Farewell, Michael Crichton

Via The New York Times: An Appraisal - Michael Crichton - Builder of Realms That Thrillingly Run Amok. Excerpt:

Michael Crichton, who died on Tuesday at the age of 66, was like a character in a Michael Crichton novel. He was unusually tall (6 feet 7 inches), strikingly handsome and encyclopedically well informed about everything from dinosaurs to medieval banquet halls to nanotechnology.

As a writer he was a kind of cyborg, tirelessly turning out novels that were intricately engineered entertainment systems. No one — except possibly Mr. Crichton himself — ever confused them with great literature, but very few readers who started a Crichton novel ever put it down.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum...Of the dead, speak nothing but good. At the age of 67, I feel a shiver when I hear of another writer dead at 66.

But Crichton's novels survive him, though they don't deserve it.

Crichton was clearly a very, very smart and well-educated man. He was also a fast writer of formula fiction, and he stayed within the limits of his "engineered" formulas. That was the key to his success and the cause of his failure.

Crichton understood how to take a half-teaspoon of science and add it to four cups of routine story. The result was a nanotech threat, or a dinosaur threat, or an alien-virus threat. The half-teaspoon of science made his stories just exotic enough to interest readers, without actually making them think. They could sit back and let the routine story carry them up and down the usual roller coaster. At the end, we usually got something like a return to the safe, reassuring status quo.

I read quite a few of his novels, sometimes enjoying them as a pleasant way to waste a weekend. But I stopped taking him seriously after The Andromeda Strain.

Here we have an alien disease, which is to be identified and destroyed in an underground laboratory. To ensure that the disease can never escape, a nuclear bomb is planted under the bottom floor of the lab.

More clearly in the movie than in the book, the lab is a symbolic vagina: the various floors are built around a central shaft. The whole plot depends, in effect, on doing exciting stuff in this vagina without actually setting off an orgasm. (One of the scientists, a woman, is also an epileptic who goes into a trance when alarm lights flash. Figure that out for yourself.)

Now, a satirist could have had a great time with such an image while poking fun at thrillers, Big Science, and any number of other targets. But Crichton didn't have a satirical bone in his body.

He certainly advocated for certain values, and opposed others. One value he opposed was Dumb Kids who Get In Trouble. Another value was Bitchy Women who Hassle the Hero. But he used dumb kids and bitchy women simply to move his plots along, and to make us sympathize with his heroes. God knows the heroes themselves didn't offer much we could sympathize with.

Most of his novels, especially after he began to succeed in Hollywood, read more like treatments for the inevitable screenplays that would follow them. They offered just enough technobabble to give the stories some credibility, and they kept readers turning the pages. But they never drew readers to think seriously about the issues the stories dramatized.

Writing fiction is a craft. If we're good enough at that craft, our readers (not we ourselves) can call us artists. Like any craft, writing relies on formulas and conventions. If we want to challenge those formulas, we first need to understand them very well.

Then we can tweak them in ways that make our readers snap out of their trance and ask: "What the hell is this story really about? And why the hell do I find such a story interesting?"

A story that makes us ask such questions, and find answers to them, begins to escape formula and become literature.

I'm glad for Crichton and his family that he was able to make enough money to keep them all very comfortable. But I'm sorry for Crichton, because his intelligence and talent suggested that he could have been a far better writer if only he had taken his craft seriously.

Comments

[Dai Alanye]

Your comments make you sound envious. Not that there's anything wrong with that, because envy is an emotion we've retained for hundreds of thousands of years, and which is also expressed among animals--so it must have some survival value.

I've read two of Crichton's. I found Andromeda Strain gripping, but when the Deus exited from the machina--in other words, when the virus mutated to harmlessness--I suffered grave disappointment

I've noticed all too many authors seem to tire of their stories and look for a quick and easy way to end them, even when risking the ultimate value of the work, and perhaps that occurred there.

Later, Jurassic Park caused such a ruckus that I read it, and even watched part of the regrettable movie that was made from it--I've never been entranced with the making of dangerous critters into heroes. But in the book, it seemed to me that characterization was the weakest link, and additionally made me think that Crichton just might have a misogynistic streak, deep down inside.

Whatever. I envy him his success and his apparent broad range of technical knowledge.

[Joe Lopp]

I must say I rather liked some of his earlier novels, though he probably should have discarded the 'formula' after Jurassic Park ... hmmm, maybe after Rising Sun, at that. In any event, the man wrote what he wanted and the way he wanted ... or did he...?

[Chad]

"More clearly in the movie than in the book, the lab is a symbolic vagina: the various floors are built around a central shaft. The whole plot depends, in effect, on doing exciting stuff in this vagina without actually setting off an orgasm. (One of the scientists, a woman, is also an epileptic who goes into a trance when alarm lights flash. Figure that out for yourself.)"

Did Crichton ever admit to this? It's weird analysis like yours that always turned me off to english teachers. Some times a story is just a story. And, no, I'm not a Crichton fan. I'm someone who is tired of being told by english teachers/professors what constitutes literature, when 80% of the vaunted literature I have read for these people is pure crap.