The Novels of Michael Crichton

(poolside)

This year's thrift store indulgence: Timeline, which I'd never touched before, sensing that a time-traveling knights-in-shining-armor story wasn't really what I looked for in Crichton. (I had also basically grown out of him by that point, and had AP English and a part-time job at a bookstore raising my taste profile.) And my god, it may be the stupidest book I've ever read as an adult. Stupid science, stupid politics (typical Crichton sexism plus lots of typical academic-bashing and a general "our wussy 20th-century characters benefit from healthy contact with traumatizing old-fashioned violence" vibe), stupid characters, stupid plotting (constant doubling-back and getting re-captured, people just sort of fade in and out of scenes depending on whether he feels like writing them), REALLY stupid ending, and such hazy description of scenes and actions that he has to resort to illustrations, several of which blatantly do not match even the scraps of windows given in the text.

Nonetheless, I basically enjoyed it on the level of something I would have devoured unquestioningly at age 11 or 12... especially with all the digressions on medieval life, technology, and historiography, for which he actually provides a bibliography (!). I still think it's measurably worse than his biggest hit books, but, y'know, a passable beach read.

like serously the end of the line for the aggro corporate bad guy is that our heroes cold-bloodedly corner him outside a boardroom, drug him, and stick him in a time machine (i'm sorry, quantum teleportation machine) leading to the year of the black death so he'll catch it and die. he has a device to take him home but it's stuck in the heel of his sneaker and as the novel closes, he hasn't yet found a tool to help with this (though perhaps he will). our heroes have the gumption to do this because they've already slaughtered a bunch of medieval people in their efforts to survive, which has enabled them to overcome all the namby-pamby abstract pontificating they learned about in college. makes you think!

sadly, the novel is entirely missing any passages along the lines of ''sir lancelot had torn him open. his guts had fallen out.'' don't worry though - the woman who rejects the nerd at the beginning later realizes how hunky he is and has his babies after he kills some people and saves her a few times.

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