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John Michael Crichton (born October 23, 1942, pronounced /ˈkɹaɪtən/ [1]) is an American author, film producer, film director, and television producer. His best-known works are techno-thriller novels, films and television programs. His works are usually based on the action genre and heavily feature technology. Many of his future history novels have medical or scientific underpinnings, reflecting his medical training and science background.
Biography
He attended Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts as an undergraduate, graduating summa cum laude in 1964. Crichton was also initiated into the honors organization Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to become the Henry Russell Shaw Travelling Fellow, 1964-65 and Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at Cambridge University, England, 1965. He graduated at Harvard Medical School, gaining an M.D. in 1969 and did post-doctoral fellowship study at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California, in 1969–1970. In 1988, he was Visiting Writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While in medical school, he wrote novels under the pen names John Lange and Jeffery Hudson. A Case of Need, written under the latter pseudonym, won the 1969 Edgar Award for Best Novel. He also co-authored Dealing with his younger brother Douglas under the shared pen name Michael Douglas. The back cover of that book contains a picture of Michael and Douglas at a very young age taken by their mother. His two pen names were both created to reflect his above-average height. According to his own words, he was about 2.06 m (6 ft 9 in) tall in 1997 [2]. Lange means "tall one" in German, Danish and Dutch, and Sir Jeffrey Hudson was a famous seventeenth century dwarf in the court of Queen Henrietta Maria of England. Crichton has admitted to having once, during his undergraduate study, plagiarized a work by George Orwell and submitted it as his own. According to Crichton the paper was received by his professor with a mark of "B−". Crichton has claimed that the plagiarism was not intended to defraud the school, but rather as an experiment. Crichton believed that the professor in question had been intentionally giving him abnormally low marks, and so as an experiment Crichton informed another professor of his idea and submitted Orwell's paper as his own.[3]
Literary techniquesCrichton's works are consistently cautionary in that his plots invariably portray scientific advancements going awry, often with worst-case scenarios. Seldom, if ever, does Crichton portray scientific achievement as going according to plan, usually because those who utilize the technology become overconfident and, basically, refuse to believe that they can fail. The use of author surrogate has been a feature of Crichton's writings since the beginning of his career. In A Case of Need, one of his pseudonymous whodunit stories, Crichton used first-person narrative to portray the hero, a Bostonian pathologist, who is running against the clock to clear a friend's name from medical malpractice in a girl's death from a hack job abortion. That book was written in 1968, several years before the landmark case that legalized abortion nationwide in the US, Roe v. Wade (1973). It took the hero about 160 pages to find the chief suspect, an underground abortionist, who was created to be the author surrogate. Then, Crichton gave that character three pages to justify his illegal practice. Some of Crichton's fiction uses a literary technique called false document. For example, Eaters of the Dead is a fabricated recreation of the Old English epic Beowulf in the form of a scholarly translation of Ahmad ibn Fadlan's tenth century manuscript. Other novels, such as The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, incorporate fictionalized scientific documents in the form of diagrams, computer output, DNA sequences, footnotes and bibliography. However, some of his novels actually include authentic published scientific works to illustrate his point, as can be seen in 'State of Fear.' FictionNon-fictionApart from fiction, Crichton has written several other books based on scientific themes, amongst which is Travels, which also contains autobiographical episodes. As a personal friend to the Neo-Dadaist artist Jasper Johns, Crichton compiled many of his works in a coffee table book also named Jasper Johns. That book has been updated once. Crichton is also the author of Electronic Life, a book that introduces BASIC programming to its readers. In his words, being able to program a computer is liberation:
To prove his point, Crichton included many self-written demonstrative Applesoft (for Apple II) and BASICA (for IBM PC compatibles) programs in that book. Crichton once considered updating it, but the project seemed to be canceled. His non-fiction works are:
Movies and televisionCrichton has written and directed several motion pictures:
Pursuit is a TV movie written and directed by Crichton that is based on his novel Binary. Westworld was the first feature film that used 2D computer-generated imagery (CGI) and the first use of 3D CGI was in its sequel, Futureworld (1976), which featured a computer-generated hand and face created by then University of Utah graduate students Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke. Crichton directed the film Coma, adapted from a Robin Cook novel. There are other similarities in terms of genre and the fact that both Cook and Crichton are physicians, are of similar age, and write about similar subjects. Many of his novels have been filmed by others: He has written the screenplay for the movies Extreme Close Up (1973) and Twister (1996) (the latter co-written with Anne-Marie Martin, his wife at the time). Crichton is also the creator and executive producer of the television drama ER. In December 1994, he achieved the unique distinction of having the #1 movie (Jurassic Park), the #1 TV show (ER), and the #1 book (Disclosure, atop the paperback list). Crichton has written only three episodes of ER:
Computer gamesAmazon is a graphical text adventure game created by Michael Crichton and produced by John Wells under Trillium Corp. Amazon was released in the United States in 1984 and it runs on Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and the DOS systems. Amazon was considered by some to be a breakthrough in the way it updated text adventure games by adding color graphics and music. It sold more than 100,000 copies, making it a significant commercial success at the time. In 1999, Crichton founded Timeline Computer Entertainment with David Smith. Despite signing a multi-title publishing deal with Eidos Interactive, only one game was ever published, Timeline. Released on 8 December 2000 for the PC, the game received poor reviews and sold poorly. Awards
Speeches"Aliens Cause Global Warming"In 2003 he gave a controversial lecture at Caltech entitled "Aliens Cause Global Warming" [4] in which he expressed his views of the danger of "consensus science" — especially with regard to what he regards as popular but disputed theories such as nuclear winter, the dangers of second-hand smoke, and the global warming controversy. Crichton has been critical of widespread belief in ETs and UFOs, citing the fact that there is no conclusive proof of their existence. Crichton stated that "The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion." Crichton has commented that belief in purported scientific theories without a factual basis is more akin to faith than science. Environmentalism as a religionIn a related speech given to the Commonwealth Club of California, called "Environmentalism as a religion" [5] (see Radical environmentalism), Crichton described what he sees as similarities between the structure of various religious views (particularly Judeo-Christian dogma) and the beliefs of many modern urban atheists who he asserts have romantic ideas about Nature and our past, who he thinks believe in the initial "paradise", the human "sins", and the "judgment day". He also articulates his belief that it is the tendency of modern environmentalists to cling stubbornly to elements of their faith in spite of what he would contend is evidence to the contrary. Crichton cites what he contends are misconceptions about DDT, second-hand smoke, and global warming as examples. Widespread speculation in the mediaIn a speech entitled "Why Speculate?", [6] delivered in 2002 to the International Leadership Forum, Crichton criticized the media for engaging in what he saw as pointless speculation rather than the delivery of facts. As an example, he pointed to a front-page article of the March 6 New York Times that speculated about the possible effects of U.S. President George W. Bush's decision to impose tariffs on imported steel. Crichton also singled out Susan Faludi's book Backlash for criticism, saying that it "presented hundreds of pages of quasi-statistical assertions based on a premise that was never demonstrated and that was almost certainly false". He referred to what he calls the "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" to describe the public's tendency to discount one story in a newspaper they may know to be false because of their knowledge of the subject, but believe the same paper on subjects with which they are unfamiliar. Crichton used the Latin expression falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which he translated as "untruthful in one part, untruthful in all", to describe what he thought should be a more appropriate reaction. The speech also made several references to Crichton's skepticism of environmentalists' assertions about the possible future ramifications of human activity on the Earth's environment. Role of science in environmental policy-makingIn September 2005 Crichton testified at a Congressional hearing on climate change, having been called by Senator James Inhofe, a well-known disbeliever in global climate change (he's called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people") to advise the Environment and Public Works Committee, despite Crichton having no professional expertise in the subject in question. [7] CriticismMany of Crichton's publicly expressed views, particularly on subjects like the global warming controversy, have caused heated debate. An example is meteorologist Jeffrey Masters' review of State of Fear:
Peter Doran, author of the paper in the January 2002 issue of Nature which reported the finding referred to above, that some areas of Antarctica had cooled between 1986 and 2000, wrote an opinion piece in the July 27 2006 New York Times in which he stated "Our results have been misused as 'evidence' against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel State of Fear".[9] Next controversyIn his 2006 novel Next (released November 28th), Crichton introduces a character named "Mick Crowley" who is a Yale graduate and a Washington D.C.-based political columnist. "Crowley" is portrayed by Crichton as a child molester who is on trial for the anal rape of his two-year-old nephew. "Crowley" is also said to have a small penis. The character is a minor one who does not appear elsewhere in the book.[10] A real person named Michael Crowley is also a Yale graduate, and a senior editor of The New Republic, a Washington D.C.-based political magazine. In March 2006, the real Crowley wrote an article strongly critical of Crichton for his stance on global warming in State of Fear. [11] Pop culture referencesThe following is a list of references in pop culture made about Michael Crichton.
References
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