Word: crichtons
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Once, though, just once, Crichton hung his personal life out nakedly--in an autobiographical book called Travels, published in 1988. In it he talks of his five-year attack of writer's block in the late '70s and early '80s. He wrote: "My subjective feeling every day was, it's hard, and it's not working." So he didn't work. He traveled like a fox on the run, racking up exotic locales, exploring the world and the mind, the squirrelier the better. He went through every bent-spoon, aura-fluffing, New Age, past-life, talk-to-plants, Aquarian-karmic...
...Lost World, which will show up in bookstores in dino-size portions this Wednesday, might seem like a bit of backtracking for Crichton--it's the first sequel he has ever written. Crichton saw it as a challenge: "The reality is, you can't be fresh. If you're really fresh, it's not a sequel." He anticipates a critical drubbing, and probably deserves one. The book (it's six years after Jurassic Park, we're on a Costa Rican island, and the earth trembles .) has a cutting-room-floor feeling to it: outtakes. No matter; the national release...
...other reason why Crichton discovered The Lost World is that he needed something to do while gestating his next project. This unborn novel, he says, will deal with the media, big legal trials, Menendez-like crimes, something along those lines. "Shoot mom and reload and keep shooting. Is that O.K.? I mean, what do we think about all this? Are we all victims of our upbringing in some form or another? Or do we at every moment have a choice, and are we responsible for that choice? You know, this is a phenomenally contentious area. Nature/nurture [whether you were born...
...Crichton smiles sweetly, makes a steeple of his long fingers. Anything else? "I just kind of mostly work a lot and spend time with my family. It seems like, in a way, that's all there is. There's the time you spend with your family and your friends, and there's the time you spend working. You're actually trying to make something, and you make it." With The Lost World about to hit the bookstores, the movie screens and the popular imagination, nobody will be unaware that he made something, again...
...Michael Crichton didn't really have to get the science right to make sure The Lost World would be a best seller. But he got the science right anyway. Like many of his earlier novels--from The Andromeda Strain, his killer-bacteria thriller that prefigured The Hot Zone by 25 years, to Jurassic Park--The Lost World is suffused with scientific detail that has clearly been lifted from the latest research journals. Yet as a novelist Crichton isn't bound by the usual caveats that academics are forced to issue; he can and does take the most speculative of theories...