The Novels of Michael Crichton

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.

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

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