Bush with this book, which sought to debunk warnings about man-made global warming and included a 20-page annotated bibliography. Crichton annoyed environmentalists but made a fan of George W. "Long before Malcolm has his say, this reader, at least, was hoping for some more dinosaurs to put him out of his misery," wrote science fiction author Greg Bear. Book World's reviewer said the novel produced "excitement in large quantities" and predicted that it would "make a terrific movie." But he didn't much care for Ian Malcolm's "extended philosophizing" about chaos theory.
Once again making full, frightening use of the biotech background Crichton gained at Harvard Medical School, Jurassic Park played on legitimate fears as we entered the era of genetic engineering, even if scientists rejected the exact mechanism he propounded for generating dinosaurs from amber-encased DNA. "These details, rather than the characters, make this book seem more believable," he wrote. Real-life astronaut Michael Collins, who reviewed Sphere for Book World, waxed enthusiastic about Crichton's ability to explain how oxygen under pressure becomes toxic to humans. Navy more than 300 years after it landed on the sea floor. Sphere (1987) This time, the extraterrestrial threat is underwater, in a spacecraft discovered by the U.S. But Book World's reviewer, Bruce Cook, thought the book was "written directly with the requirements of the screen in mind" and said Crichton "never really gets inside his characters." What's more, the multi-talented brainiac author himself directed the 1979 film starring Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland. Many diehard Crichton fans think it's his best. The story of an 1855 gold heist aboard a steam-powered passenger train through Victorian England, this novel demonstrated Crichton's evolving talent for description and scene-setting.
It used to minister to our need for prophecy now it ministers to our need for fear." "Worse still," he added, "we are now using real science as if it were fiction, for the physical acting out of the brainsick matter of such tales." The splicing of fact and fantasy was just too much for our reviewer, British author Alex Comfort, who lamented that "science fiction has undergone an unwelcome change. It feels pretty dated now, but this techno-thriller was a stunning genre-bender four decades ago - as I realized this week when I dug up Book World's original review. A military satellite returns to Earth bearing a deadly microbe, and government scientists race to prevent a nuclear-cum-biological doomsday. Thanks partly to the hit movie, everyone knows the plot of Crichton's first novel published under his own name (he had previously written a handful under the pen name John Lange).
I wish I could give you electronic links to the full texts of all these reviews, but I can't some of them appeared so long ago that I had to retrieve them from the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database. That's a pretty good summation of what Crichton tried to do in his books and why they sold millions of copies even though critics, as you will see, have generally found his characters to be cardboard. He got to the point, said what was on his mind, and shut up." He set the tone for all scientific writing of the last 350 years. "We remember Galileo, among other things, for his crisp writing style.
"One yearns to reprimand the author, and shoot his editor," Crichton wrote. "For plainly, this book represents monumental self-indulgence." He went on to mock Eckstein's pretentious statement that "a literary tone fell of itself over the writing" of the book.
"Anyone floating to the surface after 800 pages of this book feels a compulsion to speak plainly," he began. Crichton's review is a short masterpiece of savage criticism. Back in 1970, he wrote a review for Book World of The Body Has a Head, a long reflection on biology and philosophy by Gustav Eckstein. As our review noted at the time, the ludicruously shallow explanation - "but as it turned out I was only slightly dead," Malcolm says - showed "splendid panache on the author's part."Ī second key to Crichton's success was that he eschewed literary pretensions. But when Jurassic Park became a colossal success and Crichton sat down to write a sequel, The Lost World, he knew he needed Malcolm back, if only to explain the science. Here's a small example: In Jurassic Park (the book, not the movie) the mathematician Ian ("I hate being right") Malcolm dies.