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Saturday, November 08, 2008
Michael Crichton
So Michael Crichton died on November 4th. I find myself a little surprised by just how many of his (to be honest) workmanlike and often plodding novels I’ve read in my life: a lot. He was enormously successful, of course, despite being not a very good writer. I feel comfortable calling him ‘not a very good writer’ now that he’s dead. Doing so when he was alive was a more precarious business, as the following story makes plain. [I quote from this account in the Fordham Law Review]:
In 2006, New Republic columnist Michael Crowley authored a critical profile of author Michael Crichton. Shortly thereafter, Crowley noticed a strong resemblance between himself and the character “Mick Crowley” in Crichton’s latest novel, Next. In addition to having nearly identical names, both Crowleys are graduates of Yale University and political journalists in Washington, D.C. In the novel, Mick Crowley’s appearance is brief but notable. He is a pedophile on trial for sodomizing a two-year-old child and, Crichton writes, his “penis was small.” Crichton [had] apparently resorted to employing the small penis rule, a “sly trick” used in publishing to ward off defamation lawsuits. Assuming no man would come forward claiming to be a character with a small penis (or would invite such an inquiry), the scheming author simply depicts his target as less than fully endowed. The author then defames as he pleases and hopes his subject forgoes legal action due to the possible embarrassment of coming forward. Thus, the small penis rule is not really a rule, merely a tactic for discouraging litigation. In the end, Michael Crowley [was] disinclined to file suit. Although “grossed out,” Crowley says that he was “strangely flattered” by his “sliver of literary immortality.”
So, ladies, gentleman, if you learn nothing else today, at least take this to heart: the small penis rule is not really a rule. A precept to live by, we can all agree.
Comments
I’ve read one of the man’s novels (the one that’s paranoid about Japan), but have watched a good many episodes of ER and seen some of the flicks based on his books, including one or two of the dinosaur ones and the Japan-rising one. & probably something else.
A woman who works at my local liquor store loves Crichton’s novels. An dinosauerologist on the Evolutionary Psychology list serve refers to him as “Reb” Michael Crichton, a high honor. Me, I’d be happy to come up with one book that makes me as much money as one of his novels made him.
I have no informed opinion on the relationship between penis length and writerly excellence, though I suspect it to be random. I wonder of Mailer had an opinion on the question.
Hmmm. Hemingway always talked about using a pillow. ...
He wrote one arguably good book, The Andromeda Strain. It was a classic case of authorial style being suited to subject, given that his prose often brought to mind the governmental documents that he inserted into the narrative. And there were a few things that that book did really well.
First, it was a shot in the head to the heroic-scientist SF tradition. I remember reading it and thinking finally, someone is writing about big science as it is actually done. No more Heinleinian kids building spacecraft; no more geniuses leapfrogging world technology, just teams of people and lots of bureaucracy.
Second, it did its part to mythologize that kind of science. When you finally got to see some kind of printout with obscure governmental codes in it, it was the same kind of thing that people like with the Da Vince Code (or so I assume; I haven’t actually read the Da Vinci Code). The idea of secret knowledge, secret power, that could be transmitted to you if you were in the right place at the right time.
Third, the idea of bungled catastrophe, not bungled through evil or leading to the SF standard holocaust, but rather inevitably bungled but leading to a society that after all went on.
Those kind of ideas were important to later SF. I can’t imagine Kim Stanley Robinson, for instance, without Critchton.
Unfortunately, by Jurassic Park he was writing self-parodies, or recycling old material without really thinking about it—why exactly was a mathematician the person to figure out that the dinosaurs could escape and breed?—and after that, he descended into ridiculous Japan-enemy-creation and then one of the worst blots that can appear on an SF writer, global warming denialism. It’s not surprising that he went out with the whole “Mick Crowley” thing; right-wingerdom did not wear well on SF authors of the period.
I very much like the whole New Jersey sound of ‘Da Vince Code’. You got a promising parody novel there, Rich.
I haven’t read The Andromeda Strain; though I’ve seen the movie. The movie is good; as was Westworld and early ER. That was something he could do well. But a lot of his later novels (Sphere, say; or Rising Sun,a nd the rubbish rubbish one about nanontechnology whose title I’ve purged from my mind) are not good novels.
“I have no informed opinion on the relationship between penis length and writerly excellence, though I suspect it to be random.” Speaking for myself, I’m, randomly, hung like a Grand National winner. Of course, I don’t like to brag about it.
Interesting remarks, Rich. FWIW, I read one obit that tried to redeem him on global warming.
As long as Gradisil is high, eh Adam?
How big? Big enough to fill a pram, that’s how big.
You haven’t read The Andromeda Strain, even though you’ve read a number of his books? Huh. As a historian and critic of SF, you really should; it was his best and most influential book. I’ve heard people say that they went into science because of it. Which isn’t to say that it’s good in a literary sense, of course.
"I read one obit that tried to redeem him on global warming.”
I don’t know which obit that is, and I don’t want to speak too badly of someone who has just died, but I don’t really see how that can be true. He accused scientists of falsifying global climate change science in his testimony to a Senate committee. He met with Bush and talked to him about it. He was wrong about the most pressing scientific issue of his day, and it wasn’t a matter of just being wrong in fiction—he also used whatever political influence he had, as someone who was supposed understand science, to accuse real scientists of serious misdeeds. As I wrote above, I can’t think of much worse that an SF writer can do. (Elron, though… hmm.)
There’s a tradition that what people do in the few years before they die shouldn’t really be counted against them. Perhaps that’s best in this case. I do think that AS was important within the genre.
I really hated the concept of his Ibn Fadlan book / movie"Eaters of the Dead”. He took a fantastic, dramatic piece of non-fiction (orgies, human sacrifice, filthy tattooed Vikings) and junked it up with Neanderthals and shit.
A) Stylistic mediocrity rarely gets in the way of ripping-yarn-spinning (in fact, it really really helps). Yarn-reception and aesthetics-savouring are governed by two very different bureaus of the intellect.
I read “Andromeda” when I was twelve, and visuals/sensations evoked in that book are still with me. On the other hand, I remember “Cyborg” (Martin Caidin) and “Future Shock” (Alvin Toffler) and “Jaws” (Benchley) just as vividly… and all four books feel as though the same guy wrote them.
B) Do small penises even *require* rules?
Its stylistic flaws aside, Jurassic Park was a big damn deal for me as a kid - in part because it was the story that revealed to me that science and engineering are Big Business, a notion theretofore unthinkable and thereafter obvious. The descriptions of Dennis Nedry made me want to be a hacker (but not a fat dead one); the descriptions of Grant made me want to dig up dinosaurs (again). It was clear even then that Crichton was a little too in love with Ian Malcolm - but then I was in love with Ellie whassername, so I could forgive him.
Meanwhile the structure of the book gets a little odd - its intense multipart climax (quite different from the film’s, and - surprise - less ‘cinematic’ by far) is followed by that weirdly elegiac scene on the beach that climaxes with Grant’s revelation: ‘They want to migrate.’ I was even more wrapped up in the eerie behaviour of the raptors in that scene than I was in the big chase/action bits beforehand. I can forgive him the excesses and awful ending of Sphere, and the trash that he wrote at the end of his career, because of that one scene.
Sequel was dogshit but they usually are.
Of course I read and greatly enjoyed, like, thirteen L. Ron Hubbard novels, so salt-grains all around. (Also re: Hubbard-reading, kill me.)
Huh: ‘scene on the beach’ should be ‘sequence in the nest and on the beach.’ Codas aren’t strange at all, but the placement of that last bit - which prepares the sequel - felt that way when I was a wee lad.
Wax: you have reason, as they say in France. I read absolutely every Asimov story and novel I could lay my hands on by the age of 11, and he’s certainly no Nabokov. My problem isn’t with junk fiction. Junk fiction was one of the major modes of art in the last century. (Man, I write junk fiction). My point is that like any mode of art, junk can be well done or badly done; and the later Crichton seem to me badly done ... bloated, underpowered, written badly not in the sense of lacking Joycean stylistic pyrotechnics but in the sense of being dull. But, as I said, I haven’t read The Andromeda Strain, and maybe it has all the junk virtues and none of the later self-indulgence.
Quite to my embarrassment now, I have to admit that I read almost all of Crichton’s novels (this was around the time “Disclosure” came out) during the course of a summer and autumn when I was travelling a lot by bus and plane (I found his prose is easy to read while jostling in a bus or cramped into economy class). I generally agree with the comments here, i.e. “Andromeda Strain” is about the only good one of the bunch. It was the one where he best dealt with his recurring theme, the hubris of modern scientists - in later books, it was so obvious he had an axe to grind and he was not a good enough writer to make these points with greater subtlety. It was all over when he started to fling that axe at other pet peeves, as in ‘Rising Sun’ and ‘Disclosure.’ Needless to say, I haven’t had even the remotest interest in taking the time to read anything he released after those two screeds.
As an aside, I have to admit that I enjoyed both “Eaters of the Dead” and “The Great Train Robbery” because the concepts were clever and generally well-executed (none of his annoying pontificating) - certainly not literature of any value, but still fun to read (as I recall, the movie adaption of the latter, with Sean Connery, wasn’t bad either...)