What I liked about Michael Crichton
Like most people, I’ve read a lot of books from a variety of authors over the years across many different genres, but if I had to pick one overall as my favourite, it would be Michael Crichton. Not because he was necessarily the best author technically speaking or had the most amazing prose, but because I liked the way he would tell stories.
Loosely, Crichton was a “Science Fiction” writer but he didn’t always stick to a single genre like many other authors do. The first of his books I read was Jurassic Park and I read it after I had seen the film. I then naturally read The Lost World and then I think I branched off and read Sphere or perhaps Congo (I lost track of the order after The Lost World). All those could be classified as Science Fiction, but the waters get a little muddy when you start looking at some of his other titles – Eaters of the Dead (The 13th Warrior if you prefer), Disclosure, Airframe, or The Great Train Robbery (my favourite). The stories start to flirt with other genres at that point.
So why was he able to find success over such a wide range of topics and genres? I think it’s because he told fundamentally human stories in extraordinary circumstances. Take Jurassic Park for example: it isn’t really about a dinosaur theme park that experiences some pre-opening glitches, the dinosaurs are simply the (very cool) mechanism that allows the reader to explore the deeper themes. How much control can humans exert over nature? Can people ever truly understand complex systems? How far should science go? He typically took intelligent, competent people and put them in extraordinary situations and asked “how would these people react?”
The Great Train Robbery was actually my favourite because it was such a shift from what I had become used to from Crichton. If I recall correctly, I read it right after I had finished The Terminal Man. I jumped from a techno-thriller about a violent criminal with an experimental implant in his brain to 1855 England for a heist story that took a look at how some in the Victorian Era falsely believed that industrialization would naturally eradicate crime as well as commenting on social repression and class society.
I didn’t love every one of his books, but that doesn’t matter. I loved enough of them that I kept coming back because I liked how his books made me think. He certainly had an influence on how I like to tell stories. I am not so interested in telling people what to think, but instead I just want them to think.
If I am fortunate enough to garner any amount of success in my writing, I hope it’s because readers have come to trust that if they read one of my books, it will give them a particular experience that they know they will enjoy.
