Michael Crichton
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Categories: 1942 births | Living people | American novelists | American science fiction writers | American thriller writers | Techno-thrillers | Global warming skeptics
John Michael Crichton (born October 23, 1942, pronounced /'kɹaɪtən/ [1] ) is an American author, film producer and television producer. His best-known works are techno thriller novels, films and television programs. Crichton describes his genre as techno-thriller which is usually the marriage of action and technical details. Many of his novels have medical or scientific underpinnings, reflecting his medical training and science background.
Crichton directed the film Coma, adapted from a Robin Cook novel, and there are other similarities in terms of genre and the fact that both Cook and Crichton are physicians, are of similar age and write about similar subjects.
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Biography
John Michael Crichton was born on October 23, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois to John Henderson Crichton and Zula Miller Crichton, and raised in Roslyn, Long Island, New York.[1]
He was educated at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, A.B. (summa cum laude) 1964 (Phi Beta Kappa). He went on to become the Henry Russell Shaw Travelling Fellow, 1964-65 and Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at Cambridge University, England, 1965. He graduated Harvard Medical School, gaining an M.D. 1969 and did post-doctoral fellowship study at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, La Jolla, California 1969-1970. In 1988, he was Visiting Writer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A strong credit to Crichton's entertainment work is that he is the only person to have had the number one movie, the number one book, and the number one television show in the United States at the same time.
Crichton has admitted to once, during his undergraduate study, plagiarizing a work by George Orwell and submitting it as his own. The paper was received by his professor with a mark of "B−". Crichton has stated that the plagiarism was not intended to defraud the school, but rather as an experiment. Crichton believed that the professor in question had been intentionally giving him abnormally low marks, and so as an experiment Crichton informed another professor of his idea and submitted Orwell's paper as his own. Crichton admitted to plagiarizing when he was on the stand in the course of a lawsuit trying to defend the authenticity of Twister, a movie which one individual claimed was based on his story entitled "Catch the Wind".
While in medical school, he wrote novels under the pen names John Lange and Jeffrey Hudson (under which pseudonym A Case of Need won the 1969 Edgar Award). He also co-authored Dealing with his younger brother Douglas Crichton under a shared pen name Michael Douglas. The back cover of that book contains a picture of Michael and Douglas at a very young age taken by their mother.
His two pen names were both created to reflect his above-average height. According to his own words, he was about 206 cm (6' 9") tall in 1997 (see [1]). Lange means tall one in German and Dutch, and Sir Jeffrey Hudson was a famous seventeenth century dwarf in Queen Henrietta Maria's court.
Crichton has two sisters, Kimberly and Catherine, and a brother, Douglas.
He is married to Sherri Alexander and has a daughter, Taylor, with ex-wife, Anne-Marie Martin.
Scientific concepts
In several of his books, Crichton popularized scientific and technological concepts which had not previously received widespread attention by non-scientists. Many of the ideas he used were novel to the average person, despite previous attention to them being given by some in the scientific community.
For example, before Jurassic Park, Robert T. Bakker's theory of warm-blooded and fast-moving dinosaurs had not received a great deal of attention in the popular media. Laypeople were accustomed to seeing stop motion clay dinosaurs crawling sluggishly over the volcanic prehistorical terrains.
Fred Barnes, in Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush, states that George W. Bush "avidly read Michael Crichton's 2004 novel State of Fear, whose villain falsifies scientific studies to justify draconian steps to curb global warming....Early in 2005, political adviser Karl Rove arranged for Crichton to meet with Bush at the White House. They talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement. The visit was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more."
Literary techniques
From time to time, Crichton has recycled a well-known story's structure for his own story. For example: The Andromeda Strain was influenced by H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. However, rather than reusing the early twentieth century plot devices, Crichton introduced the idea of an imaginary microscopic pathogen's evolution of virulence with his own story.
Most of his stories tend to be somewhat open-ended, including Jurassic Park, Sphere and Prey. His work is consistently cautionary in that his plots invariably portray scientific advancements going awry, often with worst-case scenarios. Seldom if ever does Crichton portray scientific achievement as going according to plan.
The use of author surrogate has been a feature of Crichton's writings since the beginning of his career. In A Case of Need, one of his pseudonym whodunit stories, Crichton used first-person narrative to portray the hero, a Bostonian pathologist, who is running against the clock to clear a good friend's name from medical malpractice in a girl's death from a hack job abortion. That book was written in 1968, long before Roe v. Wade of 1973, the landmark case that legalized abortion nationwide in the U.S. It took the hero about 160 pages to find the chief-suspect, an underground abortionist, who was created to be the author surrogate. Then, Crichton gave that character three pages to justify his illegal practice.
Some of Crichton's fiction uses a literary technique called false document. For example, Eaters of the Dead is a fabricated recreation of the Old English epic Beowulf in the form of a scholastic translation of Ahmad ibn Fadlan's tenth century manuscript. Other novels, such as The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, incorporate fictionalized scientific documents in the form of diagrams, computer output, DNA sequences, footnotes and bibliography.
In The Terminal Man, Crichton created a dialog between two computer programs, good-natured Saint George and evil-minded Martha, variations on ELIZA. In the end, the Charlie Brown-like Saint George shouts "GO TO HELL I WILL KILL YOU:::::::::::::: ..." at the provocative Martha, foreshadowing a killing spree conducted by the ill-fated hero, an innocent epileptic implanted with an experimental computerized device to control his seizures.
Sphere contains a dialog, in which a panicked scientist in an underwater lab tries to talk the omnipotent but innocent "extraterrestrial life" out of manifesting beautiful aquatic creatures that are harmful to human beings.
Fiction
| Year | Title | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1966 | Odds On | As John Lange |
| 1967 | Scratch One | As John Lange |
| 1968 | Easy Go | As John Lange |
| 1968 | A Case of Need | As Jeffrey Hudson |
| 1969 | The Andromeda Strain | |
| 1969 | Venom Business | As John Lange |
| 1969 | Zero Cool | As John Lange |
| 1970 | Grave Descend | As John Lange |
| 1970 | Drug of Choice | As John Lange |
| 1972 | The Terminal Man | |
| 1972 | Binary | As John Lange |
| 1975 | The Great Train Robbery | |
| 1976 | Eaters of the Dead | |
| 1980 | Congo | |
| 1987 | Sphere | |
| 1990 | Jurassic Park | |
| 1992 | Rising Sun | |
| 1993 | Disclosure | |
| 1995 | The Lost World | |
| 1996 | Airframe | |
| 1999 | Timeline | |
| 2002 | Prey | |
| 2004 | State of Fear |
Non-fiction
Apart from fiction, Crichton has written several other books based on scientific themes, amongst which is Travels, which also contains autobiographical episodes.
As a personal friend to the "Neo-Dadaist" artist Jasper Johns, Crichton compiled many of his works in a coffee table tome also named Jasper Johns. That book has been updated once.
Crichton is also the author of Electronic Life, a book that introduces BASIC programming to its readers. In his words, being able to program a computer is liberation:
- In my experience, you assert control over a computer -- show it who's the boss -- by making it do something unique. That means programming it. ... [I]f you devote a couple of hours to programming a new machine, you'll feel better about it ever afterward. (p. 44)
To prove his point, Crichton included many self-written demonstrative Applesoft (for Apple II) and BASICA (for IBM PC compatibles) programs in that book. Crichton once considered updating it, but the project seemed to be cancelled.
His non-fiction works are:
| Year | Title |
|---|---|
| 1970 | Five Patients |
| 1977 | Jasper Johns |
| 1983 | Electronic Life |
| 1988 | Travels |
Movies and television
Crichton has written and directed several motion pictures:
| Year | Title | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1972 | Pursuit | A TV movie |
| 1973 | Westworld | |
| 1978 | Coma | |
| 1979 | The Great Train Robbery | |
| 1981 | Looker | |
| 1984 | Runaway | |
| 1989 | Physical Evidence | |
| 1994 | "ER" | Creator/Writer/Executive Producer |
| 1996 | Twister |
Westworld was the first feature film that used 2D computer-generated imagery (CGI) and the first use of 3D CGI was in its sequel, Futureworld (1976), which featured a computer-generated hand and face created by then University of Utah graduate students Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke.
Many of his novels have been filmed by others:
He has written the screenplay for the movies Extreme Close Up (1973) and Twister (1996) (the latter co-written with Anne-Marie Martin, his wife at the time).
Crichton is also the creator and executive producer of the television drama ER. In December of 1994, he achieved the unique distinction of having the #1 movie (Disclosure), the #1 TV show (ER), and the #1 book (Disclosure, atop the paperback list). Crichton has written only two episodes of ER: Episode 1-2: "Day One" and Episode 1-3: "Going Home".
Computer Games
Amazon is a graphical text adventure game created by Michael Crichton and produced by John Wells under Trillium Corp. Amazon was released in the United States in 1984 and it runs on Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and the DOS systems. Amazon received moderate to poor reviews from its critics.
In 1999 Crichton founded Timeline Computer Entertainment with David Smith. Despite signing a multi-title publishing deal with Eidos Interactive only one game was ever published, Timeline. Released on 8 December 2000 for the PC, the game received poor reviews and sold poorly.
Awards
- Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award, 1969 (A Case of Need) – as Jeffrey Hudson
- Association of American Medical Writers Award, 1970 (Five Patients)
- Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award, 1980 (The Great Train Robbery)
- The American Association of Petroleum Geologists Journalism Award, 2006 (State of Fear)
- A dinosaur, Crichtonsaurus bohlini, was named after him in honor of Jurassic Park[2].
- Crichton was named to the list of the "Fifty Most Beautiful People" by People magazine, 1992
Speeches
"Aliens Cause Global Warming"
In 2003 he gave a controversial lecture at Caltech entitled "Aliens Cause Global Warming" [3] in which he expressed his views of the dangers of consensus science and junk science—especially with regard to what he regards as popular but disputed theories such as nuclear winter, the dangers of second-hand smoke and the global warming controversy. Crichton has been critical of widespread belief of ETs and UFOs, citing the fact that there is no conclusive proof of their existence. Crichton has commented that belief without a factual basis is more akin to faith.
Environmentalism as a religion
In a related speech given to the Commonwealth Club, called "Environmentalism as a religion" [4], Crichton describes what he sees as similarities between the structure of various religious views (particularly Judeo-Christian dogma) and the beliefs of many modern urban atheists who he asserts have romantic ideas about Nature and our past, who he thinks believe in the initial "paradise", the human "sins", and the "judgement day". He also articulates his belief that it is the tendency of modern environmentalists to cling stubbornly to elements of their faith in spite of scientific evidence to the contrary. Crichton cites what he contends are misconceptions about DDT, second-hand smoke and global warming as examples (however these examples are heavily disputed in the scientific community).
Widespread speculation in the media
In a speech entitled "Why Speculate?" [5], delivered in 2002 to the International Leadership Forum, Crichton took the media to task for engaging in what he saw as pointless speculation rather than the delivery of facts. As an example, he pointed to a front-page article of the March 6 New York Times that speculated about the possible effects of U.S. President George W. Bush's decision to impose tariffs on imported steel. Crichton also singled out Susan Faludi's book Backlash for criticism, saying that it "presented hundreds of pages of quasi-statistical assertions based on a premise that was never demonstrated and that was almost certainly false". He referred to what he calls the "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" to describe the public's tendency to discount one story in a newspaper they may know to be false because of their knowledge of the subject, but believe the same paper on subjects with which they are unfamiliar. Crichton used the Latin expression "falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus", which he translated as "untruthful in one part, untruthful in all", to describe what he thought a more appropriate reaction should be. The speech also made several references to Crichton's by-now-familiar skepticism of environmentalists' assertions about the possible future ramifications of human activity on Earth's environment.
The Role of Science in Environmental Policy-Making
In September 2005 Crichton testified at a Congressional hearing on climate change[6], having been called by Senator James Inhofe.
Criticism
Many of Crichton's publicly expressed views, particularly on subjects like the global warming controversy, have caused heated debate. As pointed out in Dr. Jeffrey M. Masters' review of State of Fear,
[F]lawed or misleading presentations of Global Warming science exist in the book, including those on Arctic sea ice thinning, correction of land-based temperature measurements for the urban heat island effect, and satellite vs. ground-based measurements of Earth's warming. I will spare the reader additional details. On the positive side, Crichton does emphasize the little-appreciated fact that while most of the world has been warming the past few decades, most of Antarctica has seen a cooling trend. The Antarctic ice sheet is actually expected in increase in mass over the next 100 years due to increased precipitation, according to the IPCC (although recent findings by NASA call this result into question). Additionally, Crichton correctly points out that there has been no rise in hurricane activity in the Atlantic over the past few decades (a point unchanged by the record four hurricanes that struck Florida in 2004).
Crichton has also been criticized for having the protagonist of State of Fear assert,
- Since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. The ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.
even though the DDT ban specifically exempts any and all use for disease prevention from any regulation, and the total number of deaths from malaria in the period described actually totals less than fifty million worldwide[7]. Although Crichton moderates his statement somewhat elsewhere in the book with,
- DDT was never banned.
- You're right. Countries were just told that if they used it, they wouldn't get foreign aid.
even this version conflicts with statements by USAID, the World Bank, and WHO, all of which do fund DDT for malaria prevention.
Another example is this criticism of Jurassic Park:
- The scientific scheme is not completely outrageous; unless one looks too closely, ... Although they are dinosaurs ..., they could have been any death-dealing automata ... substitute hostile extraterrestrials, lunatic Nazis, or predatory androids and it would have been the same film with a different title -- Aliens, Raiders of the Lost Ark or Terminator 2: Judgment Day. (Henry Gee, "Jaws with Claws," Nature 363:681, 1993.)
Another criticism of Crichton's novels is that they are generally based on the conceit of a "false revolution": while the novels describe potentially world-changing concepts such as alien plagues, cloned dinosaurs, and time travel, the books seem to always end with the threat destroyed or the scientific breakthrough lost. In other words, the events described in the novels might as well never have happened in the context of their fictional universes. Critics feel that this allows Crichton to avoid having to describe how, for example, time travel or cloning of extinct animals would change society.
Critical essays of Crichton's work and/or ideas:
- Review of Michael Crichton's State of Fear – Dr. Jeffrey M. Masters, Chief Meteorologist at The Weather Underground
- Michael Crichton and Global Warming – David B. Sandalow, Environment Scholar for the Brookings Institute
- Science Fiction: Michael Crichton takes a novel approach to global-warming alarmism. – Iain Murray, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute
Specific criticisms of State of Fear:
- Michael Crichton's State of Confusion – Dr. Gavin A Schmidt, climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
- "Crichton's Thriller State of Fear: Separating Fact from Fiction" – Union of Concerned Scientists
- Answers to Key Questions Raised by M. Crichton in State of Fear – Pew Center on Global Climate Change
- Novel on global warming gets some scientists burned up – Seth Borenstein, Seattle Times
- Bad Science, Bad Fiction: In Michael Crichton's work, the two are intimately connected. – Chris Mooney, Washington correspondent for Seed Magazine
References
- Elizabeth A. Trembley, 1996, Michael Crichton: A Critical Companion, Greenwood Press, ISBN 031329414.
Notes
- ^ a b - Crichton, Michael (2005). "For Younger Readers". Retrieved Dec. 11, 2005.
External links
- Michael Crichton's Official Homepage
- Recorded BBC Five Live interview with Michael Crichton
- Michael Crichton: From Scientist to Novelist, by Tal Cohen
- Earth Institute News, Columbia.edu Criticism of the science of State of Fear
- Michael Crichton at IMDB
- Discuss Michael Crichton
- Audio interviews with Michael Crichton by Don Swaim of CBS Radio - RealAudio
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Crichton, Michael |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Crichton, John Michael |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | American novelist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 23, 1942 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Chicago, Illinois |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
