Did anyone read that one Crichton book, you know, with the emergency or mystery caused by greed and technology and the wacky mismatched team of experts called in to do something about it, which almost distroys the world, but is just barely averted? Yeah, that was a good one…
I write Crichton off when they used a Cray computer to do the real-time control for Jurassic Park (in the book). Gene sequencing maybe, but Cray’s were not designed to open and close doors and monitor temperatures.
There are lots of other technical groaners as well.
My problem are the endings. Too many of his books are going along, going along, going along, leading up to it, here it comes, climax on the way, oh my god, here it comes, and… NOTHING.
The ends just happen. The heroes rarely save the day. They rarely even face their final showdown with whatever’s going on. Either the virus mutates into something harmless, or they get off the island pretty easily or whatnot.
Lame endings. Great concepts. Lame endings.
And yeah, bad use of technology.
Speaking of Fatal Flaws, I just read Prey. Hey, I was in the hospital with nothing to do, and someone gave it to me. Anyway, in that book, the company creates nanobots, gives them solar powered batteries to make them more independent, programs them to behave like predators, then pumps pounds and pounds of them out into the desert to see what happens. Brilliant! Of course, they assumed that they wouldn’t be able to spontaneously come up with the half-dozen fundamental improvements that allowed them to survive and reproduce out there, which, if they weren’t in a Crichton novel, would have been a perfectly good assumption.
I think I’ve only read three Chricton novels: Jurassic Park, The Lost World, and Eaters of the Dead.
I liked JP, despite some very annoying, even lame, attempts at explaining the alleged science behind the premise. For example, who in the hell would think to use frog DNA, of all critters, to fill in the gaps in dino DNA? Option number one would have been bird, option two would have been crocodile. If you’re really desperate, use some other fricken’ reptile’s DNA.
The Chaos Theory stuff seemed a bit off to me, too. Malcolm contends that you can’t control the park because of all sorts of chaos theory mumbo-jumbo, yet he still ultimately predicts that teh park will fail - I would think that if a system is truly chaotic, you can’t make any prediction about its final state, so he couldn’t have “known” that it would fail any more than Hammond, et al., could “know” that it would work. Besides which, Malcolm was only proven right because of Nedry’s actions, and those actions had nothing at all to do with the park set-up itself.
The Lost World sucked at least five kinds of ass, so isn’t worth discussing. I have only one thing to say about it: where the heck did he get that lame “chameleonic ceratosaurs” idea?!
Eaters of the Dead, I liked. No goofy science, just some goofy pseudo-history.
Chrichton would be just fine if he did more research. He would also be fine if he did less research. His fundamental problem is that he does enough research to make his stories sound plausible, but not enough to make them correct. To someone with no background in mathematics, Jurassic Park’s chaos theory would seem reasonable. To someone with no knowledge of solid-state electronics, the diamonds in Congo sound good. Et cetera. But once you do have any understanding of what he’s talking about, the holes are glaring.
Just goes to show ya’! Diff’runt strokes and all that. The guy is my favorite contemporary author and I’m always looking forward his next novel.
My favorites would be Airframe, Congo and The Great Train Robbery.
Plus, if you tried to do it the way he described it, the “gaps” would constitute roughly 99.9999% of the genome. It’s like trying to reconstruct Moby Dick from the words “ship”, “the”, and a few assorted vowels, and filling in the rest with, say, War and Peace.
Congo was a bit of a watershed book for me. I read it in my junior year in high school. At the time, I was reading a lot of stuff I’d turn my nose up at today. Endless, multi-volumed, bible-thick fantasy series. Dungeons and Dragons novelizations. Piers Anthony. You know, real crap.
Then I read Congo. For the first time in my life, I finished a book, put it down, and thought, “Jesus, what a waste of my time.” For very possibly the first time in my life, I wished I had done something other than read a book. (Okay, in fairness, I mostly wished I had read a different book. Incidentally, I didn’t date much in high school.) That book changed the way I looked at reading. Suddenly, I wanted quality. I was a nascent book snob. By that summer, I had given up entirely on any book that had originally been a movie, television show, or video game. By the time I graduated, I was pretty much only reading “classic” science fiction. By the time I was in college, I was a Lit. major, and would read Henry James recreationly.
And then, after six years of college literature courses, I finally got my degree…
…and spent that summer reading nothing but Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton. My God, they sucked, but I didn’t care. No subtext! No allegory! No need to interpret, analyze, or discuss! No thought needed at all! Good God, that was bliss.
So, I can’t say as I hate Michael Crichton. Godawful author, no doubt about it. But it doesn’t really take much skill to make a twinkie, you know? And while there’s a lot to criticize about a twinkie, there’s really not much point to it, is there? It is what it is, and it doesn’t really pretend to be anything else.
And I don’t care what you say, I’ll take a twinkie over Henry James any day of the week.
I’ve performed forensic investigations for the chemical industry. His description of an FAA investigation is probably very accurate - following the same logic applied in my line of work. Later in the book, the storyline completely falls apart as he goes off on a tangent against the press. For Chriton’s sake, man! Stick to being a novelist! Also, the reason the plane failed, IIRC, was such a lame reason - as if he forgot his original premise! It’s a shame he had to blow such a good start for a story!
IMHO,
- Jinx
Gah, yeah, TM was the book that turned me off of Crichton when it first came out. He was asking me to believe that the scientist was so anxious to put his theories and technologies into practice that he would pick the one person that would be the absolute worst subject, considering his obvious and well documented paranoia about mind control. Sheesh.
Nobody has mentioned Disclosure or Prey, both of which I liked. I enjoyed Jurassic Park when I read it, too, but that’s been some time ago. I wouldn’t be a good critic, I suppose, because I don’t dissect a book. I either like it or I don’t. I’m half way through Airframe right now, and I’m enjoying that, too.
Then again, I enjoy Sue Grafton, too, so you can draw whatever conclusions you wish about my taste. If I’m reading novels I want to be entertained. If I have to suspend disbelief once in a while I can do that.
Someone in chat suggested that instead of banning people, we should still allow them to post, but make it so no one else can see their posts. That way, the only way they’d know they were banned would be by noticing that everyone seemed to ignore them.
If I’ve been secretly banned, someone please email me!
…I look at Chaos Theory as “predictable unpredictability”… we will never be able to predict the weather in three months time thanks to that cursed butterfly flapping its wings over Siberia, but we can pick patterns, we can spot trends.
I have worked in a couple of large organisations before-and both could be viewed as chaotic systems… in one organisation, systems were redundant, supervisors and management were well trained, everything was done in a systematic manner. When one part of the system failed, redundant systems would take over to ensure the whole system didn’t fall over…
…in the other organisation, supervisors did their own things, management ignored the manual, there were no systems in place and nothing was redundant. Both of the systems were chaotic, one was more organised than the other, by analysing the relationships withn both chaotic systems it would be fairly easy to predict that one of them would fail, and why…
I loathe Chrichton. He basically rips off plotlines that have been in science fiction for decades and repackages them as get-rich-quick technothrillers made for the movies. He’s scum.
You MUST be joking…the crew of the Nostromo was LIKEABLE???
It’s been mentioned a couple of times already, but I’ll always be grateful to Crichton for The Great Train Robbery. Wonderful quick read. And there the lack of “flesh” on the characters is by design and works well within the book.
Hey, now, I thought Timeline pulled off the perfect hat trick.
Crappy book, crappy movie, AND crappy computer game. All three were roughly at the same level of quality.
That’s consistency for you.
While reading Timeline, it occured to me “this would make a great crappy movie”.
Do yourself a favor and don’t bother - instead get Beowulf, of which Eaters of the Dead is just a rehash. I agree that The 13th Warrior was pretty good, tho.
Snicks