Rhode Island is 30 miles wide? Tell me again why it gets to be a state?
I should hasten to add that I don’t think he’s just content to get his notions out there, I suspect he’s also promoting them, or hoping to, which is the natural aim of any storyteller.
His books sell.
His screenplays sell.
What does that say for those who buy them?
Well, some of it is pretty decent fiction of the junky variety, and has earned a respectable place next to the Stephen Kings and the John Grishams of the world. It doesn’t say much of anything except that the buyers like a good yarn for the beach or the NY-to-LA flight to pass the time.
I rather liked Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, and found the movie adaptation of the former to be great popcorn fun. The trouble with these sorts of authors is when they do their thing right, it’s very entertaining; but when they do it wrong, it’s so very wrong. Those two or three really good stories get their hooks in, and it takes at least twice that many really shitty stories before the poor consumer finally gives up. You just want so badly for the next one to be as fun as the last one that you can’t quite resist dropping the five bucks on the paperback and giving the author yet another chance to redeem themselves. We’re like battered spouses, always going back to the abuser.
Well, if the glacier is about 4 miles wide and 40 miles long, that gives it an area of about 160 square miles.
The area of Rhode Island is 1,214 square miles.
Is that close?
Why should size be the only criteria?
At least Rhode Island’s population breaks the 1 million barrier. Seven other states have fewer people than that.
Not when a whole page of MLA format citations is part of a footnote to dialogue.
Sometimes Crichton gets facts wrong even though they have nothing to do with his political opinions nor with streamlining the story so they it moves faster even though the facts are wrong. For instance, in Timeline he has a character who is a “Regius Professor at Yale.” A Regius Professor is only a title in British universities. That should be obvious if you think about it for a second, since “regius” means something related to the king or queen. Crichton had obviously read the words “Regius Professor” several years before writing the book and thought they sounded kind of cool, although he didn’t understand exactly what they meant. Checking out facts himself is apparently boring to Crichton, so he couldn’t be bothered to look them up. He’s also too cheap to just hire a researcher to fact-check his books and apparently editors don’t care whether he’s correct in anything, so they don’t bother to edit his works.
Of course, hiring a bunch of researchers doesn’t always keep you out of trouble either.
Just ask Stephen Ambrose.
I think his books start out as treatments for possible screenplays. The real goal is the movie, and sometimes the book works as a book, and sometimes it doesn’t, but who cares? If he can generate enough book sales that can be used to help the movie, well, thats where the money is.
That said, I still like him. Even when he is so/so Airframe, or bad, like TimeLine, he is a good on vacation type read. I think that he has a habit of presenting totally bogus/created for the book “facts” in a believable, scientific manner (remember, he is a doctor). So is he wrong, or deliberately recreating the universe to fit his story?
Give me a so/so Michael Chricton over a so/so Stephen King.
I once saw a New Yorker cartoon: It shows an airport bookstore called “King and Crichton,” which sells nothing but, well, King and Crichton.
Oh, come on! At least King’s worst stuff reads like a human being wrote it!
Dude, we have 56 COUNTIES bigger than Rhode Island.
whistlepig in Montana
And 54 people to live in them.
