michael crichton

“F—ing pissed!” And that was one of the more polite e-mails that have come in since Friday afternoon when this blog and many others spread the news about the Climate Research Unit at University of East Anglia getting hacked. That 61-megabyte .zip archive has gone viral across the Intertubes and bunches of blood-boiling stuff is still being gleaned from the correspondence between climate “scientists” that points to a decades-long conspiracy to promote paranoia about global warming at cost of rigorous and honest study.

Well, many people have been saying for a long time that global warming is fake. And few argued against global warming as articulately and passionately as did Michael Crichton. The acclaimed bestselling author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain addressed global warming in his novel State of Fear. It was one year ago this month that Crichton passed away, but I’ve no doubt ...

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The first time I ever read a Michael Crichton novel, it was Jurassic Park. I bought the paperback version the week it came out, one cold and rainy Friday afternoon following swim practice at our high school. It drizzled hard all weekend and I spent most of it curled up under a blanket in my bedroom, reading Crichton’s fascinating tale of outlaw cloning and systems breakdown.

I wound up re-reading Jurassic Park five more times after that, prior to the movie coming out a year and a half later. By that time I had also read many other of Crichton’s novels, including The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, and Congo (which for some reason I enjoyed even more than Jurassic Park).

Over the years I hungrily devoured most of his books as they were released. The Lost World, I eagerly snapped up during my first ...

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