Quote:
Originally Posted by MakubeX2
So, how would you guys rate Michael Crichton ? He writes a while range of subject from drama to sci-fi, always done a lot of reseach on topics in his novels on has a knack for breaking down complex subjects into something understandable.
But his talents lies in mixing fact with fiction and makes everything sounds believable like what he had done with Jurassic Park, Prey and State Of Fear. So should he be placed with all-time great like Clark and Dick ?
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As much as I love Michael Crichton (I particularly like
State of Fear,
Jurassic Park/
The Lost World and
Timeline), I don't think he'll be a classic - though he might be a
reference in his genre, as he contributed to popularizing techno-thriller with extremely popular franchises like
Jurassic Park (for those who don't know, he's also the father of the
ER television series). If you concentrate on the technological cautionary tale genre, I'm certain that his name would come at the top of the list of landmark authors, since a lot of his works (even movies he directed, such as
Westworld) are about (spectacularly) failed human-machine/system interactions...but his writing style, IMHO, do not highlight him as someone to be remembered like Tolkien, Orwell or even Stephen King.
Rather, what really singles him out in a crowd is his particularly thought-inducing (or controversial, in some cases) set of ideas; one of his last works,
State of Fear, stirred a lot of attention (both good and bad, approving and disapproving) in the Climate Change landscape, as he was questioning a lot of the data and reasoning (IMHO he was not so much set against CC than he was against
certain emergent -and potentially dangerous- ideological/intellectual trends). Of course, you don't have to always agree with him, but the amount of trouble he goes through to make his point (in SoF he even dumps a truckload of real life literary references for the reader to read and judge) is certainly admirable.
That, IMHO, is what garnered him a lot of fame - the idea of salvaging fossilized DNA and tinkering with it to revive dinosaurs (in JP, he almost subverts some potential criticisms about dinosaurs not being exactly the way he portrays them by suggesting that the dinosaurs are actually already genetically modified for the park's convenience), eco-terrorism and the climate change turning into an industry of sorts, politicized science, chaos theory predicting that Man cannot control Nature and that ecosystems are highly unpredictable, quantum mechanics showing that funky stuff can happen with certain particles, etc, etc. A lot of that was groundbreaking, cutting edge science or stuff we were uncomfortable talking about.
The problem is that those ideas are tied with current trends, technology and themes that might disappear, become common/boring or fade in the background in the decades to come (in
State of Fear he even discusses an ironically similar topic, where he likens ideas to trends, which by nature rise and fall, become popular then get quickly forgotten when they fall out of context).
Books like
1984, have themes that can remain valid even decades into the future because the bottom line, the message deep beneath can transcend time. But, let's imagine, 50 years from now: will people still be highly concerned/fascinated about tampering with DNA of long-lost species? Climate change? Uncontrolled artificial intelligences and nanomachines? I can't say - because as MC said it himself in one of his books (either SoF or Timeline), people have absolutely no idea about what the future is made of.
General fears and passions, however, need not worry about that. They can remain pertinent no matter which decade or century they're applied to.