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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, 4th Ed. Michael Crichton Born: Chicago, Illinois; October 23, 1942 Died: Los Angeles, California; November 4, 2008 Also Known As: John Michael Crichton; Michael Douglas; Jeffrey Hudson; John Lange Principal Long Fiction A Case of Need, 1968 (as Jeffrey Hudson) The Andromeda Strain, 1969 The Terminal Man, 1972 The Great Train Robbery, 1975 Eaters of the Dead, 1976 Congo, 1980 Sphere, 1987 Jurassic Park, 1990 Rising Sun, 1992 Disclosure, 1994 The Lost World, 1995 Airframe, 1996 Timeline, 1999 Prey, 2002 State of Fear, 2004 Next, 2006 Other Literary Forms Best known as a writer of science-fiction thrillers with compulsively page-turning plots, Michael Crichton (KRI-tuhn) also wrote nonfiction books on a variety of topics: Five Patients: The Hospital Explained (1970), an exposé of the inner workings of a big-city hospital; Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers (1983), an introduction to computer programming; Jasper Johns (1977), a biography-cum-portfolio of the artist; and Travels (1988), an autobiography-cum-travelogue. He also frequently contributed opinion pieces on scientific topics to newspapers and magazines. Other than as a novelist, however, Crichton is best known as a screenwriter. He wrote the script for the popular science-fiction film Westworld (1973) as well as the script for the film adaptation of his novel The Great Train Robbery (1979); he also directed both of those motion pictures. He also, with the help of collaborators, worked on the screenplays for the adaptations of Jurassic Park (1993) and Rising Sun (1993). Along with his then wife, Anne-Marie Martin, he wrote the script of one of the most popular films of the 1990's, Twister (1996). In addition to his work in films, Crichton created the hugely popular television series ER, drawing on his own experiences as a doctor. He served as an executive producer for the show, which premiered in 1994, and he wrote the first three episodes. Achievements A doctor and research scientist, Michael Crichton began writing mystery novels under pseudonyms as a way to support himself while he was in medical school. His first novel under his own name, The Andromeda Strain, became an immediate best seller and was promptly made into a big-budget Hollywood film--a pattern that was to be followed by many of his subsequent novels. None of his principal works of long fiction ever failed to make the best-seller lists in the United States, and Crichton has enjoyed similar success in world markets. His immensely popular novel Jurassic Park, and its subsequent film version and sequels, brought to science fiction a fresh approach to one of its favorite tropes, that of modern humans encountering prehistoric species: the re-creation of extinct life-forms via reclaimed DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). The success of Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World, inspired a generation of science-fiction thriller writers to employ a similar "hard science" approach. Crichton twice won the Edgar Award, the highest prize awarded by the Mystery Writers of America: first in 1968 for his abortion-themed novel A Case of Need, which he originally published under the name Jeffrey Hudson, and again in 1980 for the screenplay for The Great Train Robbery. The Association of American Medical Writers gave a best-book award to Five Patients in 1970. With other producers and writers, Crichton shared the George Foster Peabody Award for ER in 1995 and an Emmy for Best Drama Series the following year. In 1998, the American Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films presented him with its Life Career Award. Biography John Michael Crichton was born in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in Long Island, New York. He had three siblings, one a younger brother named Douglas, with whom he once collaborated on a comic novel in 1971, Dealing. Written under the pen name Michael Douglas, the book was an account of upper middle-class college students who become marijuana dealers. Crichton received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1964 and his M.D. from the same school in 1969. His other early academic activities included lecturing at Cambridge in England in 1965 and studying at the Salk Institute in California in the late 1960's. To eke out a living as a student, Crichton began to write mystery novels under the pseudonyms Jeffrey Hudson and John Lange, a practice that he maintained through the early 1970's, even after he had published his first two best sellers under his own name. The fourth of these mysteries, A Case of Need, was one of the first pieces of American popular fiction to deal forthrightly with the issue of abortion, then illegal throughout the United States. The publication of The Andromeda Strain in 1969 began Crichton's long stream of best-selling popular novels, most of which drew on the genres of science fiction and the espionage thriller. Crichton was always vocal about his political views pertaining to topics in the fields of medicine and science. In the early twenty-first century, he attracted much attention by questioning whether "global warming" was actually occurring and, if it was, whether it was being induced by human activities such as industry and the use of fossil fuels. He also publicly questioned other contemporary fears related to the environment and health, such as the purported danger posed by secondhand cigarette smoke. He raised these questions most frequently in articles in magazines and journals, op-ed pieces in newspapers and magazines, and speeches, but he addressed them most dramatically in his 2004 novel State of Fear. Crichton's views on such issues triggered criticism and rebuke, much of which came from the author's colleagues in the medical and scientific community, with some of it insinuating that he was a shill for big business and conservative political factions--the latter somewhat surprising in light of the passionately argued pro-choice stance of A Case of Need. Crichton was married five times. Four of his marriages ended in divorce; he was married to his fifth wife at the time of his death from cancer in 2008. His fourth wife, actor and screenwriter Anne-Marie Martin, is the mother of his only child, a daughter. Analysis Thought of primarily as a writer of slick, exciting popular fiction, Michael Crichton has received far more praise for the sensational premises of his novels and their action-fueled plots than for his writing style, which is at best serviceable and at worst far less imaginative than his story lines. A chief importance of Crichton in popular American fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, however, is his adroit manipulation of science-fiction texts, as he boldly rewrote and reenvisioned the more far-fetched and fanciful stories of classic fantastic novels and films within a framework of straightforward "hard" science as he perceived it as a working scientist. As such, Crichton rivals Stephen King as the foremost best-selling "pop" practitioner of metafiction (fiction addressing the reading and writing of fiction) and intertextuality (text addressing other texts), trends in literature usually associated with belletristic, "highbrow" writers. For example, as some reviewers noted when his second best seller, The Terminal Man, was published, the book is in many ways an update of Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who, because of this 1818 novel, is often seen as the originator of the modern science-fiction genre. In the early 1880's, electricity was still a fairly new discovery and hence a mysterious force, and so Shelley's suggestion that it might somehow revitalize inert limbs and organs seemed not implausible. Today, however, such an idea is laughable. In The Terminal Man, then, Crichton rewrites Shelley's scenario: The "monster" is not a creature stitched together from cadavers but a living man beset by physical and emotional ailments whose brain has been wired so as to control his moods and impulses, thereby giving him a new life. These procedures as described may be in advance of contemporary science, but they still fall within the realm of near-future possibilities. Likewise, in Next, Crichton reworks H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, that seminal science-fiction writer's exploration of the borderlands between humanity and other species. Whereas in 1896 Wells had Dr. Moreau create humanoid creatures from animals through painful operations, Crichton's characters employ more believable twenty-first century science involving DNA and gene splicing. Consciously or unconsciously, Crichton seems to have devoted much of his career to creating a vast patchwork quilt of intertextual reconstructions of classic science-fiction stories. Crichton's dedication to "real" science is his most obvious and recurrent theme. Many reviewers and even ardent fans of his work have assumed that Crichton's principal concern is with the dangers of science run amuck, as is the case with Shelley in Frankenstein. However, although Shelley was indeed concerned with scientific inquiry and invention going so far as to be dangerous and dehumanizing, Crichton is more specific: His fiction addresses the dangers posed by science when it is corrupted by outside influences, most commonly business, the government and military, and popular media. The Andromeda Strain The first novel published under Crichton's own name--and his first work that was not a conventional murder mystery--The Andromeda Strain remained until the publication of Jurassic Park in the 1990's Crichton's most widely read book. In it, we see at the inception of his career as a best-selling science-fiction/thriller writer the themes and techniques that he used most consistently throughout his life. The plot is simple and fast-moving: A space probe crashes in the American Southwest bearing a dangerous microscopic organism that causes the death of an entire town except for one small boy and one old man. A team of scientists must figure out how the organism attacks the human body in order to end the threat. In his debut science-fiction work, Crichton clearly displays his spin on the Frankenstein theme: The danger is not so much science getting out of hand as it is science falling into the wrong hands. The danger is not created by the scientist-heroes but by "corrupt" scientists whose work has been co-opted by the U.S. military: The crashed probe had been part of an attempt by the military and the government to find dangerous microbes in space to use in biological warfare. The heroes are the "pure" scientists untainted by outside influence, brought in as troubleshooters--a plot device Crichton would repeat in his most popular novels, Jurassic Park and The Lost World. To underscore the role of the military in bringing this threat literally to Earth, in the conclusion of the novel Crichton has one of his heroes run a gamut of threats that are part of a secret military base's "defense" and "security" measures, the irony lying in the fact that Earth would not be facing the danger posed by an alien microbe had the military not misused science in the cause of "national security." A further irony lies in the name given to the dangerous organism: Andromeda, an innocent princess in Greek mythology who is doomed to be sacrificed to a sea monster because of her mother's impious boast that she is more beautiful than the sea goddesses. To the Greeks, such extreme pride, hubris, was the ultimate sin, one certain to bring disaster. By alluding to this myth, Crichton seems to be commenting on the hubristic arrogance of the military leaders, who court disaster with their arrogant assumption that they can control forces for which they have little understanding or respect. In keeping with the metafictional and intertextual tendencies of Crichton's canon, the novel's central plot is a hard-science rewrite of the plot of one of the most popular horror films of all time, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), in which hoards of cannibal undead are created by a satellite that returns from Venus carrying an alien virus. Romero was interested in horrific effect and social commentary, and the explanation of a plague from space was merely a pretext for these things; in The Andromeda Strain, however, Crichton takes Romero's premise and puts an ultrarealistic spin on it, with carefully thought-out accounts of how such an organism would invade and affect the human body. The Andromeda Strain was made into a film in 1971 and remade as a television miniseries in 2008. Jurassic Park and The Lost World In Crichton's most famous work, Jurassic Park, as well as its sequel, The Lost World, readers can easily detect the same ploys and techniques that Crichton used in his first best seller. As in The Andromeda Strain, the threat springs from science corrupted by outsiders--in this case, entrepreneurs. A multimillionaire named John Hammond sets up, off the coast of Central America, a theme park featuring live dinosaurs created from DNA retrieved from prehistoric insects that drank reptilian blood and then became preserved in amber. Hammond soon has to bring paleontologists to the island to help when his program of saurian re-creation goes awry. Reviewers in 1990 made much of Crichton's discussion of "chaos theory," which is evoked repeatedly to explain why things went wrong in the park, and indeed Jurassic Park introduced this concept into mainstream American thought. The real origin of the threat posed by the revived species of dinosaurs, however, lies in Hammond's hubristic attitude: He understands next to nothing of the science he exploits and is motivated solely by avarice. His arrogance is most clearly evinced in the scenes (the most exciting scenes in the novel) in which he sends his young grandchildren out into the park, smugly assuming that he controls the ancient environment that his millions have brought back to life. In a fate worthy of a villain in myth or fairy tale, Hammond is ultimately killed and eaten by his own (re)creations. As in The Andromeda Strain, the virtuous "true" scientists must then clean up the mess--environmental, legal, and ethical--that he has left behind. In wordplay typical of his metafictional and intertextual tendencies, Crichton names the two "bad" scientists who through treachery make Hammond's meddling far worse: Dennis Nedry and Lewis Dodgson. Nedry's name is an anagram of "nerdy," and his first name suggests the comic-strip brat "Dennis the Menace." Lewis Dodgson's name is an amalgamation of the first name of the pseudonym and the actual surname of the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871)--Charles Lutwidge Dodgson writing as Lewis Carroll--and thus establishes parallels between Alice and the heroic paleontologists, all of whom stumble into a pocket of existence where nothing works as expected. Further intertextual references are more obvious. As the title of the sequel clearly indicates, these two novels are Crichton's reworking of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), which, like Crichton's books, features humans encountering dinosaurs in Latin America. Again, Crichton seeks to provide a feasible explanation for human-dinosaur coexistence. Though scientists have expressed doubts about whether extinct species could be reborn through the sorts of DNA experimentation that Hammond's lackeys employ, the process depicted in Crichton's novels at least involves state-of-the-art "hard" science and offers possibilities that are more likely than the explanation in Doyle's novel: that a large relic population of ancient reptiles could somehow survive in a remote corner of the world. None of Crichton's other books has had effects on popular culture as immense as those of Jurassic Park and The Lost World; both were made into blockbuster films, and both have inspired further sequels and imitations, adding to the American fascination with prehistoric reptiles. Thomas Du Bose Other Major WorksScreenplays: Westworld, 1973; Coma, 1978 (adaptation of Robin Cook's novel); The Great Train Robbery, 1979 (adaptation of his novel); Looker, 1981; Runaway, 1984; Jurassic Park, 1993 (adaptation of his novel; with David Koepp); Rising Sun, 1993 (adaptation of his novel; with Philip Kaufman and Michael Backes); Twister, 1996 (with Anne-Marie Martin). Nonfiction: Five Patients: The Hospital Explained, 1970; Jasper Johns, 1977; Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers, 1983; Travels, 1988. Bibliography Crichton, Michael. "Ritual Abuse, Hot Air, and Missed Opportunities." Science 283, no. 5407 (March 5, 1999): 1461-1463. One of Crichton's best articles presents his definitive statement on the portrayal of science and scientists in popular culture, especially films. Grazier, Kevin R., ed. The Science of Michael Crichton: An Unauthorized Exploration into the Real Science Behind the Fictional Worlds of Michael Crichton. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2008. Focuses on Crichton's use of science and examines the real-world validity of the various scientific elements in his novels, including cloning, nanotechnology, and time travel. Sandalow, David B. Michael Crichton and Global Warming. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2005. Excellent brief publication (available online at http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2005/0128energy_sandalow.aspx) focuses on Crichton's novel State of Fear and provides one of the best analyses available regarding Crichton's controversial stance on global warming. Trembley, Elizabeth A. Michael Crichton: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Presents good, detailed critical analyses of Crichton's best sellers through The Lost World. Includes biographical information and a chapter devoted to Crichton's literary heritage. Supplemented with bibliography and index. |
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