did evolution make an eye?" stuff) that isn't related to anything.

everyone go read The Terminal Man right now

I also read Disclosure when it came out when I was in middle school, which probably explains a lot of misconceptions about sex

Never realized that Eaters of the Dead and Congo were that old, especially Congo. Makes more sense in retrospect because it didn't seem to include any of the early '90s technology I knew about it when I read it.

FRACTALS and CHAOS THEORY seemed pretty mind-blowing when I read Jurassic Park before the movie came out. Malcolm tied right into the other weirdo fictional characters I was identifying with at the time (Sherlock Holmes, Spock, Data, Mulder - maybe, might be too early for that).

Eaters of the Dead probably the only one I'd want to go back and re-read, plus it had the second-best movie adaptation.

The Congo film would have been immensely improved by making it a late-Seventies period piece IMO.

The Congo film would have been immensely improved by dubbing over the dialogue with fart noises.

you can't improve on congo. it's a perfectly stupid piece of entertainment.

Jurassic Park fits in perfectly with early 90s chaos theory and fractal hype, which resulted in very many Mandelbrot screensavers and trapper keeper art.

Many, _many_ screensavers.

the incredibly stupid child robot voice that they gave Amy because they didn't want to do subtitles, I mean how did we as a society allow that to happen

haha yeah I used Jurassic Park to illustrate Deleuze in a lecture talking about whiz-bang 90s intellectual trends and their impact on architecture

it went over slightly better than my discussion of Lynch's Dune in the same lecture

i was heavy into crichton as a teen, at the time i'd rep for most of his stuff under his own name up to and including jurassic park - after that, it seemed like he was just writing books to be turned into movies. i think i'll vote for "the great train robbery" bc it's a heist, come on.

I've probably posted on ILX about this before but my lady acquaintance and I watched Congo about six months ago and ended up working out a much improved version of the film over drinks afterwards. The big change was killing off the stupid ape expert guy (the only guy in the movie apparently not in on the joke) and playing up the angle of all these postmodern, cynical, stateless persons awkwardly rubbing up against old heart-of-darkness tropes in a postcolonial warzone. Like the sign-language gorilla, who finds a tenuous 'family' in the murderous super-apes, our heroes find a provisional, mobile and self-conscious kind of 'home' in each other, as Ernie Hudson and Laura Linney (rescued from a stint as adopted 'ape queen' in the second act), the only two likable characters in the movie, get together at the end. Also there would not be an hour of screwing around before they get to the damned lost city. Or a volcano. Could have been great.

it went over slightly better than my discussion of Lynch's Dune in the same lecture

humanity has no future

Eddie Ventro: Wow, a talking gorilla! I can feel the money hairs on the back of my neck going "WOO-WOO-WOO".

I realized that the Sphere adaptation was too close to the source material when it managed to have a pretty ridiculous cast and the movie still had no charisma

It's been a while since I've picked up any of his books, but I think Crichton was a pretty heavy offender of telling the audience what a character was like instead of illustrating it via action and dialogue

he was horrible with characters.

I mean, Barry Levinson was definitely not helping, but having a film with Samuel L. Jackson, Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman, and Liev Schreiber have no charisma to it is disturbing

actually, wtf, Levinson should have done better

I saw "The Andromeda Strain" again last year and thought it held up well. It might be the earliest example of a kind of ensemble-driven techno-thriller that's now pretty much a genre in its own right.

Are any of his books more successful than their movie adaptations?

I remember liking Andromeda Strain the book a lot more than the movie but I was also a teenager and the movie seemed kind of slow and old-timey. I bet I'd like it a lot more now.

I've never seen Sphere but I'm pretty sure most fans rate the book wayyyy higher than the movie on that one.

It's funny, and a testament to how much I reread these things, how many of this dude's turns of phrase are still stuck in my head despite not being all that clever.

The dinosaur had torn him open. His guts had fallen out.

I probably have some of his "erotic" scene descriptions stuck in some corner of my mind and would pay real money to have them removed

Are any of his books more successful than their movie adaptations?

lol are you ignoring the discussion of how terrible the Congo adaption was or assuming that the book was bad, too? (btw the book was great)

i voted for Congo but i really loved Sphere too

I've only read three or four of his books, but they all felt kind of like screen treatments to me

Maybe I should take a look at Congo, I think we have a copy at home somewhere

I remember reading Rising Sun in high school, kind of LOL that the trickery used to obscure the true culprit's identity on the security video is something most people can do on their laptops now.

o shit I forgot spoiler tag

His stuff was great when I was a stupid teenager. Was it ever figured out why he decided to write a climate change denying book, and name his threatening eco-terrorist villain _Nick Drake?_

I wonder if its the same thought process resulting in him thinking it was a great idea to put all the new age stuff in _Travels_

I remember reading Airframe and not getting much out of it other than "lol Japanese Pilots let their kids fly planes sometimes"

Always got the feeling that Crichton felt he really got heavy industry and science in a way engineers and scientists didn't

jurassic park is such a cool movie

the book is like my mate talking about graph theory or some shit iirc

disclosure is amazing tho yeah. Also what phil D said, I've always wanted to read that one

everyone go read The Terminal Man right now

― DJP

My sister and I both independently recommended this one to a cousin just a coupla months ago

i voted andromeda strian, seemed the most compelling read to me as a kid. second would probably be sphere

i read every crichton book i could get as a kid at the library. dont think i ever read rising sun or disclosure though. i even ended up reading airframe.

jonh lange more like john lame

I just started watching the TV version of The Andromeda Strain last night. Dim memories of the original, haven't read the novel.

haven't read a word of him in nearly plural decades, but JP was the first. i actually heard about the movie coming out, and deliberately read the book first. andromeda strain seems like the "best" of the few that I read, though.

rising sun, the film, created one of the most uncomfortable movie watching experiences of my adolescent life

JP freaked me when I read it age 13 out due to how graphic some of it was. Like the part about reading that Nedry, blinded, held something warm in his hands and then found out they were his intestines.

at least in the movie when people got eaten, there was rarely gore (other than that severed arm)

jp the book has some great gore moments

yes JP was definitely the first really gory book i ever read (i was about 11). the bit that horrified me most was the scene where one character (forget who) falls down in a swamp and wakes up to find himself covered in leeches. there's also a pretty nasty scene where a couple of adult raptors (i think) rip apart a baby one.

yeah that was awesome

terminal man, of what i've read.

best part about the gratuitous illustrated operating-system interludes in JP is that they recur in TLW, which has a computer with a NEW EXPERIMENTAL OS where the buttons are the faces of a constantly morphing cube. i do genuinely appreciate his (repeated!) attempts to wring suspense out of characters looking for menu options.

as a kid the shifting-cube operating system was easily my favorite part of the lost world and i was disappointed when (unlike crichton's previous obtuse-gui suspense scene) it was excised from the film.

now i'm thinking maybe it's unclear in the lost world whether the cube is in fact changing or whether the character is having drug/dino-related hallucinatory issues. man i can't be remembering that right because if there were a scene in the lost world where someone has to perform a function in an operating system but can't because he's hallucinating that the operating system is a morphing cube it'd have to be the most important novel of the 1990s.

i read every crichton book i could get as a kid at the library. dont think i ever read rising sun or disclosure though. i even ended up reading airframe.

― 乒乓, Monday, June 24, 2013 6:12 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

i read airframe too! and disclosure. last one i read was the time traveling into medieval era one. well-meaning relatives kept buying me his books long after i had grown out of them. i kept reading them. i agree w/ whoever said above disclosure had deleterious effect on my beliefs about sexuality.

i read the time traveling one, all i remember was the revelation that knights were muscleheads who were more than capable of wearing their 100 pound armor suits

loving that trio of difficult listening hour posts there

eaters of the dead is the only one i've ever read, so that one. i think i remember ibn fadlan's actual writing more than i do crichton's interpretation but i'm not sure. i remember thinking ibn fadlan seemed like a chill dude.

it was me

I knew someone in middle school who said her mom wouldn't let her read Disclosure or w/e. Really, it was probably a good call on her mom's part.

Is there ever a Crichton book where two people have a romantic (or even sexual) relationship that takes place during the work and is portrayed as reasonably normal or functional? Pretty much all he wrote was people with dysfunctional past relationships or sexual relationships with a weird power dynamic.

I have to also say that I never noticed that Rising Sun came out in 1992 with a main character named John Connor. Which was... a year after Terminator 2.

Crichton had at least three different characters in his books with the name Richard Stone. And 3 or 4 characters in Jurassic Park named John. I think he really just didn't give a fuck.

Jurassic Park, but I thought about Sphere and Rising Sun for a second.

Disclosure was food too, Airframe was pointless

I love how the way that they discover that the dinosaurs are mating in Jurassic Park is by increasing the number of dinosaurs they search for on the inventory screen.

hahaha yeah that's great! See, that's the kind of dopily techy plot detail I can get behind. The program was designed for one set of circumstances and totally leaves them blind to this other problem. Drama!

this is Sphere vs Rising Sun vs A Case of Need, and now I am tempted to try to reread all three of these. Liked JP too, but I do not remember any of the specific gore scenes from that (except maybe Nedry's disembowelment).

The earth shook beneath him and Nedry knew the dinosaur was moving, he could hear its soft hooting cry, and despite the pain he forced his eyes open and still he saw nothing but flashing spots against black. Slowly the realization came to him.

He was blind.

The hooting was louder as Nedry scrambled to his feet and staggered back against the side panel of the car, as a wave of nausea and dizziness swept over him. The dinosaur was close now, he could feel it coming close, he was dimly aware of its snorting breath.

But he couldn't see.

He couldn't see anything, and his terror was extreme.

He stretched out his hands, waving them wildly in the air to ward off the attack he knew was coming.

And then there was a new, searing pain, like a fiery knife in his belly, and Nedry stumbled, reaching blindly down to touch the ragged edge of his shirt, and then a thick, slippery mass that was surprisingly warm, and with horror he suddenly knew he was holding his own intestines in his hands. The dinosaur had torn him open. His guts had fallen out.

his terror was extreme

(courtesy http://www.e-reading-lib.org/book.php?book=73660)

Raptor-on-raptor violence scene is here: http://www.e-reading-lib.org/chapter.php/73660/61/Crichton_-_Jurassic_Park.html

I remember the young male boy exclaiming "SHIT!" a lot in the book too

"Look," Wu said, "the fact remains, all the animals are female. They can't breed."

Grant had been thinking about that. He had recently learned of an intriguing West German study that he suspected held the answer.

Seriously love this guy's See Spot Run approach to science fiction. It really plays like fanfic.

He had recently learned of an intriguing West German study that he suspected held the answer. Which is puzzling because the study was about the behavioral effects of hostel overcrowding.

I'm going to start dealing with all ILX clusterfucks by claiming I've recently learned of an intriguing West German study that I suspect holds the answer.

it's too bad Crichton didn't write more books in the Information Age, woulda been fun to fuck with him by placing nonsense in scentific articles on Wikipedia, then watch them make their way into his books

At least once a month the big medical reveal of Andromeda Strain (why did the baby and the old man survive?) comes to mind when I'm looking at an arterial blood gas or a minimum / maximum speed sign on a freeway.

read JP first; i remember sphere being weirdly creepy, eaters being like "ok this is no longer fun," rising sun "ok i'll give it one more chance," and disclosure "i wonder if sharon stone is naked"

At least once a month the big medical reveal of Andromeda Strain (why did the baby and the old man survive?) comes to mind when I'm looking at an arterial blood gas or a minimum / maximum speed sign on a freeway.

― Plasmon, Tuesday, June 25, 2013 12:54 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha totally, i can still remember how this whole thing plays out too - the old Sterno-drinking drifter!

I've read far too many of these. Sphere is the best by a mile.

When you open The Lost Worldt you enter a strange terrain of one-page chapters, one-sentence paragraphs and one-word sentences. You will gaze through the thick canopy of authorial padding. It's a jungle out there, and jungles are 'hot' sometimes 'very hot'. 'Malcolm wiped his forehead. "It's hot up here." 'Levine agrees: 'Yes, it's hot."' Thirty pages later it's still hot. '"Jeez, it's hot up here," Eddie said.' And Levine agrees again: '"Yes," Levine said, shrugging.' Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of cliches, roaming free. You will listen in 'stunned silence' to an 'unearthly cry' or a 'deafening roar'. Raptors are 'rapacious'. Reptiles are 'reptilian'. Pain is 'searing'.
The job of characterization has been delegated to two or three thrashed and downtrodden adverbs. 'Dodgson shook his head irritably'; '"Handle what?" Dodgson said irritably.' So Dodgson is irritable. But '"I tell you it's fine," Levine said irritably.' 'Levine got up irritably.' So Levine is irritable too. 'Malcolm stared forward gloomily.' '"We shouldn't have the kids here," said Malcolm gloomily.' Malcolm seems to own 'gloomily'; but then you irritably notice that Rossiter is behaving 'gloomily' too, and gloomily discover that Malcolm is behaving 'irritably'. Forget about 'tensely' and 'grimly' for now. And don't get me started on 'thoughtfully'.

-Martin Amis, "Park II"

I've not read any of these, but Sphere is my favorite of the film adaptations I've seen.

qAnd then there was a new, searing pain, like a fiery knife in his belly, and Nedry stumbled, reaching blindly down to touch the ragged edge of his shirt, and then a thick, slippery mass that was surprisingly warm, and with horror he suddenly knew he was holding his own intestines in his hands. The dinosaur had torn him open. His guts had fallen out.

lol @ crichton very obviously applying the writing 101 technique of looooong sentence, shorter sentence, very short sentence

I never finished reading The Lost World (as it was hella boring), but I'm thankful for it as it inspired one of the most delightfully stupid cinematic scenes ever in the form of a young female gymnast doing a somersalt and kicking over a dinosaur that weighs several tons.

i read jurassic park in.... 2nd grade? when my parents told me that if i read the book i could see the movie, something they didnt think id be able to accomplish. but i did. all i really took from it was the everyday use of the phrase "jesus christ" which i dont think id ever said as an exclamation before i read the book.

sphere, though. and great train robbery--i remember really loving those, tearing through them. eaters of the dead to some extent, too, in retrospect more interesting as a historical/counter-historical exercise than i realized at the time (or maybe not, i havent gone back to it, heh)

iirc from the eaters of the dead foreword the guy harbored a lot of resentment about how his stuff was reviewed and perceived, by critics and scientists alike, which i think shed some light on why he became a climate change denialist

ha i read it in 3rd grade because my mom wouldn't let me see the movie and i figured this was the next best thing. totally remember nedry's guts falling out during Silent Reading Time or naptime or whatever. looking around the room.

i think i read the junior novelization of the movie first :>

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kyyc2lLHDJ1qbpwb1o1_400.jpg

which reminds me, the way i got into star wars was also through a junior novelization, or it might have been the alan dean foster novelization. then i think i convinced them to buy me the x-wing computer game, on floppy disk, somewhere. when i finally convinced my parents to buy the just-released trilogy on VHS at shoprite, it was a really Big Deal for me.

"hey look it's got eight pages of color photos from the movie" is what i say almost every time i open a book that has, like, plates of nicholas ii in his garden in the middle of it or something, even if i'm alone xp

in the x-wing computer game, i never got past the first mission where you had to blow up 6 freighters or something like that. fortunately you could turn on invincibility and infinite ammo straight from the menu screen

i had tie fighter but i remember being sort of scandalized by the very idea

Crichton was always both of his time and yet always past the shelf date due to no actual pretensions at futurism. It's not really an error, but the quote above about a "West German scientist" made me recheck when Jurassic Park came out -- nearly an exact year after the Berlin wall fell. Which makes it a not-inaccurate reference, but still seems dated.

I took a sci-fi literature class in college and after reading through a reasonable survey of books leaning on the last few decades (John Brunner, Le Guin, Dan Simmons' Hyperion, The Canticle of Leibowitz) we met to discuss the first half of Jurassic Park. The professor admitted that the writing was... not exactly good and we ended up just watching the movie in the next class meeting.

which reminds me, the way i got into star wars was also through a junior novelization, or it might have been the alan dean foster novelization. then i think i convinced them to buy me the x-wing computer game, on floppy disk, somewhere. when i finally convinced my parents to buy the just-released trilogy on VHS at shoprite, it was a really Big Deal for me.

― 乒乓, Tuesday, June 25, 2013 9:40 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

i realize that i used the pronoun before the antecedent here. this is the danger of editing your posts on ilx. better go just go with what you had typed out in the first place

I think A Case of Need is an amateur-detective novel about a doctor who is trying to get his friend, who performs abortions, off of a murder rap. But it's been like 15 years, so I am really fuzzy on details...

i read jurassic park in.... 2nd grade? when my parents told me that if i read the book i could see the movie, something they didnt think id be able to accomplish.

ha i read it in 3rd grade because my mom wouldn't let me see the movie and i figured this was the next best thing

http://musicnerdery.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/itchy-and-scratchy-the-movie-the-novel.jpeg

i too read the book because i wasn't allowed to go see the movie, although i did end up seeing it eventually in the theater for some other kid's birthday, happily bypassing my dad's movie rules

-Martin Amis, "Park II"

― slam dunk, Tuesday, June 25, 2013 2:38 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

awww

this book was sent to me at work because the writer's day job is working at Valve...but anyway if you wish there were new Crichton books, this is pretty dead on w/the mix of violence, fast pace intrigue, and cod science:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805096175

Is is shittily written tho

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

is michael crichton the least original author ever

no but he writes the most beautiful prose

The dinosaur had torn him open. His guts had fallen out.

this is a p good thread, sorry i missed it

i realised the other day that i'd stuck 'rising sun' and 'disclosure' together in my head, what i realise today is 'airframe' was in there too

like someone was falsely accused of rape by his boss but it was nabd because it was in japan and the tits had just fallen off a boeing 767

After that late night I spent rereading most of Jurassic Park as a .txt file I don't think I can vote for it in good conscience. Would go with Sphere which would probably similarly disappoint me but was a bigger "woah, coooooool" thing when I was a kid... but now I'm remembering that it boils down to a stereotype-breaking black nerd who is secretly a stereotype-affirming angry black man, and a CRAZY WOMAN ON VALIUM, and the bland white guy who has to save the day. Andromeda Strain gets around these problems by having the entire cast consist of white men, though it's otherwise probably his most defensible techno-thriller in terms of ideas and plotting and so on.

What the hell - Great Train Robbery. I'd read that again at a beach or something.

andromeda strain is the first story i think of when i think of deus ex machina

"Changed," Stone said. "Mutated."

"Yes. Mutated to a noninfectious form. And perhaps it is still mutating. Now it is no longer directly harmful to man, but it eats rubber gaskets."

I voted for Jurassic Park because I read it shortly after the film came out and though the "his guts had fallen out bit" was super cool. I went around school telling everyone how the book was super violent and so much more mature than the movie

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I went around school telling everyone how the book was super violent and so much more mature than the movie

haha yep me too. in retrospect though i'm very glad spielberg chose to emphasize the "holy shit dinosaurs are fucking awesome" angle over crichton's "dinosaurs are fucking horrifying and here is why you would never want one near you" attitude.

along those lines i'm especially glad he changed hammond from hubristic cartoon to directorial stand-in

i think in the book it's hammond who hates kids?

which makes no sense because he's building an amusement park. i guess it's funny. i'm not sure it's supposed to be.

oh nah i'm remembering wrong sorry. still, the book understands him much more poorly than the movie does.

"It was a flea circus, Petticoat Lane. Really quite wonderful!"

my takeaway here is that more people need to read The Terminal Man

xp *spoons ice cream into mouth* "we spared no expense"

Is it Andromeda Strain that has one of the main characters have a seizure triggered by looking at a blinking light? Loses some time, wakes up feeling his/her jumpsuit (or whatever special outfit was needed to go down through the levels of sterilization needed to interact with the virus) is suddenly warm, and wet.

And AS has the study about how unmarried men do better making difficult decisions than married men.

And it's Terminal Man that has the (first of several similar references across the Crichtonian oeuvre IIRC) description of how male and female pubic hairs are different (female curlier?) when a hair found on a bar of soap proves to be a Crucial Clue.

Plus there's something about cortical electrodes triggering seizures.

Have to make a point of rereading.

i thought i voted for terminal man actually but maybe i didn't vote at all.

Other weird digressions and medical twists in The Andromeda Strain: the imaginary super-antibiotic that kills you if you go off it because all the 'everyday' bacteria are no longer in equilibrium, the suction of air out of the complex to somehow improve the quality of the nuclear explosion, the relationship between coagulation and hemorrhage, this kooky thing called infra-red photography, why biologists would work on pigs and rats versus rhesus monkeys, and much squinting at charts and graphs diagramming recently-deceased animals.

because all the 'everyday' bacteria are no longer in equilibrium

feel like this is p prescient with all the research going into gut flora nowadays

Stone was right: the forty volunteers each had died of obscure and horrible diseases no one had ever seen before. One man experienced swelling of his body, from head to foot, a hot, bloated swelling until he suffocated from pulmonary edema. Another man fell prey to an organism that ate away his stomach in a matter of hours. A third was hit by a virus that dissolved his brain to a jelly.

And so it went.

i just remember the guy who, what does he do, eat a tube of airplane glue? the blockage at the back of his throat.

Stone was right: the forty volunteers each had died of obscure and horrible diseases no one had ever seen before.

great sentence

oh yeah

superglue would definitely do ya -- not sure if regular ol' toulene would be enough to block the windpipe

"Changed," Stone said. "Mutated."
"Yes. Mutated to a noninfectious form. And perhaps it is still mutating. Now it is no longer directly harmful to man, but it eats rubber gaskets."

― Doctor Casino, Monday, July 8, 2013 9:42 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

this is perhaps only comparable to the end of the war of the worlds

He walked to the other end of the house. Stone was in a small bedroom, bent over the body of a young teenage boy on the bed. It was obviously his room: psychedelic posters on the walls, model airplanes on a shelf to one side.

The boy lay on his back in bed, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. His mouth was open. In one hand, an empty tube of model-airplane cement was tightly clenched; all over the bed were empty bottles of airplane dope, paint thinner, turps.

Stone stepped back. "Have a look."

Burton looked in the mouth, reached a finger in, touched the now-hardened mass. "Good God," he said.

Stone was frowning. "This took time," he said. "Regardless of what made him do it, it took time. We've obviously been oversimplifying events here. Everyone did not die instantaneously. Some people died in their homes; some got out into the street. And this kid here..."

He shook his head. "Let's check the other houses."

On the way out, Burton returned to the doctor's office, stepping around the body of the physician. It gave him a strange feeling to see the wrist and leg sliced open, the chest exposed-- but no bleeding. There was something wild and inhuman about that. As if bleeding were a sign of humanity. Well, he thought, perhaps it is. Perhaps the fact that we bleed to death makes us human.

i like that he circuits explicitly writing "his mouth was full of airplane glue" there. makes it seem creepier/more awful and it's elegant a lil.

and i remembered the image forever!

a craftsman's accomplishment on the level of "his guts had fallen out"

The boy lay on his back in bed, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. His mouth was open. In one hand, an empty tube of model-airplane cement was tightly clenched; all over the bed were empty bottles of airplane dope, paint thinner, turps.

The dinosaur had torn him open. His guts had fallen out.

lolllllll

Perhaps the fact that our guts fall out makes us human.

(that was snowden's secret. ripeness was all.)

lmao

I love his attempts at "makes u think."

though right now i'm mostly just sad that i can't find Sphere or Congo online for more crichton death-scene mashups

I've got em as either PDFs or epubs; what's your flavor?

so tempted
http://www.ebay.com/itm/BIG-Lot-16-Michael-Crichton-Books-Novels-Five-Patients-The-Great-Train-Robbery-/190865531256?pt=US_Fiction_Books&hash=item2c7078e178

Some of those will have full color cigarette ads in the center y/n

i HOPE SO..

maybe this is the lot for me
http://www.ebay.com/itm/MICHAEL-CRICHTON-LOT-OF-15-NYT-Bestselling-Author-Fiction-Chillers-Suspense-/190868406217?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c70a4bfc9

I've got em as either PDFs or epubs; what's your flavor?

― Thelema & Louise (Jon Lewis), Wednesday, July 10, 2013 8:49 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh god, don't tempt me!

ILX summer of crichton!!!!

totally forgot that he wrote twister. westworld isn't a good movie but the gradual descent into chaos is v satisfying and besides of course the movie of jurassic park (essentially a westworld sequel) it's the closest i've felt as an adult to the thrills and chills of reading him as a kid.

though right now i'm mostly just sad that i can't find Sphere or Congo online for more crichton death-scene mashups

i found congo at the salvation army, i havent read it though, i forgot i had bought it actually

#braggin

I was at a thrift store today, with an extensive book section, and they did not have one Crichton. I think that could get them their license revoked.

TLW design, with the black t-rex skeleton against a white background, is indelibly etched into my mind

Feel like we should include his non-novel screenplays here. Never forget:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4dTDm47Lms

Hahah classic Crichton - millimeters, a Doctor with a bland WASPY name, unconvincing futuristic computer interfaces...

Pretty interested in seeing his Great Train Robbery film though.

GTR has a fucking stupendously awesome Goldsmith score if nothing else.

Flipped through the Andromeda Strain flick (the 1971 one). It's as plodding and dull as I remember but that does work to convey a certain dreadful tension, the isolated underground science lab with neither day or night and just an endless series of boring lab tests up ahead. The effects shots are charming, too, and I do like the treatment of the most vivid idea from the book, the ghost town full of corpses in weird circumstances with no blood anywhere.

I do love how they make exactly one major character female, and then have her be the one who nearly wrecks everything by covering up her epilepsy. Other than that it's almost painfully faithful to the novel. Nice period piece though.

My usual coffee shop has recently come into a worn hardback of Sphere. The other day i had a blast flipping through to the good parts and stuck around way longer than planned. Came in today intending to pick up where i left off but some good looking skinny guy in a sporty jersey has usurped the book and I am irrationally disappointed.

HELLO. HOW ARE YOU. I AM FINE. WHAT IS YOUR NAME. MY NAME IS JERRY.

gawwwwwd what sexist garbage. I remembered the CRAZY WOMAN storyline generally but did not remember that the climax was literally:

He felt a shuddering chill. Beth, with her lack of self-esteem, her deep core of self-hate, had gone inside the sphere, and now she was acting with the power of the sphere, but without stability to her thoughts. Beth saw herself as a victim who struggled against her fate, always unsuccessfully. Beth was victimized by men, victimized by the establishment, victimized by research, victimized by reality. In every case she failed to see how she had done it to herself. And she’s put explosives all around the habitat, he thought.

“I won’t let you do it, Norman. I’m going to stop you before you kill us all.”

The woman had torn him open. His guts had fallen out.

lolled

He couldn't see anything, and his terror was extreme.

Gennaro turned in a full circle, feeling with his outstretched hands. And then he felt a sharp pain in his right hand.
Teeth.
It was biting him.
The raptor jerked his head, and Donald Gennaro was yanked off his feet, and he fell.

"Those are the ones," Wu said. "Those are the two fuel tanks for the generator. One of them has been run dry, and so we have to switch over to the other. If you look at the bottom of the tanks, you'll see a white pipe coming out."
"Four-inch PVC?"
"Yes. PVC. Follow that pipe as it goes back."
"Okay. I'm following it. . . Ow!"
"What happened?"
"Nothing. I hit my head." There was a pause.
"Are you all right?"
"Yeah, fine. Just . . . hurt my head. Stupid."
"Keep following the pipe."

feel like this guy had me convinced for a few years there that i totally had this writing thing down. LOTTA back and forth dialogue sections like that. even bled over into drawing comics - just pages of talking heads with no backgrounds or action. keep following the pipe.

at least he didn't attribute every line

i definitely once used to believe in "there was a pause"

lol

I feel bad for being so long-winded and critical last year. DJP otm, read The Terminal Man

the local Hecklevision screening had "Congo" a few weeks ago, and ohhh boy:

-Ernie Hudson is in this, and he's awesome! Very much a dashing 30s swashbuckling adventurer. He should have been in a Joe Johnston dieselpunk epic, not this mess.

-Delroy Lindo is in this for a full scene, and uncredited!

-So much of the middle part of the movie felt like "Oh, so this is where they got the idea for most of Far Cry 2."

Love the synthy jerry goldsmith score to that

I love Congo

"Wow, a talking gorilla! I can feel the money hairs on the back of my neck going WOO-WOO-WOO."

"Please, have some coffee and cake." … "HAVE SOME!"

"Stop eating my sesame cake" possibly the closest the movie has to an iconic line of dialogue.

What, "WHO is Kafka??? TELL ME!!!" doesn't qualify?

list is missing 'travels,' his autobiographical work from 1988 that somehow manages to be written in the same style as the rest of his work yet even more vapid

I read Travels when I was in high school, and the main takeaway for me was "wow, this guy is messed up" even though he was obviously exaggerating his own wackiness for effect. these are the bits I remember:

-he attended a parapsychologist dinner party, where he displayed a superhuman level of credulity as his hosts taught him how to bend spoons ("I could feel the metal melting between my fingers, it was amazing!")

-he had a mystical experience while wandering in the desert at a New Age retreat in the southwestern US (possibly Sedona?)

-a sexy blonde nymphomaniac patient tried to seduce him when he was a naive med school student, but he refused her advances. he spent most of the chapter gloating about how noble he was.

-he went to China on a business trip, and his colleagues took him on a surprise visit to a child whorehouse. his friends took one look at the girls and were like, 'too old, these girls are practically grandmas compared to the ones we had last time,' whereas Michael took one look at them and was like, 'fuck you guys, I'm outta here.'

I'm pretty sure there was some more mystical shit, but the details are hazy. I doubt anyone who read Travels was surprised when he emerged as a global warming denier.

http://www.michaelcrichton.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/travels-archive-fullpagead.jpg

what a traveler he is!

Crichton's official website is kind of amazing, reminds me a bit of Lee + Herring's 'Men of Achievement 1974'

http://www.michaelcrichton.com/visionary/

oh wowwwwwwww the travels ad is beautiful.

As soon as I am at a computer I'm saving that jpg

his head looks like it's carved out of a limestone monolith

Off Tahiti
he dives
through a cloud of sharks

Off Tahiti he dives-uh
Through a CLOUD-uh
Of sharks

TRAVELS

^^^ a preview of soul coughing's forthcoming michael crichton concept album

(poolside)

This year's thrift store indulgence: Timeline, which I'd never touched before, sensing that a time-traveling knights-in-shining-armor story wasn't really what I looked for in Crichton. (I had also basically grown out of him by that point, and had AP English and a part-time job at a bookstore raising my taste profile.) And my god, it may be the stupidest book I've ever read as an adult. Stupid science, stupid politics (typical Crichton sexism plus lots of typical academic-bashing and a general "our wussy 20th-century characters benefit from healthy contact with traumatizing old-fashioned violence" vibe), stupid characters, stupid plotting (constant doubling-back and getting re-captured, people just sort of fade in and out of scenes depending on whether he feels like writing them), REALLY stupid ending, and such hazy description of scenes and actions that he has to resort to illustrations, several of which blatantly do not match even the scraps of windows given in the text.

Nonetheless, I basically enjoyed it on the level of something I would have devoured unquestioningly at age 11 or 12... especially with all the digressions on medieval life, technology, and historiography, for which he actually provides a bibliography (!). I still think it's measurably worse than his biggest hit books, but, y'know, a passable beach read.

like serously the end of the line for the aggro corporate bad guy is that our heroes cold-bloodedly corner him outside a boardroom, drug him, and stick him in a time machine (i'm sorry, quantum teleportation machine) leading to the year of the black death so he'll catch it and die. he has a device to take him home but it's stuck in the heel of his sneaker and as the novel closes, he hasn't yet found a tool to help with this (though perhaps he will). our heroes have the gumption to do this because they've already slaughtered a bunch of medieval people in their efforts to survive, which has enabled them to overcome all the namby-pamby abstract pontificating they learned about in college. makes you think!

sadly, the novel is entirely missing any passages along the lines of ''sir lancelot had torn him open. his guts had fallen out.'' don't worry though - the woman who rejects the nerd at the beginning later realizes how hunky he is and has his babies after he kills some people and saves her a few times.

Timeline is Connie Willis's Doomsday Book for slow people.

http://66.media.tumblr.com/df3043fd61258afd002d6ad0821cb765/tumblr_n8cugfXtgQ1rgh197o1_250.gif

imo the thing about crichton is he kept rolling with the same viewpoint and moral compass until his death, when he started out writing in what, the 70s? the gender dynamics never change and he just keeps rolling out product with worse themes

I can't confirm it but I may have watched Timeline after a bunch of beers one time and found it incomprehensible

I seriously forgot there was ever a Timeline film.... somehow convinced myself that The 13th Warrior killed the "anything with this guy's name on it will be gold!" which apparently someone still thought despite Congo and Sphere. In this case, the book is so sketchily worked out that I really think at that point he was writing with the anticipation of selling the concept and his name to someone who would be free to change almost everything in the effort to make a compelling story out of it all. I love how Crichton goes out of his way to emphasize at the beginning that they're not traveling through time, but to other universes (but earlier in time there, evidently), and yet ultimately we find, in the present day, the grave of the character they left behind in the past, whose epitaph is a message for them.

I'm pretty sure there's a selection algorithm to create all possible Crichton stories

Pick at least one from each of the following:

Mind control
Survival against the environment
Corporate bureaucracy

Expedition to alien probe
Expedition to foreign/wild land
Expedition to theme park
New workplace

Man paired with ex
Man paired with sage older man
Man paired with knowledgable youth

Genetic engineering
Computer engineering
Aerospace engineering
Medicine
Archeology

how many of his stories involved some dude unexpectedly being on the same team with his ex-girlfriend or w/e

I'm actually struggling to think of examples, but only because I can't really remember the characters in most of his books. But it makes perfect sense to me that he'd go with that - lets him fantasize about his own exes while writing the book, and also lets him write a relationship without having to show any of it on the page.

missed out on my annual lazy summer crichton re-read. :-( but i did see his 1981 sci-fi/mystery/social-commentary film Looker a couple months back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoT-r1slAZ4

basically a mess btw - crichton clearly more interested in the bleeding-edge tech and ogling TV's Laura Partridge than in telling a compelling story. lotta good ideas for themes, not much of a movie.

"hey look it's got eight pages of color photos from the movie" is what i say almost every time i open a book that has, like, plates of nicholas ii in his garden in the middle of it or something, even if i'm alone xp

― the white queen and her caustic judgments (difficult listening hour), Tuesday, June 25, 2013 9:41 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think about this post every time i open such a book

Seeing this thread pop up made me think of Hollywood having made the dumb book Sphere into an even dumber movie and having to see Dustin Hoffman starting at a computer screen and saying "Use your words, Jerry."

i love that scene where he cluelessly keeps calling him the wrong name even when this malevolent shapeless force is like STOP CALLING ME THAT and is blowing up the whole underwater habitat or whatever. jerry, jerry, why are you doing this, jerry?! jerry!

thanks to this thread all i can think of anytime anything crichton-related comes up is 'the dinosaur had torn him open. his guts had fallen out.'

it might be my favourite two sentences in the history of human endeavour tbh

i will be able to recite that when i'm 103 and otherwise incapable of bringing to mind any other detail from any cultural field. that and the nickelodeon spot for looney tunes to the tune of mozart or whatever it is. "LOON-ey tunes! you'll find them all on NICK! LOTs of STUFF! enOUGH to make you SICK!" etc.

I would love for someone to reprint Crichton's books with every other sentence beginning "And then" like a story told by a breathless six year old.

system was Nedry's request to leave the ordinary user interface and access the code itself. The computer asked for his name, and he replied: nedry. That name was authorized to access the code, so the computer allowed him into the system. Nedry asked to goto command level, the computer's highest level of control. The command level required extra security, and asked Nedry for his name, access number, and password.

nedry
040/#xy/67&
mr goodbytes

Those entries got Nedry into the command level. From there he wanted security. And since he was authorized, the computer allowed him to go there. Once at the security level, Nedry tried three variations:

keycheck off
safety off
sl off

"He's trying to turn off the safety systems," Wu said. "He doesn't want anybody to see what he's about to do."
"Exactly," Arnold said. "And apparently he doesn't know it's no longer possible to turn the systems off except by manually flipping switches on the main board.

After three failed commands, the computer automatically began to worry about Nedry. But since he had gotten in with proper authorization, the computer would assume that Nedry was lost, trying to do something he couldn't accomplish from where he was. So the computer asked him agian where he wanted to be, and Nedry said:
security. And he was allowed to remain there.

"Finally," Wu said, "here's the kicker." He pointed to the last of the commands Nedry had entered.
whte_rbt.obj

whte_rbt.obj

a file name conforming to MS-DOS naming conventions?

I thought at first you were quoting The Andromeda Strain, the part where they try to override the auto-destruct function.

no, that's actually exciting (if contrived)

"Automatic," Stone said quietly. "The system cuts in when the level is contaminated. We can't let it happen."
Hall was holding the key in his hand. "There's no way to get to a substation?"
"Not on this level. Each sector is sealed from every other."
"But there are substations, on the other levels?"
"Yes ..."
"How do I get up?"
"You can't. All the conventional routes are sealed."
"What about the central core?" The central core communicated with all levels.
Stone shrugged. "The safeguards ..."
Hall remembered talking to Burton earlier about the central-core safeguards.

At midnight in Africa he comes

eye to eye with an elephant

the Timeline movie is just as bad, maybe worse than the book. kind of surprisingly hacky and shapeless as a screenplay - you'd think a vet like Richard Donner would have insisted on a real story. mostly plays like a sci-fi channel original movie.

just learned, via the Blank Check episode on The 13th Warrior, that the late Michael C. has a new book coming out, finished up by fellow best-seller-list standby James Patterson. per Deadline:

Hachette Book Group’s Little, Brown and Company will release Eruption on Monday, June 3, with Hachette Book Group CEO Michael Pietsch calling it “one of the most spectacular meetings of minds in literary history.”

oh, and:

The subject: A once-in-a-century volcano eruption of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano threatens a secret cache of chemical weapons that can destroy not only the island but the world.

tbf that's also where i wd have stored the chemicals

Pretty interested in seeing his Great Train Robbery film though.

― Doctor Casino, Thursday, July 11, 2013 2:43 PM bookmarkflaglink

update: it's lousy! i see there are people out there who find it a cozy low-stakes 70s heist picture, but boy did it drag for me. it does gain a little steam (sorry) as they get closer to the train itself, but the first few rounds of sub-quests to attain the keys are just soporific. Connery's smugness might have worked with a slightly different tone, and Sutherland is fine (if not at his best), so i blame Crichton's direction.

I actually quite liked that one when I was a kid. Not seen it in decades. Sean Connery in a coffin with a dead cat stands out in my memory

For a second, in the list of results, I thought I read “Artie Lange” and got very confused

It's Sutherland in the coffin - Connery and/or his stuntman are up on the train's roof for that sequence.