This is really ridiculous. Indeed, it sounds positively made up, but truth is stranger than fiction.
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Michael Crichton is a Bad Man
14 Dec 2006 04:59 pm
Comments (33)
I'd actually read those memoirs. I enjoyed it, but those passages made me go 'huh.' When he went on to become one of the leading "experts" against globalization it all came together.
Michael Crichton is a daunting authority. Can't we get, like, Piers Anthony to make the case for the other side?
Best story of the week.
I want to stay mad at TNR, but between stuff like this and the way they tore up George Allen, it's hard to. If they can get Jason Zengerle to take on Vincent Gallo or Mike Tyson, I might consider subscribing again.
Dr. A: You gotta get Marty Peretz out of the picture first.
Re Crichton: What an ass.
The very existence of Michael Chrichton is how you know that either there is no God, or that God is an asshole.
I mean here you have this guy who has literally (yes, literally) the best job in the entire world, making tens of millions of dollars and having to deal with more or less nobody in the process, all day long - and he's a total dick.
He doesn't have the best job in the world, he still has to write long-ass books that have some coherence and structure. David Brooks, now he has the best job in the world.
Reading the reactions to this in other arenas, I'm still saddened to see how much those reactions hinge on belief in global warming. The people who don't believe in it think this is both funny and clever of Crichton, with those who do seeing it as childish of him. One might extrapolate something about those two groups from this observation.
Surely such an obvious and viciously defamatory reference is actionable? Is Crichton's lovely little novel being published in places such as the UK, that have lower bars in libel cases?
"He doesn't have the best job in the world, he still has to write long-ass books that have some coherence and structure. David Brooks, now he has the best job in the world."
Yup.
Punditry is easy. Novels are hard.
Even in US law, it seems he has a good case:
http://www.pma-online.org/scripts/shownews.cfm?id=559
It is perfectly possible to libel someone in fiction. The criteria are:
1) the victim has to be alive, because the dead have no reputation in law. OK.
2) the victim has to be recognisable by others as the original of the fictional portrait. Also OK - it's not a common name, and there is enough biographical detail for everyone to make the connection.
3) the tricky bit: the victim has to show that his reputation has been damaged as a result.
If I write a SF novel in which the world-destroying villain is a sadistic and repulsive alien tyrant called "Matthew Yglesias", it's unlikely that it's actionable, because MY would have to show that people actually thought less of him because they had read my description of his cruel laughter as his armies of killer robots slaughtered the population of Hydos IV.
It's possible (IANAL) that Crichton could argue that no reasonable man would believe the horrible things he said about Crowley to be true.
Also this:
http://www.caslon.com.au/defamationprofile16.htm
"Typically for defamation action to succeed, the real person must have a reputation to lose and in the words of one US court
'the description of the fictional character must be so closely akin to the real person claiming to be defamed that a reader of the book, knowing the real person, would have no difficulty linking the two. Superficial similarities are insufficient.'"
Sounds pretty bad for Crichton.
"he still has to write long-ass books that have some coherence and structure."
You'd think that would be true, wouldn't you? But the evidence is strongly to the contrary . . .
"But the evidence is strongly to the contrary"
Crichton is actually pretty damn good at what he does.
Crichton is actually pretty damn good at what he does.
You have shitty taste in books, Petey.
"You have shitty taste in books, Petey."
He ain't Joyce, but he excels in his genre. And that's good enough for me.
Crichton used to be good at what he did.
"Rising Sun" and "Disclosure" were pretty okay little thrillers. "Jurrasic Park" was even a good one. Then, he started circling the drain. I'm not even sure where I stopped reading him. "Timeline"? I think I read that. Doesn't a windmill blow up?
Crichton is saying that Crowley is a paedophile. That's defamatory per se and damages are presumed. I'm surprised his publisher let him get away with this little stunt. For that matter, it is probably a material breach of his contract.
Crichton, like some other commercially successful authors, made some big dough on movies, then the rest of his books came to resemble script outlines. It's especially true for Grisham; I started to imagine camera directions (FADE OUT, PAN LEFT) in the last Grisham book I read.
I've noticed before that people who meet with great success in one area often come to believe that they are therefore Right in some Calvinist sense and thus are qualified to make pronouncements about other areas that they really know nothing about.
He doesn't have the best job in the world, he still has to write long-ass books that have some coherence and structure. David Brooks, now he has the best job in the world.
Surely one has to consider the relative income of the two jobs. Brooks probably does but fine, but Crichton is surely a bajillionaire.
Crichton is actually pretty damn good at what he does.
Used to be, definitely. Jurassic Park, Congo, Andromeda Strain, and Sphere are all phenomenal. The wheels started to come off somewhere around The Lost World, and the last one or two have been disasters. I hear the latest is no different. (I disagree with the comment about Timeline though, I thought that was a pretty good one, by his recent standards.)
Crichton is actually pretty damn good at what he does.
Plus he deserves massive amounts of goodwill for creating E.R., which was the best show on television for the first five or six years (and bears no resemblance to the dreck currenly on with that name).
Say what you will about Crichton's books about global warming and woman-on-man sexual harrassment, but nobody better talk shit about that one where the Vikings fight the Neanderthals! That's a treasured adolescent memory right there.
Plus he deserves massive amounts of goodwill for creating E.R., which was the best show on television for the first five or six years
Three years. I admit I really enjoyed Chrichton's books up to, I think, Disclosure. Those early books reveal a fairly fucked up view of women, though. I don't know how much of that was a sign o' the times.
He's not very keen on smart black people either. In the book "Jurassic Park" the mathematician (Jeff Goldblum in the film) is a) black and b) a sarcastic, unpleasant knowall. In "Sphere" I think the ultrasmart female scientist (Sharon Stone in the film) is black and gets really weird and psychotic.
Chances are, if you remember a sympathetic black person from a Crichton film (Samuel Jackson in Sphere; the chainsmoking engineer in JP) he was white in the book; and if there's a really smart, abrasive, technocrat type in the film, they were black in the book.
Jurassic Park, Congo, Andromeda Strain, and Sphere are all phenomenal.
"Phenomenal"? We're not talking five-star gourmet dining, or even McDonald's. We're talking microwavable frozen cheeseburgers. There are science fiction novels out there that don't suck donkey balls out there, you know.
I read the book and that passage is definitely in there. I remember it because it just seemed out of place -- why bring up an infant rape in the middle of a story about human genetics?
I read the book and that passage is definitely in there. I remember it because it just seemed out of place -- why bring up an infant rape in the middle of a story about human genetics?
I haven't read any of Crichton's most recent books, but some of his old stuff was absolutely great with one really major problem: he really needs someone else to write the endings. He has great set up, brilliant concepts, interesting spin on things and then those last ten to twenty pages amazingly levels of sucktitude. So much so that it almost retroactively ruins the rest of the book.
I won't give spoilers but anyone who has read the books (and there appear to be millions of us) will know exactly what I'm talking about (I'll write about them in the order I read them):
Andromeda Strain--possibly his best book. Great set up with the scary extra-terrestrial virus. Great interplay with different parts of the government trying to deal with it in different ways. Really great how the solution toward the end threatens to accidentaly make things a million times worse. And then at the end.... ARGH. Are you kidding me? The book would have almost been better with--"and then everyone died" as the ending.
Terminal Man--interesting concept exploring addiction, the interplay between humans and machines, what it means to be human, all sorts of fun stuff. And then at the end, argh again.
Sphere--when I was half way through this book I thought it was a very interesting book on what modern society would do with a crashed spaceship. Last thirty pages, he slams me again by going off on a weird mystical bent out of nowhere. Now I love a weird mystical book as much as many, but it seemed almost like he had written himself into a corner and he needed an actual deus ex machina in order to make the book end.
I then stopped. Did he get any better with his more popular later works?
i thought that it was "funny" that a small penis was actually mentioned by crichton.
In the book "Jurassic Park" the mathematician (Jeff Goldblum in the film) is a) black and b) a sarcastic, unpleasant knowall. In "Sphere" I think the ultrasmart female scientist (Sharon Stone in the film) is black and gets really weird and psychotic.
I think you're a bit off on both counts. In "Sphere" (the book) the woman is definitely white, but Sam Jackson's character is black and HE'S the one who goes wacky.
I don't think Ian Malcolm was black in the book, but maybe I've just replaced my original image of him with Jeff Goldblum. But remember that Malcolm dies in that book, but then comes back to life as the main character (in a much more sympathetic portrayal, for obvious Hollywood purposes) in "The Lost World."
I then stopped. Did he get any better with his more popular later works?
Definitely read Congo and Jurassic Park. I wouldn't recommend any of the others. Don't remember how Congo ends; JP is much like the film.
I thought Sphere had a fantastically ambiguous ending, but I agree Andromeda Strain's end was very War of the World-ish in its lameness (although I may give too much credit in thinking its perhaps an intentional homage, given the subject matter).
Comments closed December 28, 2006.
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Heads in the Sand
In his memoirs, Crichton talks about how he used to bend spoons with his mind, like Yuri Geller, but then got bored with it.
Posted by Steve Sailer | December 14, 2006 5:21 PM