Word: crichtons
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Canadian officials seem overwhelmed by the illegal flood along the 3,987- | mile border. One reason is that thousands of vehicles pass border crossings daily, too many to check carefully. Another: the untold number of back roads and bays linking the two countries. Sighs Michael Crichton, a regional intelligence official for Canada Customs: "The odds are all on the smugglers' side...
...with computer software companies in adapting their novels to "interactive fiction," an electronic form of literature that transforms the reader into an active participant in the plot. A version of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is available in interactive form on a floppy disk (Telarium; $39.95). Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man) has actually created a software work from scratch: Amazon (Telarium; $39.95), which transports the player and a sidekick parrot named Paco into the jungles of South America in search of a lost city and hidden emeralds. Infocom, the Cambridge-based software company that pioneered...
...comes a new book that promises to help owners integrate computers into their lives intellectually, emotionally and practically: Electronic Life (Knopf; 211 pages; $12.95). Author Michael Crichton is no self-anointed microprocessor guru but the Harvard Medical School graduate turned bestselling author (The Andromeda Strain) and movie director (Coma, The Great Train Robbery). It turns out that Crichton is also a computer expert of sorts. He wrote his senior thesis at Harvard in 1963 on a mainframe and has since created a computer adventure game and designed software programs for cost analysis and shooting-schedule planning in the movie business...
...Crichton aims at far more than simple hand holding. It is his conviction that just as computers have changed his own work life, they will change the very existence of almost everyone else. He believes the eventual impact of the computer will surpass that of the telephone and the automobile. To the author, the important issue is: " 'Am I going to be able to get through the rest of my life without a practical ability to use computers?' The answer is almost certainly 'No.' My sense is that most people aren't going to have...
That said, Crichton manages to create a believable human framework for micromachines. Electronic Life is a casual, alphabetized guidebook, with a brief initiation into high-tech jargon (RAM, ROM, kilobyte) and arcana (magnetic fields, artificial intelligence and dedicated machines). The process is reassuring for the technophobic. "Fear of computers is normal," writes Crichton. "A certain amount of kicking and screaming is useful...