Word: crichton
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Next (HarperCollins; 433 pages) is Michael Crichton's 15th novel, and I can't say for sure that it's his worst, but I can say for sure that it's the worst I've read, and I've read a bunch. And that includes his last book, State of Fear, in which he attempted to frighten us with the idea that global warming is not actually happening but is instead a hoax staged by a shadowy network of overzealous environmentalists...
...course, Crichton's ambition is never merely to scare us. The Crichtonian view of humanity is that we're all a bunch of overeager meddlers, so high on greed and curiosity that we can't resist trifling with complex systems (you know--DNA, nanotechnology, alien spheres, Japan) in the name of progress, which then turn around and bite us, often literally. This view is not necessarily incorrect, and Crichton has expressed it in some first-rate, even prescient, works of genre fiction, notably Congo and Jurassic Park. (Crichton is in real life famously tall--he's usually reported...
...interminable convention. You can recognize the good guys, who are sober and clear-eyed. You can recognize the bad guys, who are reckless and shortsighted, and if you still don't get it, they're mean to children. The villains here are all people, which is a problem, since Crichton's people are a lot less plausibly human than his dinosaurs, of which there are zero in Next. There's only one authentically chilling moment, when an orangutan peers out of the jungle in Sumatra and swears gutturally at some tourists in Dutch, but it leads nowhere. (And anyway, Crichton...
LOGAN AIRPORT—Among the obligatory Michael Crichton, Stephen King, Patricia Cornwell, and John Grisham offerings, I discovered these holiday in-flight gems...
...popular contrarian, Crichton offers plenty of targets for critics in the reality-based community: his 2004 State of Fear, about global warming as an overwrought conspiracy theory, inspired a Stanford climatologist to denounce it as "demonstrably garbage" and President Bush to invite him to the White House to chat. But I'd be willing to bet that more people were introduced to the concept of cloning from reading or watching Jurassic Park than from the news stories and academic papers that have followed the research for years. He performs a service when he acts on his belief that science...