Michael Crichton, Science Studies, and the Technothriller (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Michael Crichton, Science Studies, and the Technothriller (2015)

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35 pointsHooke37 comments

I highly recommend Michael Crichton’s autobiography, ‘Travels’. It chronicles his time beginning in med school, where he began writing on a whim, to his post-fame struggles. Time periods are framed in short stories that are entertaining and thought provoking. I never would have guessed he even had an autobiography and now I find myself reading it once a year.

Sometimes all it takes is one novel to lose all respect for an author and any pretence about their relationship to science. One that's not mentioned in this article. State of Fear, which had the added bonus of being a novel with dozens of charts and graphs and incredibly heavy going. He should have stuck with the sillier stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear

It's one of my favorite books. The economic model discussed in there tells us lot about humanity. Everyone with an openmind should give it a read.

The biggest demonstration of the model you can see today in, environmentalist opposing nuclear power

It's a fiction. Liking the author is optional, even if one likes the book.

I do think there is heavy politicization of climate science going on, when reporting science to the public. For example, reporting is increasingly confident, while science is not. Climate sensitivity estimate hasn't improved at all for >10 years between TAR(2001) and AR5(2014), it's still from 1.5 to 4.5 C. Where is confidence coming from? Repeating things over and over should not make one more confident.

Why would you say that scientific confidence is increasing? The only change that I have noticed is that the public is slowly deciding that the believe the scientists. The public includes journalists from the scientist's perspective.

I loved the book, but I utterly repudiate his denialist position espoused in it. It feels to me like loving Ian Fleming but abhoring the sexism inherent in James bond. Michael Chrichton wrote pot-boiler thrillers really well and to relax on a long flight I still read them, including this one but the climate denialism is a royal pain.

He wasn't a denialist. In the afterword he explicitly said he believed in a warming climate, and that the climate would warm by 0.8-ish degrees (somewhat tongue-in-cheek, referencing all the confidence that is espoused by the research). What he objected to was CO2 as the driving force -- his research led him to believe that the urban heat island effect had more impact.

I enjoyed the likes of Jurassic Park, Timeline, The First Great Train Robbery hugely. Found State of Fear too much like hard work.

I think I might be similarly disappointed with Fleming if he had held a well publicised stance about equality and women's rights through his career, and then put out James Bond. Course the Bond movies were very different to the books.

You should definitely read Sphere and Prey if you haven't!

Also avoid the Timeline movie at all costs unless you are trapped on a flight.

I rather liked the timeline book, but it's juvenalia. I liked his reasoned (if entirely hypothetical) comments about the mistakes we make visualising the past as white, because we see whitewashed walls, when they were probably as polychromatic as they could be in the circumstances. And I liked his characterisation of the poor as probably predating everyone they could, not some robin-hood fantasy of nice people waiting for gifts of food. But the whole quantum foam and nasty scientist at home angle was just trashy. Geniuses like this don't rise to the top of corporations. Oh wait.. hang on...

I did like the Timeline book as well, but I read it at around 13.

It did really change a lot of images I had of the period though. One thing that sticks out in my memory was a comment on how much distance the average serf could cover in a day from walking since it was their only mode of transportation.

The movie, though, is just completely middling. It's not bad enough to be fun but not good enough to be exciting. I watched it on a plane, which adds two points to any score I would give a movie, but if I was at home I would have probably turned it off after 45 minutes.

Prey and Timeline are two of my favorite. Micro (which was finished by another author after Crichton's death) is also very good an dissimilar to Prey.

Since I like Timeline so much it made watching the movie so painful.

Scepticism not denialism.

This feels like the get-out clause from heck. He didn't care that his line of argument was destructive, and he had a lawyer-thin "but I didn't mean it" escape hatch. He also had a pulpit, mass-market reach. He turned it into a bit of a bully-pulpit.

But the effect of state of fear was small I think. Reality asserted itself: there was no grant conspiracy, we don't use vibra-belts from failed west coast gyms to try and shake a quake out of PNG islands, the cannibals retreated into the hills and eat each other when dead, not alive, carbon fibre spools are used to short out Iraqi power stations, not to make lightning target campers...

OTOH, he gave us Jurassic Park, that likely influenced legions of kids to be interested in Science and Biology.

I think this book and movie actually started the whole movement where the first HN or reddit comment on any breakthroguh is basically saying what could go wrong. And it sours the rest of the discussion trying to recover from that top comment.

The majority of the world now believes that scientific breakthroughs offer more harm than good.

Although "State of Fear" was horrible, it really isn't inconsistent with the rest of his novels. Crichton never liked science and scientists. It and they are always villains in his books. The heroes always have to destroy the findings so the world won't know of the new discovery of genetic engineering, nanotech, time travel, alien artifacts, etc.

State of Fear is a great eye opening book. The parts about how the news media exists to keep is scared is very enlightening and true.

My personal favourite conspiracy theory is that Michael Crichton was actually murdered by the “fear industry” because he hit too close to the truth with that book.

I don’t actually believe it, but the timeline works out so nicely. I keep waiting for the crazy people to take up the story and run with it, but thus far nobody has.

Which particular charts and graphs did you take issue with? It's great to see critical takes on anything but they're fairly pointless (we're anonymous here) unless you offer some reason to believe. For all I know all his data was cherry-picked to fit an anti-CAGW agenda but someone merely claiming this doesn't make me any the wiser.

a very good book, one of his best. it wouldn't cause so much butthurt if it wasn't relevant

His legacy will be that he was one of the most impactful climate deniers who influenced so many, including politicians and presidents, to ignore the issue of global warming precisely when there was still time to fix it.

There's a good chance those climate deniers would've gotten to the same point without Crichton. You can probably train a machine learning algorithm and see that there are traits that are highly correlated with climate denialism. If some person has (some of) these traits, then reading Crichton is only a trigger, but absent that there will be plenty of other triggers that will lead to the same conclusion.

yeah, it's called actually taking science seriously, but not being stuck in a false paradigm

> traits that are highly correlated with climate denialism

Sure. Since it is socially so much easier to be a secretly skeptic climate congregationist than an open climate denier, I'd bet one such correlated trait would be extreme honesty.

I wonder if he would still be a denier today. A lot has changed since he died, and I think the evidence is much clearer now. It’s easy to forget that.

I have trouble taking Michael Crichton's stories seriously partly because of his odd obsession with theme parks.

In Westworld, androids indistinguishable from humans are used for an amusement park. In Jurassic Park, it's engineering of fossil DNA to recreate dinosaurs that is used for a theme park and in Timeline, if I recall correctly, the first idea of a billionaire who manages to develop time-travelling technology is to use it to open a medieval theme park.

Given any of those technology, I think this kind of use would lie pretty low on the list of either interesting or profitable things to do...

Among his 25+ fiction books plus screenplays, Crichton wrote just two books (Jurassic Park, The Lost World) and one screenplay (Westworld) about theme parks. Not sure how that's an obsession, especially he had to be talked into writing The Lost World by Steven Spielberg, who wanted source material for a sequel movie.

I don't recall enough about Timeline to recall that plot element, though I remember thinking it was a weak novel in general. But I consider Sphere and Andromeda Strain his best novels and neither are about parks.

Andromeda Strain is amazing and is one of my favourite books.

Another overlooked work of Crichton's is his screenplay for Looker, which covers and pretty much predicts our media-obsessed society. Oh, and synthetic humans replacing live ones on TV.

I had to read a Michael Chrichton novel called 'Timeline' for a college course once. Its insulting to have been raised in a society which perceives this author with so much cachet ... Calling his writing 'not good' is ... overly generous.

I haven't read it, but enjoyed The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park. Perhaps I have no taste. What's so bad about his writing?

I never read the book but the 1971 Andromeda Strain movie is still one of my favorite moves.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066769/

Eaters of the Dead is one of my favourite books. Quasi-historical mixture of vikings, arab travellers and Beowulf.

Timeline wasn't his best. As Ant-Man and The Wasp lampoons in the subgenre, there is a habit of just throwing the word "quantum" on things instead of explaining them.

Most of his other premises are much more grounded. Some are actually fiction and not science fiction. In general, he finds something technical and complex he enjoys and finds ways to explain them through a narrative, often with unintended consequences as a unifying theme.

I'd call him a prose stylist at least as good as JK Rowling; but I suppose that's the textbook example of damning with faint praise...

Also, SF authors don't have societal cachet. Joan Didion has cachet. Tom Wolfe has cachet. Arthur Miller has cachet. Kazuo Ishiguro has cachet.

At best, SF authors have...an audience.

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