My Beef with Crichton

Author Michael Crichton yesterday died yesterday after losing a battle with cancer, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone.  I do have some gripes with the man’s art though.  I enjoyed some of his early novels, especially those featuring dinosaurs.  Over the last few years though, it seemed that he had an axe to grind that I was not on board with.  I wrote a full length diatribe about it two years ago.

Some highlights of my lack of appreciation:

• Crichton wins a “journalism” award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists for his fictional climate change-denying door stop State of Fear
• Crichton settles a score with a critic by making him a child rapist in his novel Next (read this article about the matter to learn the “small penis rule” of libel
• A trend piece about including a bibliography in novels includes this: Readers are often impressed with his bibliography, Mr. Crichton added. “People will often say to me, ‘Oh my goodness, look how many books you’ve read,’ ” he said.

On the plus side, I came across the completely unrelated Strunk and White Elements of Spam while searching the archives for this post.