I'm feeling guilty because my cat (one of the two), Leia, passed away on October 10th at the much too young age of nine and I'd been meaning to write about her here because writing is how I deal with these kinds of things and she obviously made a huge impact on my life. She was a truly extraordinary creature and I will tell you her story very soon. I promise.
But I'm feeling guilty because what's moved me to FINALLY write something here is the death of someone who was not a member of my family. I'm talking about Michael Crichton, who you'll remember is one of my listed authors on this page, who passed away a few days ago after a private battle with lung cancer. As it hadn't been publicly known until....well, the end there, I was shocked when the news reached me. He was 66 but certainly didn't look it from recent photos I've seen. Anyway, you can criticize this guy and put him in the same category as someone like Tom Clancy, who sells a lot of books without ever doing any especially good writing, relying almost completely on technical knowledge to drive his stories. But I disagree. Here was a storyteller of the highest calibre who put absolutely everything he had into his craft. There are so many great authors I want to emulate and Crichton is no exception....but I also realize my own limitations and know that I could never match him for his scientific knowledge and imagination where such is concerned. I don't think I'll ever write a book or comic or even short story that requires the degree of research and know-how that Crichton poured into pretty much everything he ever did. He was a master of the "techno-thriller" and I'm not about to challenge that myself. I'll stick to simpler fiction and fantasy, thanks.
I'm pretty sure in an early post I mentioned that reading Jurassic Park was a huge event in my life. Well, it was. Firstly, intelligent as I was as a kid, I was basically too young to properly absorb and appreciate it the first time through. To be fair, I was barely ten. But like any book that I really enjoyed, I revisisted it again and again over the years. I'm twenty-five now and I'll estimate I've read Jurassic Park somewhere around seven times so far. Obviously, the biggest attraction was simply the dinosaurs but I discovered so much more between those pages.
It may well have been Crichton who first impressed upon me how useful character backstory can be if done right. What I recall best is an account of the book's Dr. Woo - an Ingen scientist chiefly responsible for developing the cloning techniques used to create real dinosaurs. There's a digression of about two pages or so that takes us back in time and tells us of Woo as he first graduates university and begins his work before being approached by John Hammond, the man who would found Jurassic Park.
Maybe this little bit of info on a character who was actually quite secondary to the novel's actual action wouldn't impress most people but I know it made a big impression on me. As technical as Crichton's novels could often be, I always found his characters to be very human. That's why I was rooting for Ian Malcolm and Alan Grant - because I genuinely liked them. They weren't just vehicles to drive the plot - they were compelling, interesting characters and Woo was interesting too.
Aside from his obvious mastery of knowing his subject matter inside out and deploying it in an intelligent and believeable manner, I really find Crichton's other main strength as a storyteller to be his sense of pacing and ability to build suspense. Timeline remains one of the most intense novels I've ever read and I always enjoy re-reading it. If you've seen the movie and not read the book, do your best to purge any memory of that "film" from your mind and pick the book up. It's awesome. Like King, almost everything Crichton has written has been made into a movie but with the exception of Jurassic Park (one of my favourite movies despite how different it actually is from the source material), these movies don't even come close to doing these stories proper justice. And if techno-thrillers about dinosaur cloning, time travel and deadly AI aren't your thing, I guess you could always give Disclosure a shot. It was the only Crichton novel I ever read (there's like three I have yet to read) that didn't really do it for me. I've also been told to avoid Airframe as it supposedly strays into Clancyesque territory in regards to technical details but I'll still give it a shot someday. Give the dude props for creating ER too - pretty much every medical drama out today (and god knows there are a TON of them) owes something to that show. Oh, and you're welcome too, Mr. Clooney.
The last novel Michael Crichton ever finished was called Next and I have yet to read it. Maybe it's fitting that something with that title was his last - up next, Mr. Crichton goes beyond this life and as for we who are left behind, what's next is up to us.
