Michael Crichton and Computers
michaelcrichton.com
michaelcrichton.com
Glad someone enjoyed it, I may have been too picky.
But I still love Sphere, The Lost World, and so many more. I even love Disclosure, with its hilarious take on virtual reality file storage.
I gave up on him after http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2006/12/michael_crichto.ht...
It's so dirty and underhanded. He seemed like a really interesting guy from the window of his books. Perhaps he just got a little off track at the end there.
If you gave me the option of:
A) Having a person publicly criticize my work saying things such as: "I found a man who has long yearned for intellectual stature beyond the realm of killer dinosaurs and talking monkeys"
B) An author will write a d-bag into one of his novels and say he went to the same college and works in the same field as me.
I find "A" much more appalling.
B) is an underhanded rhetorical trick. "Hi, i'm bob, let me tell you a story about Moe. For convienence, Moe looks talks and acts just like Joe. Moe is a child molester."
See, there's this internal conflict, either the mythical Moe is just like Joe, and Joe is a child molester, or Moe isn't just like Joe.
Just stand up and say Joe sucks. Leave Joe out of the story you're trying to tell.
Amazing science fiction author, but possibly not a great person. Those can both be true.
It isn't like Chrichton defiled some serious work of journalism or science by slipping in this personal vendetta; as Crowley aptly points out, Chrichton's works are mass-market novels about 'killer dinosaurs and talking monkeys'.
So what's the harm? Books like that need despicable minor characters to set the tone, and I think this is perfectly fine way to say, "Fuck you, Michael Crowley!" It's his novel, after all.
Also, after reading Crowley's article[1] that so incensed Crichton, I think he probably does have a small penis^W^W^W^W^W^W^W it is not very good. (Neither are Crichton's books, although I probably read most of them in the pre-kindle days when you had to buy a paperback at the airport before a long flight.)
[1]: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/michael-crichtons-scaries...
I once read an obscure sci-fi novel where the bad guy was an evil physicist named Edward Teller, who wanted to destroy the world with his invention, the hydrogen bomb. No relation to the real-world Edward Teller, of course. All characters in the novel were fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, was purely coincidental. It said so right in the front of the book...
For example, if in an otherwise realistic military thriller, the hero finds the runway blocked by a tank, so he throws his F-16 into reverse and takes off backwards, that would completely take me out of the story, destroy the suspension of disbelief, and ruin (or at least severely degrade) the book.
Some of Crichton's books do that for me, as does almost every movie in which they use computers, and the computers are all like, bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep! whzzzzt! and sounding like R2D2 with every normal user interface action, such as scrolling text and opening windows.
But I also share his concern with the politicization of science.
I remember his protagonist, scientist who is busting the myth/propaganda in the story, lives in a 900 sq ft. home. Juxtaposed against the lavish life style of those who are propagating 'climate change'.
Crichton is a writer who takes a very macro view of the timeline. Lets not forget, he wrote Jurrasic Park, and hence the entire franchise owes him that credit.
In this book, he says that this micro environmental changes, don't matter when compared to macro stuff like Ice age, which happens every some 10,000s of years.
Also he gives a lot of data in the book. For e.g. Historical temperature charts of various cities etc. to make his case of 'climate change' being over-rated & driven by ulterior motives, than substantive in itself on merits to call such a drastic action.
I am just a layman on this. But truth be told, the book did impress me at that time. Which is not a long time ago. And please understand, I am totally not a nutcase who denies science.
It seems that Crichton always had a problem with endings. He always wrote 90% of a book and then vomited up the last two chapters.
For example, I'm not terribly fond of the way Stephen King ends his stories, especially the longer ones. J.K. Rowling also always seems to hurry too much at the end of her books. And both are much better writers than Crichton.
http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/george-orwell-got-a-b-at-...
Well, I remember this one English 101 instructor. No one in the class could please this guy. His favorite saying was, "I don't grade on the curve, because I've had too many stupid classes!" We all nervously laughed, but we were scared. Everyone seemed to try, but all our papers were given back with so much red felt tip graffiti; everyone just wanted to get through his class. We just wrote short choppy sentences, and tried to keep the grammatical errors down. He once had the nerve to say, "Most of you are passing, but your papers are so boring!" I remember thinking, whenever we get slightly creative, you beat the hell out of our papers? I personally think he would have liked to fail all of us, but he didn't have tenure? Well I got through class, but with some horrid memories.
Well, I needed four, or five (He taught us to write out numbers under 10. I'm still not sure about that, but do it out of fear) English classes in order to graduate. I took all the courses in my last semester of college. My other instructors were great. This one guy scared me so much, I just figured everyone in the English department was like this guy. Well, they weren't.
The other instructors were great. They weren't easy, but sincerely wanted to help. I had one instructor tell us I've met very few natural writers. It's a craft. Yes, like woodworking. (It wasn't a cliche back then.) I'll always remember that advice. Plus--he told us his personal story. When he was in school he hated writing, but with the right training, and encouragement, he went from a science major, to a Engish major. I think he had a PhD, but didn't want us to call him doctor. He had such a thick Indian accent, I really had to pay attention in class, but learned more in one week in his course than all the rest. I forget his name, but I remember him saying, "My name rhymes with Desi--from the Lucy show." He was a really good person/teacher.
There were at least two people inside Crichton's head, maybe more.
The article is from 1999, based on this quote from the article.
"The book features relatively new advances in the computing/scientific community, such as artificial life, emergence (and by extension, complexity), genetic algorithms, and agent-based computing."
That'd be like saying Dolly the Sheep was pioneering in ideas about cloning humans. The ideas/ethics/concerns were around for decades. That average people willfully ignored them doesn't make the ideas new.
The book is kind of about that, but also about technology. It was published in 1994 and I would say it was futuristic, if not a bit misguided.
Crichton envisioned a virtual reality tool where -- if you wanted to find a certain file on your computer -- you would run down the halls of a huge virtual library, opening virtual filing cabinets and picking through files by hand. I think this was supposed to make finding your digital files "easier"... but seems hilarious now.
Who knows, maybe some version of that will still come true. It's been a while since I read it, so I might be mis-remembering.
Almost all of his books had some futuristic technology involved, including Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Timeline, etc.
I don't remember much about the plot, but can't ever forget that VR. <curmudgeon>The trends in "expressive" animated interface design make me think that dystopian future is still an aspiration for some designers. Just as soon as we all get headsets...</curmudgeon>
We might not have to traverse miles of virtual hallways, but a lot of designers still seem to prefer to make us flick our fingers a lot. Each of us probably scrolls through hundreds of feet of virtual space every day. Before long, we'll probably begin to hear about whatever the index finger equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome is.
But at least we don't have to swing our arms in midair for 8 hours a day like the poor folks in Minority Report.
Also, the Gunslinger vision https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jCDQvNh85Y mentioned in the article isn't just the first use of CGI in a feature film, it's surely also a very early, for all I know maybe the first, attempt to show the "first-person view" Umwelt of an artificially intelligent robot.
Among other important uses:
* the widespread use of computers for nearly complete automation of the park--maintaining feeds (to a certain extent), automatically delivering medicine, etc. These systems were buggy, but it was a major early demonstration of how computers could be used to automate out many jobs.
* Think the Internet-of-Things but for tracking hundreds of dinosaurs in xyzt space around the park using image recognition from hundreds of distributed sensors/cameras around the park.
* They had several Cray XP supercomputers in order to help with DNA sequencing.
* Ian Malcolm studied chaos theory--a field that is reliant on numerical simulations (rather than pure pen-and-paper calculation).
As a slight spoiler to the book: human hubris in building incredibly complex biological systems under the control of relatively simple technological systems is what led to the downfall of the park.
Still, I sometimes wonder if they feel any remorse.