He was a screenwriter first and foremost, writing books as a pitch for movie adaptations, it's why Jurassic Park reads more like an adapted script than a proper novel.
The terminal man was banging too. My dad bought it for me for my 11th birthday. Saw "FROM THE CREATOR OF JURASSIC PARK!" on the cover.
11 year old me WAS NOT prepared for a book detailing a man beating prostitutes to literal pulp because of a computer chip in his head.
I'm one of those idiots who gets excited about a book being adapted, so I re-read the book right before going to see the film. I ended up walking out of the theater. Maybe I need to revisit it though.
Honestly, another one — absolutely terrible compared to the book (I consider it a modern classic), but a fun movie 🍿. It hops all over the world and has some decent twists. Very unpopular opinion but I actually enjoyed the ending too, it contrasted the movie in a way that I found realistic yet subverting. There are movies I hate, swear to god.
Airframe would be awesome as a 10 episode prestige miniseries like HBO does. The issue of manufacturing defects vs substandard carrier maintenance would be a great focus after some of the high profile crashes we've had lately.
Reddit loves to suggest this like its some brilliant idea but a 400 page book about aerospace accident investigation would not make a good 10 hour miniseries.
I remember sitting down in the morning with Jurassic park. I think I got up to get a glass of juice and a toilet break halfway. I was about 12-13. Got up after finishing the book and it was late afternoon. Just sucked me right in and couldn’t put it down.
My friend who’d loaned me the book told me they were making a movie of it and I couldn’t even imagine how that would be possible. Was so happy when my parents pretended we were going shopping for groceries one Saturday and realised we were actually going to see the movie!
One of the very few times the book and the movie had an almost equal impact.
The slow burn of the Andromeda Strain hits the same for me in both book and movie form.
I also read Jurassic Park in a single day around 12 or 13, only I was at school hiding the book in my desk all day.
Highly recommended best way to experience it.
I was 12 and got it at the airport on my way to Hawaii for our once every 3 year family vacation. We went all out, rented a Jeep and drove all over the island we were on. I don’t remember anything of that trip because I was glued to that fucking book.
A few years later we went to see the movie, which I couldn’t wait for, and my mom was shaking me in the theater and pointing out that we had been to that same island. The irony of seeing the shots of the island and being like wow that’s beautiful didn’t really sink in until years later.
The 13th Warrior came out of that one. I actually really liked that movie! I know a bunch of people drag on Antonio Banderas’ performance in that one, but I think he did a pretty solid job with it.
My favorite line in the movie: “An engineering dispute!”
Other than Jurassic Park, I'd argue many of the movie versions fell flat. I still prefer the book for Jurassic Park, but it was still pretty well executed.
Amy good gorilla. After the f/x wizardry of Jurassic Park, I was fully not expecting a bunch of guys running around in monkey suits. I’m still baffled by how bad that looked.
I started Micro without knowing he didn't finish it but I dropped it a third of the way through because it was so bad. It made sense later when I found out he left it unfinished.
Famously wrote jurassic park where an amazing themepark goes wrong and starts killing guests.
And also westworld. where an amazing themepark … well, you get the idea
"Don't you see the danger, John, inherent in what you're doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun."
In the novel he goes into a spiel about not having to learn from the bottom up, instead you stand on top of the achievements of others, which results in the rush to be first without considering consequences. Same idea, more wordy.
Nonono, this isn't some species that was eradicated by deforestation, or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs *had* their chance and nature *selected* them for extinction.
God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man, man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs. Dinosaurs eat man…woman inherits the earth.” I was too young to understand the brilliance of that line
There is no auto pilot, someone will have to stay behind and operate it manually.
…
…
…
…
Ya this is all my fault, I'll stay. It was a dick move for me to even pause like that.
Yes, he would was going to intern but he started getting noticed for his writing. He was basically a doctor who didn't do two years of interning at a hospital.
I have never met a single person who has read or even heard of micro. It is by far my favourite book he wrote. That said, both of the Jurassic park books are classics
I read Jurassic Park when I was 13 and it blew me away. That lunch scene in the movie that everybody fasts forwards through is the heart of the book imo, where Malcolm and Hammond get into it about the ethics of the park and the future of the planet. So impactful on me at the time, but weird in retrospect knowing how much of a climate change denier he was. Still a great chapter though.
I remember reading Timeline and feeling like, "this guy knows how to write action," but I would never read it again. I was also like 12 lol.
I recently read Sphere and was overall let down, although the psychological twist took me by surprise (which was fun)! His books don't age well in a lot of areas, particularly in how he writes women and POC. Sphere was cringe because it's about your jungian shadow side and subconscious desires/fears, but his representation of the angry black man deep down wanting to be white or dominate over the white man, and the man-hating lesbian wanting to be beautiful and seductive to control men, was very out of touch / white male POV.
I didn't think about this at the time as a teenager but that's interesting to think back. To be fair, I find most authors are terrible at other gender/racial viewpoints.
That's no excuse for Chriton though.
You are correct. IIRC it came about because of a bet he had with a fellow writer—or maybe it was an English professor, I can't remember now—that "it's impossible to make *Beowulf* entertaining." I thought it was genius to tie it into the historical writings of ibn Fadlan.
At his peak, King‘s goal was 3k words a day, which equals about 10 pages. I think nowadays he aims at 1.5k.
This is first draft, though. So basically unreadable stream of consciousness vomit to progress the story.
You’ve given me a better context to understand how completely batshit insane one of my friends is. She aims for ~3k-4.5k a day and does not use drugs or drink alcohol. Although she’s likely autistic (her words, not mine) so maybe that has something to do with it.
That's wild, I once tried to see how many pages I could reliably write in a day consistently - like I intentionally wrote any and all notes in a journal and just wrote what happened in my day in great detail, and my hand would always cramp up at 12 pages.
Weird.
This is why I started to embrace rougher first drafts. Vomit out the ideas, polish that into pearls.
If it was a research paper, I’d mark the ideas/concepts and quotes I wanted in my source material, while reading loosely, trying to internalize the ideas…
Then I would just spew…I would have the same playlist, like 20 minutes long, and a timer that went off every 5 minutes. 5 minute timer means move on to next idea. I would try to use the 20 minutes to capture one source and my ideas that sprang from that. I would write page number/source for exact quotes. If it was something I wanted to paraphrase, I’d spew that but source it properly.
I would still procrastinate on the polish, and fitting things together, which is why I was careful to document my sources so I wouldn’t accidentally plagiarize something.
Nothing worse than having to hunt back through source material for a page number or something.
I had an episode and wrote 30000 words of a fantasy novel in three days. In MS word that's about 12 pages and it took me the closest I've ever been to a psychotic break to do that.
I’m sure GRRM hearing someone say they were able to write a paragraph in a week would send him reeling and wondering how they have any time to do anything else with that much effort.
I crunched the numbers once based on the time passed since the last book to the present day, and the word count of the existing books
I forget exactly but it was about a dozen words per day (and falling every day).
Edit: okay I mis-remembered. I ran it again and it was 88. This post is mid sixties for context, including the edit.
Worth noting that GRRM has written entire hundred page sequences that he has then ... eliminated entirely in the edit, having to rewrite every bit of it from scratch.
GRRMs problem isn't that he doesn't write. It's that he writes without knowing where he's going, writes himself into a corner, and then has to back up hundreds of pages and change everything that follows while working out what he wanted to accomplish to begin with.
People rightfully shat on the tv writers of game of thrones, but I thought GRRM got off ridiculously lightly in that whole ordeal. I’m sure they’d have written a better ending, even phoning it in, if the actual author had ANY IDEA HOW THE SERIES ENDS. Granted, I think quite a lot of people could think up a better one than the show got, but it just felt spectacularly sloppy that old George apparently didn’t even have some napkin note idea of what the fuck was going to happen. He had so long. He didn’t even have to finish the series, he just needed to have some kind of rough idea about an end
He even had the audacity to criticize the final seasons for not being his vision. Nobody knows what your vision is George, you never fucking wrote it down.
There was supposed to be a time skip after Storm of Swords that led straight to Winds of Winter. During the initial draft GRRM decided he was relying on flashbacks too much so he might as well write what happened between Storm and Winds. This resulted in A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons. Writing those books introduced a bunch of new POV characters and subplots and IMO is where things went off the rails.
I agree that Martin got off easy, but I bet that the show ended based on Martin’s general ideas. Like the major notes of how Dany, Bran and Jon all end up do make some sort of sense. The problem both in the show and books is how to you get from point A to point B? At some point shit needs to move along quickly and predictably, which is something Martin seems to struggle to write.
Bran is a much more important character in the books than he was in the show. Same with the wolves. They loved the visuals of the dragons so they spent lots of money on them while ignoring the direwolves and their connection to the Stark children.
This explains why so many of his books were 90% awesome and then had terrible endings. Andromeda Strain was particularly egregious. Really seemed like he just ran out of juice and phoned the last couple chapters in.
This happens to a lot of authors as they become bigger and have publishers giving them a demanding deadline. If you compare the earlier books of Robert Harris, you see the same thing happen. Books that are an amazing read all the way through have these truncated endings that feel rushed.
Think about your favorite hero movie. Think about the great storytelling, building up the heroes and villains, and world building. Now imagine that just before the epic battle in the third act, the villain, out of the blue, decides he isn’t bad anymore and just sits down and stops. No city-flattening showdown. No desperate fight for survival. No unleashing the super weapon. No redemption for the heroes. Just ‘hey, good news, the bad guys aren’t bad anymore, the conflict is over, everyone can go home now’. That’s what reading Andromeda Strain was like for me.
Yeah but then at the end didn't it turn out that the infection was present on a spacecraft as well? And that there was a good chance it would kill everyone, implying it was a really good thing that they put so much time into studying it?
Nope. They figured out that it evolved to eat/degrade rubber and it caused a seal to fail on a reentering spacecraft...and then nothing. That's it. Just a whole lot of meh....guess we got lucky.
What part of that isn't super interesting? The strain evolved faster than we could understand it, and ultimately we had to accept we can't be in control of everything. Sometimes that's for the better.
It's just another chaos theory book, but one where the chaos doesn't result in total destruction, because if it always ends in total destruction *it isn't chaos*. Loved the end for that reason.
Aside from Jurassic Park and some of the other novels, one of my favorite things he ever did was coin the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Basically stating:
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
Reddit is a fantastic place to see this in action.
Do you know a hobby or subject matter extremely well?
Are you a skateboarder? An engineer? A family lawyer? A bicycle repair shop owner?
Do you read through reddit and see insanely dumb and incorrect comments in the subreddit of your expertise?
But then you read through other subreddits and think "oh wow that's interesting, who knew?"
The Reddit Corollary to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is substantial.
I've worked in the same field for 27 years. I'm extremely competent in that field. And I've generally had to stop reading reddit comments in subreddits related to my area of expertise because not only do people post incorrect information, but that information gets UPVOTED and if somebody posts accurate information there, it gets downvoted because the reddit hive mind doesn't think it's accurate or don't want to.
And I'm not talking about opinion stuff like politics, I'm talking factual stuff like "these widgets weigh 11 oz each" and somebody else comes in and says "actually those widgets are 11 oz for a dozen so less than an ounce each" and I'm sitting here staring at a scale with a single widget on it weight 11 oz, and ten production process engineering reports that show that our yield rate on 11 oz widgets is 97% accurate +/- .05oz and has been fo seven years.
At some point you just stop trying to correct people because they just want to be wrong.
Power engineer here with over a decade of experience working in the industry.
The amount of half truths, misunderstood info, and just flat out misinformation i see circlejerked on here is astounding. And just like you said anytime you chine up as an actual industry subject matter expert if you're speaking against the narrative you're showered with downvotes and argued with by teenagers who listened to a podcast once.
I once got told I did not know what I was talking about on a product *I designed*
Like, I literally made this product. We spec’d out every widget and bolt and circuit.
And when I explained “oh you can easily make that work if you just do this first” I got a four paragraph response from some moron about how it was mechanically impossible because the person had seen the spec sheet.
I got so enraged I literally did it myself, took a picture of it, and posted it as the sole response.
I got downvoted.
That’s the least of his weird beliefs! He truly thought that he could see people’s auras, that he could bend spoons with the slightest touch, and that a cactus spoke to him on a meditation retreat.
EDIT: This is all explored in his memoir Travels. It’s a must read for any Crichton fans. It’s part med school memories, thoughtful travelogue, and strange mystical journeys. It’s a really insightful into who the guy was and where his head was at.
He reminds me a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle whose fiction was intelligent, sharp, and based on somewhat logical thinking but his private beliefs often delved into the magical, mystic, and scientifically impossible.
Ironic, considering the major themes of his novels tended to be about how human beings were too focused on progress and advancement without giving enough attention to the potential risks and consequences of that same advancement.
Yeah I came in here to see how everyone felt about “State of Fear”. It didn’t really derail me at the time I read it but I only remembered Crichton years later when Pirate Latitudes came out.
Being super charitable, and its possible he hardened later on, he used to take the stance that regardless of what we did, the earth would survive, but in JP2 (i think) he admits that maybe we won't be on it.
So, again being charitable and not knowing where his views ended up, he didn't necessarily deny climate change, but thought of himself as not being an alarmist.
It was the first Jurassic Park novel. Ian Malcolm goes pretty hard on the concept that humanity doesn't have the ability to destroy the planet. He says we could destroy ourselves, we could destroy most life, but it would eventually come back, and it's arrogant to think of ourselves as gods in that way.
That’s not completely wrong. Even with climate change, killing 100% of species on this planet would be an incredibly difficult feat.
That’s not to say I doubt our ability to kill 99% of life.
My biggest concern is that we do thoroughly wipe ourselves out in a manner that the next intelligent species won’t have any records of our mistakes, and end up repeating our same errors
State of Fear came out a decade after The Lost World and is a novel that is staunchly against climate change being real. even has a bibliography of sources supporting his position
I stopped reading his books after Jurassic Park. His female characters were either annoying, dumb or both. Even female characters that were supposed to be smart did something incredibly stupid at the worst possible time. And the worst part was that Crichton attributed that to some type of scientific principle that assures the female will make a nonsensical choice in a crucial moment.
Clearly, the man had a lot of female-directed resentment.
That explains Timeline, possibly the worst book ever written.
Spoiler: a spooky, mysterious corporation invents time travel, but to what nefarious end? Well, at the end it’s revealed they sent a bunch of people back to medieval France so that they can gather data faithfully recreate a medieval castle which will be a theme park.
Because what the public want with theme parks is painstaking accuracy.
That’s it.
I still can’t believe it.
It’s literally that.
>Upon their return, they learn that Robert Doniger (the rich corporate supervillain scientist) plans to use his time travel technology to transform historical moments into tourist attractions.
https://www.supersummary.com/timeline/summary/
Immediately after finishing I came to Reddit to vent and found everybody bloody loves the book. I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t think it’s fab, meanwhile I’m still flawed by how bad it was.
Bizarre.
I mean, bad guys wanting to turn things that shouldn't be attractions into amusement parks IS kind of his thing. I'm not really sure what you expected the bad guys master plan would be.
I always liked the reveal that time travel was more akin to a fax machine with a shredder than a postal service delivery- *you* didn't get sent back in time, rather, you were copied, destroyed and an exact replica of you was formed at the end point. Every time you 'travelled', you killed yourself. As I've been exposed to more things I've realized that that wasn't a totally unique idea in the time travel space, but it was my first time seeing that explanation and kinda blew my mind.
For the longest time, I've considered Timeline one of my favorite MC books. I haven't read it since I was like.. 15 though. I do wonder how it holds up.
I don't think you've got it right.
It's been a while but from what I remember, the company wanted to sell 'going back in time and witnessing the past' as a form of entertainment because people have gotten bored of manufactured entertainment, which Chrichton was right about, to a degree.
The guy was a genius. I met him at a charity event and we talked about some aspects of molecular biology. We had a slight disagreement about something and he quoted me from some 20 year old paper. He even gave me authors so I could look it up. I told him that science has been superseded in the last ten years but I couldn’t give him any citations. He still disagreed because he could cite the papers. Later, I looked up his references and he had quoted them word for word! To his credit, he looked up what I said and emailed me thanking me for updating his knowledge.
He was so god damn smart. On top of writing Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Sphere, Congo, he also created ER. Incredible mind with a wonderful scientific bg with a knack for writing. A very rare combination
... Just like, write, eat a bagel for some inspiration, damn. I'm not sleeping for 5 hours. Only for my videogame addiction... Okay that does sound worse.
I was a huge Crichton fan as a teen and the Andromeda Strain he directed is still one of my favorite movies.
One of my favorite books of his was his auto biography Travelers.
[удалено]
He had the #1 book (Lost World), #1 TV Show (ER), and #1 movie (Jurassic Park) all at the same time.
He was a screenwriter first and foremost, writing books as a pitch for movie adaptations, it's why Jurassic Park reads more like an adapted script than a proper novel.
Hell. I forgot that E.R. was his too
Timeline and disclosure Still pissed they havent made Airframe into a movie. That was his best book imo
Sphere was my fav
The terminal man was banging too. My dad bought it for me for my 11th birthday. Saw "FROM THE CREATOR OF JURASSIC PARK!" on the cover. 11 year old me WAS NOT prepared for a book detailing a man beating prostitutes to literal pulp because of a computer chip in his head.
What do you think your Dad was trying to tell you with this gift?
If im going to beat a prostitute to death, get a neuralink first so i can blame it.
If you’re gonna do something, do it all the way
"You miss 100% of the hookers you dont swing at -Micheal Scott" -Unfinishedtoast3
I also liked Sphere, as seen in my username
Love Sphere, only downside is the mathematician is an annoying twit.
Underrated book. One of my all time favorites.
I'm reading Sphere rn!
And it was made into a (forgettable) movie.
The movie was terrible. I was so disappointed after loving the book so much. I still remember even after almost 30 years how bad it was.
Just watched it recently, 3 of the greatest actors of all time just phone it in for 2 hours. They also really drop the ball on the squid parts.
It was a decent movie.
Timeline was so horribly adapted. I was stoked for that movie too.
It is one of the best terrible movies tho…. if you can laugh at it and all the atrocious acting, you might have a good time.
I'm one of those idiots who gets excited about a book being adapted, so I re-read the book right before going to see the film. I ended up walking out of the theater. Maybe I need to revisit it though.
my walkout movie was World War Z.
Honestly, another one — absolutely terrible compared to the book (I consider it a modern classic), but a fun movie 🍿. It hops all over the world and has some decent twists. Very unpopular opinion but I actually enjoyed the ending too, it contrasted the movie in a way that I found realistic yet subverting. There are movies I hate, swear to god.
how much do you enjoy a bad nic cage film? Along the lines of "Knowing".
Airframe would be awesome as a 10 episode prestige miniseries like HBO does. The issue of manufacturing defects vs substandard carrier maintenance would be a great focus after some of the high profile crashes we've had lately.
Reddit loves to suggest this like its some brilliant idea but a 400 page book about aerospace accident investigation would not make a good 10 hour miniseries.
Okay okay... how about 11 hours?
I’m here for the Airframe Cinematic Universe
Well maybe with all recent the focus on Boeing there might be a market for it now.
If Boeing was smart, they’d buy the movie rights and shelve it. Then again, if Boeing was smart, they wouldn’t need to.
I'd love to see a Prey movie
Airframe, really? I mean, I didn't hate it but, it's no Great Train Robbery.
I remember sitting down in the morning with Jurassic park. I think I got up to get a glass of juice and a toilet break halfway. I was about 12-13. Got up after finishing the book and it was late afternoon. Just sucked me right in and couldn’t put it down. My friend who’d loaned me the book told me they were making a movie of it and I couldn’t even imagine how that would be possible. Was so happy when my parents pretended we were going shopping for groceries one Saturday and realised we were actually going to see the movie! One of the very few times the book and the movie had an almost equal impact. The slow burn of the Andromeda Strain hits the same for me in both book and movie form.
I also read Jurassic Park in a single day around 12 or 13, only I was at school hiding the book in my desk all day. Highly recommended best way to experience it.
I was 12 and got it at the airport on my way to Hawaii for our once every 3 year family vacation. We went all out, rented a Jeep and drove all over the island we were on. I don’t remember anything of that trip because I was glued to that fucking book. A few years later we went to see the movie, which I couldn’t wait for, and my mom was shaking me in the theater and pointing out that we had been to that same island. The irony of seeing the shots of the island and being like wow that’s beautiful didn’t really sink in until years later.
Eaters of the Dead.
The 13th Warrior came out of that one. I actually really liked that movie! I know a bunch of people drag on Antonio Banderas’ performance in that one, but I think he did a pretty solid job with it. My favorite line in the movie: “An engineering dispute!”
I really like the idea of it
Congo was a good book and a bad movie.
Curry is so gloriously over the top in it though.
And Ernie Hudson was magnificent. I have no idea why he never became a bigger star.
"STOP EATING MY SESAME CAKE!"
Other than Jurassic Park, I'd argue many of the movie versions fell flat. I still prefer the book for Jurassic Park, but it was still pretty well executed.
Not a bad movie, just a bad, bad gorilla.
Congo (the book) was absolutely terrifying to 11 year old me. The movie was weak.
Amy good gorilla. After the f/x wizardry of Jurassic Park, I was fully not expecting a bunch of guys running around in monkey suits. I’m still baffled by how bad that looked.
They need to make a Pirate Latitudes movie. I know someone else finished it for him, but damn, that was a great book.
If I recall, they found this one finished. Micro was finished by someone else and it showed. I agree a “Pirate Latitudes” movie would be great.
I started Micro without knowing he didn't finish it but I dropped it a third of the way through because it was so bad. It made sense later when I found out he left it unfinished.
Great Train Robbery as well.
Famously wrote jurassic park where an amazing themepark goes wrong and starts killing guests. And also westworld. where an amazing themepark … well, you get the idea
yeah but when Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the Pirates dont eat the tourists.
Condors! If I was to create a flock of condors on this island...
"Don't you see the danger, John, inherent in what you're doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun."
That’s a really fantastic line, I gotta say.
The entire scene is really fantastic.
My favorite scene in the movie which is saying something.
...........did you not see the T-Rex scene? T-Rex go RAWR!!!
"They should all be destroyed" -- Robert Muldoon
"Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should"
The way you capitalized this makes it look like a Fall Out Boy song title
I was about to give Chricton credit for that but I don't think it was in the novel.
In the novel he goes into a spiel about not having to learn from the bottom up, instead you stand on top of the achievements of others, which results in the rush to be first without considering consequences. Same idea, more wordy.
Nonono, this isn't some species that was eradicated by deforestation, or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs *had* their chance and nature *selected* them for extinction.
God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man, man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs. Dinosaurs eat man…woman inherits the earth.” I was too young to understand the brilliance of that line
Clever girl
It is brilliant, and it's true even if you don't believe in God.
I really hate that man.
So many quotes from the first film flit through my head pretty regularly, but that one is the one I hear the most. Rivaled only by "Must go faster."
Hold onto your butts
“Spared no expense”
You should see Pirates of the pancreas, they went really realistic with the pirates
There is no auto pilot, someone will have to stay behind and operate it manually. … … … … Ya this is all my fault, I'll stay. It was a dick move for me to even pause like that.
Like, really rapey, they didn't cover that up
He also got his PhD and wrote ER. MD* apparently
MD*
Yes, he would was going to intern but he started getting noticed for his writing. He was basically a doctor who didn't do two years of interning at a hospital.
Crichton was 6'9", so the themepark hatred makes sense.
Wow, that's a big fucking guy.
And Timeline where an amazing theme park goes ….
Timeline is my favorite Chricton, but it's been a decade and a half since I read that out anything else by him. I wonder if it holds up?
Love Timeline. My favorite so far is Micro. I just picked up Jurassic Park from a secondhand store. Kind of embarrassed it's taken me this long.
I have never met a single person who has read or even heard of micro. It is by far my favourite book he wrote. That said, both of the Jurassic park books are classics
I loved Prey. Great book. I should reread it.
I read Jurassic Park when I was 13 and it blew me away. That lunch scene in the movie that everybody fasts forwards through is the heart of the book imo, where Malcolm and Hammond get into it about the ethics of the park and the future of the planet. So impactful on me at the time, but weird in retrospect knowing how much of a climate change denier he was. Still a great chapter though. I remember reading Timeline and feeling like, "this guy knows how to write action," but I would never read it again. I was also like 12 lol. I recently read Sphere and was overall let down, although the psychological twist took me by surprise (which was fun)! His books don't age well in a lot of areas, particularly in how he writes women and POC. Sphere was cringe because it's about your jungian shadow side and subconscious desires/fears, but his representation of the angry black man deep down wanting to be white or dominate over the white man, and the man-hating lesbian wanting to be beautiful and seductive to control men, was very out of touch / white male POV.
I didn't think about this at the time as a teenager but that's interesting to think back. To be fair, I find most authors are terrible at other gender/racial viewpoints. That's no excuse for Chriton though.
Also The 13th Warrior! But the books called Eaters of the Dead i think.
You are correct. IIRC it came about because of a bet he had with a fellow writer—or maybe it was an English professor, I can't remember now—that "it's impossible to make *Beowulf* entertaining." I thought it was genius to tie it into the historical writings of ibn Fadlan.
Airframe is not about a themepark, but point well taken.
I thought it was called Billy and the Cloneassaurus?
WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!
And Prey, where nanobots are set loose in a themepark...
They predicted the frogs turning gay
Or the time GRR Martins jaw dropped when Steven King told him when he was working on a book he made himself write x number of pages a day.
It's been a while since I've seen that, but I thought king said he wrote 12 pages a day, period, working on a book or otherwise
At his peak, King‘s goal was 3k words a day, which equals about 10 pages. I think nowadays he aims at 1.5k. This is first draft, though. So basically unreadable stream of consciousness vomit to progress the story.
It's also worth noting that at his peak, King was doing enough coke to kill a horse.
And drinking anything with alcohol in it.
Probably not enough to kill a horse. They are very good at metabolizing alcohol.
So I...*shouldn't* play drinking games with a horse?
Well, it’s a free country innit?
He was regularly writing for 12 hours + a day, too, which is absolutely insanely unhealthy in it's own way.
You’ve given me a better context to understand how completely batshit insane one of my friends is. She aims for ~3k-4.5k a day and does not use drugs or drink alcohol. Although she’s likely autistic (her words, not mine) so maybe that has something to do with it.
Of which about half gets edited out
And then it just kinda ends.
Ka is a wheel.
could be it was something like its been ages since i saw the clip
That's wild, I once tried to see how many pages I could reliably write in a day consistently - like I intentionally wrote any and all notes in a journal and just wrote what happened in my day in great detail, and my hand would always cramp up at 12 pages. Weird.
Typing helps. A lot. I could probably type out 20 pages an hour if it was just mindless words. Can't print or handwrite to save my life though.
Here I am in grad school pretty proud I can average 1.5-2 pages in an hour and a half for a research paper, damn dude
Difference between mindless typing and strict grammar, standards, and mapping.
This is why I started to embrace rougher first drafts. Vomit out the ideas, polish that into pearls. If it was a research paper, I’d mark the ideas/concepts and quotes I wanted in my source material, while reading loosely, trying to internalize the ideas… Then I would just spew…I would have the same playlist, like 20 minutes long, and a timer that went off every 5 minutes. 5 minute timer means move on to next idea. I would try to use the 20 minutes to capture one source and my ideas that sprang from that. I would write page number/source for exact quotes. If it was something I wanted to paraphrase, I’d spew that but source it properly. I would still procrastinate on the polish, and fitting things together, which is why I was careful to document my sources so I wouldn’t accidentally plagiarize something. Nothing worse than having to hunt back through source material for a page number or something.
I had an episode and wrote 30000 words of a fantasy novel in three days. In MS word that's about 12 pages and it took me the closest I've ever been to a psychotic break to do that.
Same man. Went into a fugue state and came out 3 days later with a 20 page story that I love to this day
I’m sure GRRM hearing someone say they were able to write a paragraph in a week would send him reeling and wondering how they have any time to do anything else with that much effort.
I crunched the numbers once based on the time passed since the last book to the present day, and the word count of the existing books I forget exactly but it was about a dozen words per day (and falling every day). Edit: okay I mis-remembered. I ran it again and it was 88. This post is mid sixties for context, including the edit.
Worth noting that GRRM has written entire hundred page sequences that he has then ... eliminated entirely in the edit, having to rewrite every bit of it from scratch. GRRMs problem isn't that he doesn't write. It's that he writes without knowing where he's going, writes himself into a corner, and then has to back up hundreds of pages and change everything that follows while working out what he wanted to accomplish to begin with.
Yeah, it was never meant to be a serious critique of his writing process. Just gives perspective about how long it's been.
he also goes on entire tangents and writes side novels instead of working on finishing the main ones.
People rightfully shat on the tv writers of game of thrones, but I thought GRRM got off ridiculously lightly in that whole ordeal. I’m sure they’d have written a better ending, even phoning it in, if the actual author had ANY IDEA HOW THE SERIES ENDS. Granted, I think quite a lot of people could think up a better one than the show got, but it just felt spectacularly sloppy that old George apparently didn’t even have some napkin note idea of what the fuck was going to happen. He had so long. He didn’t even have to finish the series, he just needed to have some kind of rough idea about an end
He even had the audacity to criticize the final seasons for not being his vision. Nobody knows what your vision is George, you never fucking wrote it down.
Imo you can tell he didn’t actually plot the thing—or that if he did, it ran off the rails sometime ago.
There was supposed to be a time skip after Storm of Swords that led straight to Winds of Winter. During the initial draft GRRM decided he was relying on flashbacks too much so he might as well write what happened between Storm and Winds. This resulted in A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons. Writing those books introduced a bunch of new POV characters and subplots and IMO is where things went off the rails.
I agree that Martin got off easy, but I bet that the show ended based on Martin’s general ideas. Like the major notes of how Dany, Bran and Jon all end up do make some sort of sense. The problem both in the show and books is how to you get from point A to point B? At some point shit needs to move along quickly and predictably, which is something Martin seems to struggle to write.
Bran is a much more important character in the books than he was in the show. Same with the wolves. They loved the visuals of the dragons so they spent lots of money on them while ignoring the direwolves and their connection to the Stark children.
How do you even go to comicons if you have to write 3 sentences a day?
They say no one ever died from hard work, but I figured why take the chance.
I'm sure there are some miners from long ago who'd argue otherwise, but I'm no historian.
The legend of John Henry
Yeah surely at least many millions of people have died throughout human history from “hard work.”
Tell that to the Japanese
There’s even a word for it.
No doctor has ever said this lmao
This explains why so many of his books were 90% awesome and then had terrible endings. Andromeda Strain was particularly egregious. Really seemed like he just ran out of juice and phoned the last couple chapters in.
I’ve read quite a few of his books and that ending just pissed me off.
Have you read any Neal Stephenson? Very similar ending styles.
This happens to a lot of authors as they become bigger and have publishers giving them a demanding deadline. If you compare the earlier books of Robert Harris, you see the same thing happen. Books that are an amazing read all the way through have these truncated endings that feel rushed.
You’ve suddenly explained h to r ending of Timeline to me. That makes so much sense!
Whaaaa? The ending to Andromeda strain was perfect? What did you not like about it?
Think about your favorite hero movie. Think about the great storytelling, building up the heroes and villains, and world building. Now imagine that just before the epic battle in the third act, the villain, out of the blue, decides he isn’t bad anymore and just sits down and stops. No city-flattening showdown. No desperate fight for survival. No unleashing the super weapon. No redemption for the heroes. Just ‘hey, good news, the bad guys aren’t bad anymore, the conflict is over, everyone can go home now’. That’s what reading Andromeda Strain was like for me.
Yeah but then at the end didn't it turn out that the infection was present on a spacecraft as well? And that there was a good chance it would kill everyone, implying it was a really good thing that they put so much time into studying it?
Nope. They figured out that it evolved to eat/degrade rubber and it caused a seal to fail on a reentering spacecraft...and then nothing. That's it. Just a whole lot of meh....guess we got lucky.
What part of that isn't super interesting? The strain evolved faster than we could understand it, and ultimately we had to accept we can't be in control of everything. Sometimes that's for the better. It's just another chaos theory book, but one where the chaos doesn't result in total destruction, because if it always ends in total destruction *it isn't chaos*. Loved the end for that reason.
That's just odd, man.
Got up half an hour before he went to bed, and had gravel for breakfast!
work 27 hours a day and when we got home our dad would slice us in two with a bread knife
'Ot gravel?
Luxury!
And you know what happened to him? He died!
Michael Crichton was also 6 feet 9 inches tall. He was a giant.
No wonder he wrote so many scenes in trees. he wanted us to see what he sees
Michael seems a bit obsessive
He was also 6'9, went to Harvard Med School, and quit medicine because he hated dealing with patients.
Aside from Jurassic Park and some of the other novels, one of my favorite things he ever did was coin the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Basically stating: > Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. Reddit is a fantastic place to see this in action. Do you know a hobby or subject matter extremely well? Are you a skateboarder? An engineer? A family lawyer? A bicycle repair shop owner? Do you read through reddit and see insanely dumb and incorrect comments in the subreddit of your expertise? But then you read through other subreddits and think "oh wow that's interesting, who knew?" The Reddit Corollary to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is substantial. I've worked in the same field for 27 years. I'm extremely competent in that field. And I've generally had to stop reading reddit comments in subreddits related to my area of expertise because not only do people post incorrect information, but that information gets UPVOTED and if somebody posts accurate information there, it gets downvoted because the reddit hive mind doesn't think it's accurate or don't want to. And I'm not talking about opinion stuff like politics, I'm talking factual stuff like "these widgets weigh 11 oz each" and somebody else comes in and says "actually those widgets are 11 oz for a dozen so less than an ounce each" and I'm sitting here staring at a scale with a single widget on it weight 11 oz, and ten production process engineering reports that show that our yield rate on 11 oz widgets is 97% accurate +/- .05oz and has been fo seven years. At some point you just stop trying to correct people because they just want to be wrong.
Power engineer here with over a decade of experience working in the industry. The amount of half truths, misunderstood info, and just flat out misinformation i see circlejerked on here is astounding. And just like you said anytime you chine up as an actual industry subject matter expert if you're speaking against the narrative you're showered with downvotes and argued with by teenagers who listened to a podcast once.
I once got told I did not know what I was talking about on a product *I designed* Like, I literally made this product. We spec’d out every widget and bolt and circuit. And when I explained “oh you can easily make that work if you just do this first” I got a four paragraph response from some moron about how it was mechanically impossible because the person had seen the spec sheet. I got so enraged I literally did it myself, took a picture of it, and posted it as the sole response. I got downvoted.
I liked his book Prey.
He was also SUPER sure climate change was fake
That’s the least of his weird beliefs! He truly thought that he could see people’s auras, that he could bend spoons with the slightest touch, and that a cactus spoke to him on a meditation retreat. EDIT: This is all explored in his memoir Travels. It’s a must read for any Crichton fans. It’s part med school memories, thoughtful travelogue, and strange mystical journeys. It’s a really insightful into who the guy was and where his head was at. He reminds me a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle whose fiction was intelligent, sharp, and based on somewhat logical thinking but his private beliefs often delved into the magical, mystic, and scientifically impossible.
If he ate some of that cactus then it might have
IT’S THE QUENCHIEST
Ironic, considering the major themes of his novels tended to be about how human beings were too focused on progress and advancement without giving enough attention to the potential risks and consequences of that same advancement.
Yeah I came in here to see how everyone felt about “State of Fear”. It didn’t really derail me at the time I read it but I only remembered Crichton years later when Pirate Latitudes came out.
State of Fear was the last Chricton book I ever read.
Then he wrote a book about that and gave interviews where he was like “can you believe how these people behave?” as if the people in his book we real.
Ha my wife does that sometimes and it always strikes me odd. Like she gossips about fictional characters
Being super charitable, and its possible he hardened later on, he used to take the stance that regardless of what we did, the earth would survive, but in JP2 (i think) he admits that maybe we won't be on it. So, again being charitable and not knowing where his views ended up, he didn't necessarily deny climate change, but thought of himself as not being an alarmist.
It was the first Jurassic Park novel. Ian Malcolm goes pretty hard on the concept that humanity doesn't have the ability to destroy the planet. He says we could destroy ourselves, we could destroy most life, but it would eventually come back, and it's arrogant to think of ourselves as gods in that way.
That’s not completely wrong. Even with climate change, killing 100% of species on this planet would be an incredibly difficult feat. That’s not to say I doubt our ability to kill 99% of life. My biggest concern is that we do thoroughly wipe ourselves out in a manner that the next intelligent species won’t have any records of our mistakes, and end up repeating our same errors
State of Fear came out a decade after The Lost World and is a novel that is staunchly against climate change being real. even has a bibliography of sources supporting his position
Yup, fantastic ideas man, I got into reading because of him, but zero characters and the more you find out about this guy… well, just don’t find out.
I stopped reading his books after Jurassic Park. His female characters were either annoying, dumb or both. Even female characters that were supposed to be smart did something incredibly stupid at the worst possible time. And the worst part was that Crichton attributed that to some type of scientific principle that assures the female will make a nonsensical choice in a crucial moment. Clearly, the man had a lot of female-directed resentment.
Crichton was divorced four times, so it sounds like he was an asshole to women in real-life as well.
That explains Timeline, possibly the worst book ever written. Spoiler: a spooky, mysterious corporation invents time travel, but to what nefarious end? Well, at the end it’s revealed they sent a bunch of people back to medieval France so that they can gather data faithfully recreate a medieval castle which will be a theme park. Because what the public want with theme parks is painstaking accuracy. That’s it. I still can’t believe it.
What is it with this guy and theme parks?
Oh my God I started reading that book in jail and it was so boring i stopped reading it. You know how boring jail is?
I read the entire bible.
I did that too, but I wasn't in jail... I was in a cult...
This thread is just… I love reddit.
What was worse, the book or the Dementors?
Wow
It’s literally that. >Upon their return, they learn that Robert Doniger (the rich corporate supervillain scientist) plans to use his time travel technology to transform historical moments into tourist attractions. https://www.supersummary.com/timeline/summary/ Immediately after finishing I came to Reddit to vent and found everybody bloody loves the book. I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t think it’s fab, meanwhile I’m still flawed by how bad it was. Bizarre.
I mean, bad guys wanting to turn things that shouldn't be attractions into amusement parks IS kind of his thing. I'm not really sure what you expected the bad guys master plan would be. I always liked the reveal that time travel was more akin to a fax machine with a shredder than a postal service delivery- *you* didn't get sent back in time, rather, you were copied, destroyed and an exact replica of you was formed at the end point. Every time you 'travelled', you killed yourself. As I've been exposed to more things I've realized that that wasn't a totally unique idea in the time travel space, but it was my first time seeing that explanation and kinda blew my mind. For the longest time, I've considered Timeline one of my favorite MC books. I haven't read it since I was like.. 15 though. I do wonder how it holds up.
I don't think you've got it right. It's been a while but from what I remember, the company wanted to sell 'going back in time and witnessing the past' as a form of entertainment because people have gotten bored of manufactured entertainment, which Chrichton was right about, to a degree.
Are all of his books about theme parks?
No wonder he died so young. Also, he created ER.
The guy was a genius. I met him at a charity event and we talked about some aspects of molecular biology. We had a slight disagreement about something and he quoted me from some 20 year old paper. He even gave me authors so I could look it up. I told him that science has been superseded in the last ten years but I couldn’t give him any citations. He still disagreed because he could cite the papers. Later, I looked up his references and he had quoted them word for word! To his credit, he looked up what I said and emailed me thanking me for updating his knowledge.
He was so god damn smart. On top of writing Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Sphere, Congo, he also created ER. Incredible mind with a wonderful scientific bg with a knack for writing. A very rare combination
And westworld!
That’s a great story.
My husband has a bladder like that….
Prey his best work can’t believe there hasn’t been a movie yet
Man I loved Sphere, still my favorite book.
Crighton is having a bit of a resurgence with Millennials revisiting their parents books.
Aside from a mental giant, he was also a literal one at 6’ 9” 🫢
... Just like, write, eat a bagel for some inspiration, damn. I'm not sleeping for 5 hours. Only for my videogame addiction... Okay that does sound worse.
I was a huge Crichton fan as a teen and the Andromeda Strain he directed is still one of my favorite movies. One of my favorite books of his was his auto biography Travelers.
Wow TIL I don’t have trouble sleeping, I am just on the “Crichton schedule” lmfao 💀