Word: crichtons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...time enough for Wright to outwit a Defense Department intelligence agent, hijack several tanks of nerve-gas components, and rig a devilish device to dispense them. With two gases and two competitive adversaries about to mix lethally, the novel's title, Binary, and its suspense are readily understandable. Crichton also manages to turn the book into something of an early warning device. An epilogue in the form of think-tank recommendations to the Government suggests specific changes in existing procedures to prevent the theft of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Crichton's bureaucrats halfheartedly promise to review...
...Terminal Man, the near future is practically upon us. The theme is mind control through psychosurgery, today hardly in the realm of science fiction (TIME, April 3). Crichton's surgeons plant 40 minuscule electrodes in the brain of Harry Benson, a psycho-motor epileptic whose fits turn him into a homicidal maniac. The electrodes, powered by a tiny nuclear battery implanted in Harry's shoulder, deliver small electrical impulses which check the epileptic fit at its onset...
...Crichton maintains credibility with a fine array of documentary props, including a page of real brain X rays. Ironically, the plot turns on a physiological mechanism that is somewhat fanciful. Harry becomes addicted to the shocks, which give him a pleasant electrical high. His brain, therefore, contrives to have more frequent fits in order to receive more titillating shocks. Eventually the psychomotor epilepsy overrides the blocking capacity of the electrodes and Harry becomes a computerized monster. By this time he has escaped from the hospital and is well into murder and mayhem, with assorted police and medical practitioners in confused...
...hunt or a machine hunt? Is Harry Benson only the tragic victim of scientific arrogance or, as he says shortly after the operation, "a fallen man," precursor of a generation that may have no memory of what it was to have been human? Crichton does not indulge in such speculation. He is a scrupulous genre writer who is content to dress up old tales with new gadgetry. Andromeda Strain, for example, was in some sense a rewrite of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. The Terminal Man is an update of Frankenstein. Can Dracula, or Wolfman in sheep...
With his rosy, unlined face, he looks like a 15-year-old boy standing on a chair. But then Michael Crichton, M.D., ducks his 6 ft. 9 in. under the lintel of his office door and casually maneuvers a lovely young actress back into the Los Angeles sunshine. Just as casually he diagnoses the actress's problems. "She can't play a tough_ _ _ _. " The prescription? "I'll have to rewrite her part...