Dwayne McDuffie

Mammoth Task: Scientists Map DNA of Ancient Beast
Scientists map woolly mammoth's DNA, bringing 'Jurassic Park' (or more accurately 'Pleistocene Park') a step closer to reality

I saw this earlier this week and of course it reminded me of the prescient giftings of Mssr. Michael Crichton...who unfortunately recently passed away.  The Andromeda Strain is one of my all time favorite classic movies.  The book was even better.  As was The Terminal Man.   I was saddened to hear of his stepping off and a bit surprised that it went unacknowledged by this board of literary folks.

So it made me wonder if perhaps my appreciation for Crichton puts me in the minority. Certainly not all of his books were winners, but I believe he had a unique way of making real science accessible and fun for the masses....yet always containing various shadings of the  serious and valid warning...Just because something can be done, doesn't mean that it should.

So...what's the board's opinion of Crichton's craft...hack worthy or one of the best of the genre?  And if the latter, what's your favorite title... and where did he drop the keyboard?


And oh yeah... bringing back the mammoth?  Interesting idea...but the jury's still out on whether this will turn out badly or not.

It has to be said that Science Fiction from the 1960s and 1970s, not to mention DC and Marvel Comics, brought this up years before Crichton did.  

No doubt.  But he was the first (in my awareness) that actually shaped real science behind the story to a believable extent.

But to the question at hand... which bucket does Crichton fall into for you if you care to say?

I find he infodumped some interesting research into completely clunky writing and wooden characters and dialogue.

LOL!  Leave it to you man...  ;-))

I only calls it as I sees it.

I've read the first Jurassic Park and I think Congo (I don't remember a thing about it though) and I enjoyed them. Of course, this was before Crichton became a right-wing, global warming denying, hack who brown-nosed pResident Bush.

I don't know if he 'became' so much as had been that kind of guy all along.

After all, RISING SUN was a hilariously racist book whose most interesting point was its racism in the first place.

He always had a libertarian streak, which really came out in State of Fear. After all, that book went against organizing, and governmental interference with care for the environment, because all environmentalists are sucidial hacks, apparentlyl. At the end, it's the gallant billionaire who says we need to take care of things the RIGHT way, which seems to imply Privitization Uber Alles.

Next, interestingly, is actually very anti-corporate, and pro-regulation.

Ooof.  Yeah..I forgot about that one...Definitely have to agree that Rising Sun was a posterbook for  'yellow peril' fearmongering.  :-/

The movie was even funnier, because the makers were desperate to downplay or get rid of the racism, which means rubbing out what was interesting about the book in the first place.  

I never read Rising Sun but I heard it was awful. But then, I just thought it was probably a case of a writer trying to push everybody's buttons like Disclosure was. I found out later that Crichton WAS in fact that crazy.

It is.  That's why it was so funny.

"I find he infodumped some interesting research into completely clunky writing and wooden characters and dialogue."

I thought that the concepts presented in both Timeline and Prey were intriguing in their implications...but agree that  character development was not his strong suite.  To that end, what are some of your examples in the genre of non-clunky and flesh and bloody?

What's ridiculous about Chrichton's argument in the book is that... so what? The Japanese had their eye on the ball, the Americans didn't. That's the free market baby! Of course, most free market/libertarian/small goverment absolutists are always FOR something... unless they're not the successful one. Then it's twistaround!

When I want really interesting infodumps, I read straight Science Fiction by people who really think about the stuff and runs with them, like basically anything by Bruce Sterling.  DISTRACTION.  HOLY FIRE.  Any and all of his short stories.

he was over-rated.

I loved Andromeda Strain, Terminal Man and The Great Train Robbery but the rest of his stuff, to me, was crappy scifi dressed up as general lit.

General fiction seems to pay more than SF, even if it is essentially SF. ISTR when Warren Ellis's novel was published there was a story about agents pushing SF authors to market their books as mainstream lit whenever possible for bigger advances.

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