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

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.