Too tame a complaint for the Pit …
I’m reading “State of Fear”, Michael Crichton’s latest just to kill time. He’s talking about a glacier and falls into the hackneyed phrase that it’s the size of Rhode Island. In fact, he says “It’s 4 miles wide and 40 miles long. It’s the size of Rhode Island.”
DUDE, Rhode Island is 30 miles wide!
Sheesh, for someone who seems to do a lot of research for his books he gets the simplest things wrong.
Gah.
I think he’s smart enough . . . The Great Train Robbery was a very informative portrait of early-Victorian Britain . . . but what a bloodless, cold fish! It’s just about impossible to give a shit about his characters! I think he is fundamentally, constitutionally incapable of writing a compelling love scene. The closest he’s ever come is the sexual-harassment scene in Disclosure.
I remember really enjoying watching the movie version of The Andromeda Strain. Years later, I picked up the book. For once, the movie was better than the book! The book read, to me, like a movie script. Seriously, it felt as if Crichton knew before he started writing that it was going to be made into a movie, and so he went ahead and just wrote a screenplay instead of a novel.
The man is a hack, but he is certainly not dumb.
Dammit, Euty, he’s a doctor, not a cartographer. 
I think it was just an expression that he had one of his characters utter. Don’t take it so literally. Any more than I would think that the OP is dumb because it suggests that RI is a perfect rectangle, which it ain’t. In reality it’s got lots of islands and a jagged coastline, which is probably longer than Alaska’s. Just exagerrating on that last point, BTW, I know Alaska has more coastline.
Maybe the total area for RI and the glaciar are close?
While we’re at it, one of my favorite quotes is from that book. In the appendix, he says something like: I have more respect for people who change their point of view to take into account new information than I do for people who have the same opinion for thirty years.
And he’s certainly not dumb. He’s achieved excellence in several different fields.
I remember reading not too long ago that his IQ is 180. Say what you will about the efficacy of IQ tests, but I’ve never known of anyone testing in that range who turned out to be anywhere near a dunce.
I just finished the book. My biggest complaint is that I couldn’t give a rat’s patootie what happens to any of the characters. I did enjoy the fact that he actually put references in his writing; his writing style was only a little better than Dan Brown, but he’s light years ahead in terms of actual content.
After reading Timeline I vowed never to give Crichton another minute of my life. What dreck.
Crichton has written some of the better airport books I’ve ever read; both “Jurassic Park” and “Airframe” were quite good, and “Prey” had its moments, although it ended too many times. But when he’s bad, he’s awful; I second that “Timeline” was horrible, despite a promising start.
Whatever else you can say about him, he introduces neat elements into his stories. I’d rather read Crichton at his worst than John Grisham at any time.
I like how he recycles his plots, turning Westworld into Jurassic Park, for example.
Crichton was probably alluding to the events in his novel The Woonsocket Agenda, in which a team of shortsighted physicists create a quantum tunneling device to enlarge Rhode Island to visible size. It turns out that this reckless project is funded by an evil corporation seeking to manipulate real estate values in Massachusetts and Connecticut. The main characters find themselves caught in the middle of all this, and discuss the situation at length, but never actually manage to accomplish anything, and eventually the situation sorts itself out.
Having read a fair few of his novels, I think you hit the nail on the head Brain. Bloodless. Cold fish. Yeah. I think that’s why The Great Train Robbery works so well, and all the others feel like something is lacking. GTR is a historical study of someone who was a brilliant cold fish. You follow my thinking?
Intriguing… but how does the theme park figure in?
Crichton is definitely smart, and works with interesting ideas, but is clueless as a fiction writer. He tends to introduce a character with a one- or two-paragraph thumbnail personality profile, and then apparently considers his characterization chore to have been completed. Also, he uses ideas that have been developed for years, sometimes decades earlier, by genre science fiction writers, and seems to think nobody ever thought of them before. Possibly I’m being a bit harsh, and I haven’t read his entire canon, so I may be off-base.
I felt the same way about Airframe. It didn’t strike me so much as a novel as a description of the investigation of a plane crash, with narrative aspects thrown in so it would be labeled “fiction.”
I think that Crichton frequently gets his facts wrong. It’s not that he’s stupid. I suspect the problem is that he’s often lazy. A lot of his books seem like they’re based on newspaper articles that he read five years before that he uses the facts from without bothering to check if they’re accurate or even if he’s remembered them correctly. Crichton just doesn’t care about putting in any hard work on his books. Writing passible fiction and picking up random facts is so trivial for him (and so easy to do without thought) that he doesn’t understand that writing a first-rate novel (and not just a potboiler) and doing the research to get his facts straight (as opposed to just dropping in some vaguely remembered tidbits) are hard work.
Crichton drives me nuts for two reasons:
The characters do not talk like human beings. This is only symptom of poor characterization, but usually I can handle poor characterization. It’s when find myself rereading lines of dialog three or four times, thinking, “What the hell??? I can’t believe he said that! Who the hell would say that?” that I feel my suspension of disbelieve draining, draining away . . .
What Baldwin says. I find it puzzling that writers whose work is considered “mainstream” rather than “science fiction” can succeed in the marketplace by writing unimaginative, uninteresting science fiction that’s 10 years behind the state of the genre art. I guess that the public at large doesn’t “get” science fiction, and in the same way, I don’t “get” what the public at large is looking for in a novel.
The guy is my favorite contemporary author. I’ll rush out and buy his hardcover editions because I don’t want to wait for the paperback.
Diff’runt strokes and all that, I guess. 
I think sometimes it’s because he wants to promulgate a certain point of view, and facts just get in the way. It’s fiction, so he’s free to do that. Trouble is, in the oppinion of many, myself included, that point of view often stinks on “allegedly”-disappearing-ice.
What do you think the odds are that he vanity searches various boards on occasion?
Hey Mike, sup?