<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Michael Crichton (October 23, 1942– Chicago, Illinois), although he is not usually classified as a genre SF writer, has created a body of work that mostly falls within genre limits despite occasional lapses in scientific accuracy. Early in his career he wrote several thrillers as John Lange, but he soon abandoned that name and concentrated on writing imaginative bestsellers, following the enormous success of The Andromeda Strain (1969), the story of dangerous spores from outer space, which was subsequently filmed, as have at least eight of his other novels. Crichton has also been involved in movie direction and screenwriting and helped create the popular television program, E.R.

Crichton's medical background was evident in The Terminal Man (1972), which deals with mind control. His screenplay for Westworld (1974) about a robotic theme park never appeared in novel form, but it was published as a paperback when the movie appeared. Congo (1976) follows the adventures of an expedition in search of a lost civilization in Africa, which runs into trouble when it encounters a previously unknown variety of killer ape. The plot of Sphere (1987) initially seems to involve a crashed alien spaceship found beneath the ocean, but the investigators discover instead that it is American-made and arrived from the future.

Although none of these novels matched the success of The Andromeda Strain, Crichton's next effort went beyond it, thanks in part to the Steven Spielberg movie version. Jurassic Park (1990) involves another theme park, this one equipped with regenerated dinosaurs as attractions. There is a fairly strong anti-scientific tone in the novel, and the science itself is severely flawed, but as an adventure story, it has had few recent rivals. Crichton wrote a sequel, The Lost World (1995), which bears only a passing resemblance to the film version, and he was not involved at all with the third movie. Subtle references to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World are incorporated into the story.

His more recent novels have been quite varied. Timeline (2000) is a straightforward time travel thriller. A group of graduate students are transported back to France during the One Hundred Years War to rescue their professor, who has been stranded there. Prey (2002) is an exciting and suspenseful thriller about nanotechnology gone wrong. Unfortunately, his 2004 SF novel, State of Fear, is aggressively polemical and very slow going. Environmental extremists attempt to precipitate an ecological catastrophe in order to dramatize their concerns. The author has appended a lengthy essay critical of the concept of global warming.

Many SF fans characterize Crichton as an outsider who steals genre ideas for his own purposes, ignoring the fact that all writers borrow from one another as a matter of course. His ability to present sophisticated scientific concepts to a popular audience is worth emulating. There is a sense at times that the novels are being written with a film version in mind, and his experiences in that industry are no doubt helpful in this regard. Crichton has also directed two SF films not based on his own work, Looker (1981) and Runaway (1984).