Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton has died, after a lengthy (and private) battle with cancer. This makes me quite sad: I stumbled onto Crichton’s work in middle school and found it most entertaining. To your average 11 year old, the cardboard cutouts who inhabited his pages were pluses, not minuses. Those who criticize his stilted prose and one-dimensional characters aren’t wrong, though I do think they miss the point. What made his writing great was the amount of research that went into it: you always emerged from his works with a better understanding of some arcane subject, be it astrophysics and the government’s response to extra-terrestrial life (“Sphere”), nanotechnology (“Prey”), or the fear mongering surrounding global warming (“State of Fear”).

He will be missed…