Prey is one of a very small number of books I never managed to finish because it scared me at the time.
Glad someone enjoyed it, I may have been too picky.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.