Michael Crichton died at the beginning of the month, and I feel bad that I haven't gotten to it until now. Other than Tolkien and (recently) Orson Scott Card, he's the modern writer I've read the most of. Jurassic Park, Congo, Sphere, and Eaters of the Dead are books I re-read regularly. I can't claim I do this for sparkling prose or thought-provoking narratives – my motive to return to these wells is pure entertainment.
That I am a science fiction geek is no surprise; the fact that I've read most of Crichton's work follows logically. For all of his weaknesses as a writer (and he had his share), he excelled at blending intriguing narratives with technological questions and dilemmas – those most basic "What if?" questions at the heart of good science fiction. Sometimes the premise was simple and primal – what if scientists cloned dinosaurs – while other times he went for a more specific story – what if a society of anciently trained gorillas came head-to-head with a late-twentieth century tech-heavy search party. But at his best, it was always intriguing, and kept me turning the pages.
One of my first memories of a "new" book is from the early nineties, probably March of 1992. My mom had orchestrated me giving my dad the Jurassic Park paperback as a Christmas or birthday gift, though I had barely glanced at the cover before it got wrapped. So a few weeks later, when my dad handed me some book open to a particular page.
"Read this, from here to here," he said.
So I did.
A narrow path wound down the hill. The air was chilly and damp. As they moved lower, the mist around them thinned, and Grant could see the landscape better. It looked, he thought, rather like the Pacific Northwest, the Olympic Peninsula.
"That's right," Regis said. "Primary ecology is deciduous rain forest. Rather different from the vegetation on the mainland, which is more classical rain forest. But this is a microclimate that only occurs at elevation, on the slopes of the northern hills. The majority of the island is tropical."
Down below, they could see the white roofs of large buildings, nestled among the planting. Grant was surprised: the construction was elaborate. They moved lower, out of the mist, and now he could see the full extent of the island, stretching away to the south. As Regis had said, it was mostly covered in tropical forest.
To the south, rising above the palm trees, Grant saw a single trunk with no leaves at all, just a big curving stump. Then the stump moved, and twisted around to face the new arrivals. Grant realized that he was not seeing a tree at all.
He was looking at the graceful, curving neck of an enormous creature, rising fifty feet into the air.
He was looking at a dinosaur.
And then I was hooked.
I read Jurassic Park over three days, reading almost every moment I could, staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning to keep on going. Sure, the story was a survival adventure about dinosaurs, but it also tied into technology and science,; it was hard to imagine a single story tying into more of my interests.
When watching the news with my parents, we heard a report on Hurricane Iniki, which had just hit the Hawaiian island Kaua'i "disrupting the filming of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park." My dad and I looked at each other – our favorite director, making the movie of a book about cloning dinosaurs? It's hard to imagine a time before the internet, when we would have had no way of knowing about it, aside from a lucky newscast, but there we were, and we were excited.
We saw the movie as a family – I'll never forget my mom jumping and screaming when a velociraptor stuck its head through the piping in the maintenance shed. Just two weeks after it's June 3, 1993 opening, I took my dad back as a father's gift, just the two of us.1 Clearly, an impression was made.
And so my love affair with Crichton was born; soon, I was reading Disclosure, Rising Sun, Sphere, and Congo. Our copy of Jurassic Park starting falling apart, so I got another one. The Lost World is the first book I remember looking forward to; everything else I was excited about, literarily, was either long since published, or a new find. In this case, I got to anticipate, which was a fun all its own.2
I've read most of his books, some bad, most good. I've studied him in class, watched his movies, and enjoyed his TV shows. He may have been a right-wing nutjob (with his "global warming is a myth" book State of Fear which I have not finished), and he may not have written the greatest prose, but the man had a knack for storytelling, and more than the normal share of imagination. Plus, he was a big time Mac user.
And now I'm speaking of him in the past tense.
Thanks for everything, Mr. Crichton.
Embarassingly, I remember taking him to McDonald's (!) for dinner, and I think he paid for the movie, but hey, it's the thought that counts! [⇪]
That this book, as well as the two film sequels, were somewhat disappointing didn't matter; my dad and I saw both of the films together, and found plenty to like in the book (as well as the first sequel). [⇪]
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