I was a surgery resident when Andromeda Strain came out. Michael Crichton was a close friend of a fellow I knew from the Mass General Hospital when I was a medical student. Crichton had written the novel when a medical student and its enormous success (well deserved) sent him into writing instead of medicine. He is most famous for writing Jurassic Park, which became a hit movie. I might add, the movie scared the beejesus out of me when I saw it. His most recent work has been about global warming and a sensible approach, including a novel satirizing the GW alarmists.
His outstanding essay critiquing the AGW scare is here.
He will be missed. There will be plenty of time for post mortems on the election. This is more important.
Oddly enough, his web site with his speeches and books is suddenly unavailable.
It was supposedly after a long battle with cancer. I didn’t know. He was interviewed on the Dennis Miller radio show a couple of months ago.
It’s funny to read people bring up “weird” beliefs held by Crichton, but it’s my opinion that most anyone under a scrutinizing eye can be shown to have unusual and often hypocritical beliefs.
Kary Mullis, the fellow who was awarded a Nobel Prize for PCR a few years ago, has a whole raft of unusual ideas—but those ideas never made Mullis wrong about PCR. In a similar way Crichton wrote some interesting novels and “in the olden days” was quite a booster for computer literacy while home computers were still pretty rare.
He was an interesting thinker and iconclast—and will be much missed.
You two seem to have had some parallels…docs who know how to write. You’re just more on the realistic side of things. I don’t read fiction all that much, but I did enjoy one or two of his books. But couldn’t tell you one thing about them now. Except that sterno and a desert rat somehow figured into the crux of one of them. This brain retains the damnedest things…
If nothing else that Crichton wrote stays with you, I hope that this essay of his does:
http://pericson.com/2007/08/the-murray-gell-mann-amnesia-effect/
I thought of this essay for the past two years, every time I read or watched a MSM report.
I personally like the essay above, which is a pdf file because his dot-net web site was closed down as soon as he died. It is back up today.