Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Michael Crichton

This is topic Michael Crichton in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by Wolfe_boy (Member # 5456) on :

Sad news.. Michael Crichton has passed away at the age of 66, due to a long protracted and very private battle with cancer.

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2008/11/05/crichton-michael.html

I will miss him in particular. His books always entertained me, regardless of what the snooty half of my brain might think.

Jayson Merryfield

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

Thanks for posting this, Jayson. I just barely heard about it myself.

The mainstream writer that science fiction writers loved to hate (because he got away with making science fiction mainstream when most of them couldn't seem to manage it). His passing is a loss to everyone who has been or might have been introduced to science fictional ideas in a way they could access them.

He told stories and told them well.

Posted by Zero (Member # 3619) on :

And his medical background was very insightful, I thought.

Posted by InarticulateBabbler (Member # 4849) on :

He has had a wide range of specialties, and they have benefitted many of us—whether we want to admit it or not.

[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited November 05, 2008).]

Posted by philocinemas (Member # 8108) on :

Although he was not my favorite writer, I thought he had very solid story ideas that made for great cinema, and I am saddened by his death.

Posted by LAJD (Member # 8070) on :

He had an amazing ability to weave fantasy and science fiction into the everyday world. His best works were compelling, IMHO, because they were so real. You could actually see how it might happen and that made it accessible.

I read Jurassic Park as a graduate student in molecular biology. I typed his dinosaur DNA sequences into the very new GenBank -- the research database for DNA sequences -- and found, along with I'm sure every other graduate student at that time, that he used a sequence that was commonly used as a cloning vector in most labs: pBR322. It was that little bit of realism that turned that book into one of my all time favorite. What was even more amazing is that that little bit of realism was written up as a note in Science magazine, a very scholarly journal. So it wasn't just me.

The take-home message for me from his work, is to make it real.

Leslie

Posted by Zero (Member # 3619) on :

I agree with Leslie completely. Well said.

[This message has been edited by Zero (edited November 06, 2008).]

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

Crichton's first stuff was just coming out just as I began devoting myself to reading science fiction. I took him for a science fiction writer made good, and read several of his works.

Then, later on, it seemed more that he was one who avoided the genre discrimination that goes with writing and publishing science fiction. Despite this, he used, well, what we sometimes call the "tropes" of science fiction, right to the end---technological advance, alien life forms, robots, nanotechnology---things we find speculation about elsewhere in our chosen genre, but less so on the bestseller lists where Crichton's work was found.

(Also he created the TV show "ER"---but, according to my mother, who worked in real emergency rooms, the show was terribly unrealistic.)