Word: crichton
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...worth $5 billion to the right buyer." There is popularity in a passage like that. It bears information a man, even a casual-reading man, can do something with. Win a bar bet. Pass the time creatively on the scaffold with the hangman. It is skinny with legs. Crichton is Captain Reliable at this...
...information; not much of a novelist but a hell of an educator. On the other hand, scientists have been known to say he saws the limb off behind him; no hotshot in the lab but a hell of a tap dancer with a word processor. Crichton is used to the charges. "Feeling conflicted, different, has been a fact of my life," Crichton told the Los Angeles Times. "Someone once compared me to a bat. 'Put a bat among birds,' he said, 'and they call it a mammal. Put it among mammals and they call it a bird.' In more intellectual...
Except perhaps the bank. Crichton's 1995 entertainment earnings, according to Forbes magazine, amounted to $22 million--not from principal, not from interest, but just from words he thought up himself. His remuneration casts a consequential shadow, but the author isn't comfortable talking about it. He would sooner cogitate on those literary niggles--the charges that his characters have no depth. Back as far as The Andromeda Strain, Crichton concedes, he wasn't much for delving into character ("It didn't matter who the people were"). Still, he's human: criticism stings. "You know, I'm not very well...
...what about those cardboard characters? "I guess I have three answers," Crichton responds. "First of all, I'm doing the best I can. I really try hard. Second, I think there is a way where often you don't know motivation. I don't believe you can know it. So I hesitate to write it. And it makes a cold quality, an exterior quality. And I guess the third reason is that very often I'm not, in some way or another, interested in the characters. For many years, I really wasn't interested...
With typical scientific precision, Crichton tries to get to the bottom of this literary obsession with the inner lives of characters. "I've become very interested in where this inner life came from--as defined by Henry James, I guess. You don't see it at the very beginning. You don't see it in Defoe or Fielding. Was it Jane Austen? George Eliot? J.B.S. Haldane [the English scientist and writer] concluded after some period of introspection he didn't know why he did anything. I'm a lot more interested in religion and spirituality, interests you share with...