The Novels of Michael Crichton

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.