The Novels of Michael Crichton

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.

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