The Novels of Michael Crichton

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.

Is there ever a Crichton book where two people have a romantic (or even sexual) relationship that takes place during the work and is portrayed as reasonably normal or functional? Pretty much all he wrote was people with dysfunctional past relationships or sexual relationships with a weird power dynamic.

I have to also say that I never noticed that Rising Sun came out in 1992 with a main character named John Connor. Which was... a year after Terminator 2.

Crichton had at least three different characters in his books with the name Richard Stone. And 3 or 4 characters in Jurassic Park named John. I think he really just didn't give a fuck.

Jurassic Park, but I thought about Sphere and Rising Sun for a second.

Disclosure was food too, Airframe was pointless

I love how the way that they discover that the dinosaurs are mating in Jurassic Park is by increasing the number of dinosaurs they search for on the inventory screen.

hahaha yeah that's great! See, that's the kind of dopily techy plot detail I can get behind. The program was designed for one set of circumstances and totally leaves them blind to this other problem. Drama!

this is Sphere vs Rising Sun vs A Case of Need, and now I am tempted to try to reread all three of these. Liked JP too, but I do not remember any of the specific gore scenes from that (except maybe Nedry's disembowelment).

The earth shook beneath him and Nedry knew the dinosaur was moving, he could hear its soft hooting cry, and despite the pain he forced his eyes open and still he saw nothing but flashing spots against black. Slowly the realization came to him.

He was blind.

The hooting was louder as Nedry scrambled to his feet and staggered back against the side panel of the car, as a wave of nausea and dizziness swept over him. The dinosaur was close now, he could feel it coming close, he was dimly aware of its snorting breath.

But he couldn't see.

He couldn't see anything, and his terror was extreme.

He stretched out his hands, waving them wildly in the air to ward off the attack he knew was coming.

And 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.

his terror was extreme

(courtesy http://www.e-reading-lib.org/book.php?book=73660)

Raptor-on-raptor violence scene is here: http://www.e-reading-lib.org/chapter.php/73660/61/Crichton_-_Jurassic_Park.html

I remember the young male boy exclaiming "SHIT!" a lot in the book too

"Look," Wu said, "the fact remains, all the animals are female. They can't breed."

Grant had been thinking about that. He had recently learned of an intriguing West German study that he suspected held the answer.

Seriously love this guy's See Spot Run approach to science fiction. It really plays like fanfic.

He had recently learned of an intriguing West German study that he suspected held the answer. Which is puzzling because the study was about the behavioral effects of hostel overcrowding.

I'm going to start dealing with all ILX clusterfucks by claiming I've recently learned of an intriguing West German study that I suspect holds the answer.

it's too bad Crichton didn't write more books in the Information Age, woulda been fun to fuck with him by placing nonsense in scentific articles on Wikipedia, then watch them make their way into his books

At least once a month the big medical reveal of Andromeda Strain (why did the baby and the old man survive?) comes to mind when I'm looking at an arterial blood gas or a minimum / maximum speed sign on a freeway.

read JP first; i remember sphere being weirdly creepy, eaters being like "ok this is no longer fun," rising sun "ok i'll give it one more chance," and disclosure "i wonder if sharon stone is naked"

At least once a month the big medical reveal of Andromeda Strain (why did the baby and the old man survive?) comes to mind when I'm looking at an arterial blood gas or a minimum / maximum speed sign on a freeway.

― Plasmon, Tuesday, June 25, 2013 12:54 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha totally, i can still remember how this whole thing plays out too - the old Sterno-drinking drifter!

I've read far too many of these. Sphere is the best by a mile.

When you open The Lost Worldt you enter a strange terrain of one-page chapters, one-sentence paragraphs and one-word sentences. You will gaze through the thick canopy of authorial padding. It's a jungle out there, and jungles are 'hot' sometimes 'very hot'. 'Malcolm wiped his forehead. "It's hot up here." 'Levine agrees: 'Yes, it's hot."' Thirty pages later it's still hot. '"Jeez, it's hot up here," Eddie said.' And Levine agrees again: '"Yes," Levine said, shrugging.' Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of cliches, roaming free. You will listen in 'stunned silence' to an 'unearthly cry' or a 'deafening roar'. Raptors are 'rapacious'. Reptiles are 'reptilian'. Pain is 'searing'.
The job of characterization has been delegated to two or three thrashed and downtrodden adverbs. 'Dodgson shook his head irritably'; '"Handle what?" Dodgson said irritably.' So Dodgson is irritable. But '"I tell you it's fine," Levine said irritably.' 'Levine got up irritably.' So Levine is irritable too. 'Malcolm stared forward gloomily.' '"We shouldn't have the kids here," said Malcolm gloomily.' Malcolm seems to own 'gloomily'; but then you irritably notice that Rossiter is behaving 'gloomily' too, and gloomily discover that Malcolm is behaving 'irritably'. Forget about 'tensely' and 'grimly' for now. And don't get me started on 'thoughtfully'.

-Martin Amis, "Park II"

I've not read any of these, but Sphere is my favorite of the film adaptations I've seen.

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