Michael Crichton died on Tuesday. This made me sad because I was hoping for a Crichton resurgence. His latest books were not as good as his earlier ones, and I figured he’d leave off the plot-holed recent trends and return to uber-researched awesomeness a la Eaters of the Dead, etc.
I think Crichton’s later works suffered from a lack of evolutionary pressure. (Coincidentally, the lack of evolutionary pressure is part of what made Prey unfeasible. Evolutionary pressure is what makes creatures evolve. Fish do not grow feet, for instance, unless there is something like predators or water quality pressuring them to get out of the ocean. Similarly, nanomachines do not evolve scary ways to attack humans unless there is an evolutionary pressure, of which there was none in Prey.) For authors, evolutionary pressure is provided by editors and public, and when you have the number one movie, number one TV series and number one book all in the same year, you probably listen less to editors. Interestingly, Crichton’s book sales had been in steady decline for the last four or five books.
So I figured Crichton would soon return to form. He was awesome. Some say he wrote entertainment, not literature, but since I do not recognize the distinction, I won’t argue it here.
Critics didn’t like him, probably because he was more talented than they were. Crichton did an amazing job of blending in his huge amounts of research with his fiction, a task so difficult that 1) almost nobody else does it, and 2) critics call him “genre” so they feel better about the fact that they can’t do the same.
I sure as hell can’t do it, and I’m willing to admit that. I really get tired of the way critics try to carve books into categories so they can rate them. You’ll notice that my complaint about Prey is based firmly in Crichton’s turf and not in some high-order academic mumbo jumbo that Crichton is supposed to adhere to if he wants to be literature.
Whatever literature means.
OK, now go read The Great Train Robbery. It was historical fiction before anyone had come up with the name historical fiction.
Comments 4
State of fear and his anthropogenic climate change skepticism are black marks on him as a person in my book but that part of prey is what really broke the camel’s back for me. I kind of suspect he started thinking he was smarter than he was towards the end which contributed to his decline. Airframe is actually not a bad book although not many people have read it. We’ll always have stuff like the andromeda strain which was pretty cool.
Posted 09 Nov 2008 at 7:26 pm ¶I was going to mention Airframe. I quite liked it. And I didn’t read anything after Prey, so I can’t judge any of it. Now, what does anthropogenic mean?
Posted 10 Nov 2008 at 3:49 pm ¶Caused by humans. Nobody bothers debating that the earth is warming nowadays, they debate whether humans have anything to do with it. I think my muddled point is that I don’t like what he became later in life but his early stuff was cool. And don’t ever even bother to consider reading next. That book is so terrible.
Posted 10 Nov 2008 at 11:20 pm ¶Considering I own 4 of his books, which is more than any other single author in my collection, I will miss the possibility of his return to the good stuff, as you mentioned Mike. I think I read Jurassic Park 14 times one year. I think I WAS 14. At any rate, if you have the mosquito, I can make things happen. I know people.
Posted 15 Nov 2008 at 1:40 am ¶Post a Comment