Michael Crichton: A Master Storyteller of Technology’s Promise and Peril

An outsize figure in al-most every possible way–he stood 6 ft. 9 in.–Michael Crichton died of cancer Nov. 4 in Los Angeles at the age of 66. It would require several obituaries to do justice to his polymathic professional accomplishments. Crichton trained as a doctor at Harvard Medical School, directed several feature films and created ER, one of the most successful TV dramas of all time.

But it’s as a novelist that Crichton was best known. A pioneer of the techno-thriller, he wrote two dozen of them–including The Andromeda Strain, Congo and Rising Sun–which collectively sold more than 150 million copies. Crichton was never a literary stylist, but his skills as a storyteller were enormous. His plots have a crystalline perfection that has been much copied, and they combined a true nerd’s fascination with science and technology with a salutary skepticism. Time and again his novels feature greedy, overeager researchers who open one Pandora’s box after another, always with fatal consequences.

Crichton’s most successful book was Jurassic Park, his novel about dinosaurs cloned from their fossilized DNA. Even aside from its power as a thriller, its prescience gets more astonishing year after year. The week of Crichton’s death, Japanese scientists announced that they had successfully cloned mice from tissue that had been frozen for 16 years. Crichton probably wouldn’t have approved, but it’s a shame that he missed it.