THE BORE

General => The Superdeep Borehole => Topic started by: Mr. Gundam on November 05, 2008, 01:11:57 PM

Title: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Mr. Gundam on November 05, 2008, 01:11:57 PM
CNN just reported he died last night of cancer.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Kestastrophe on November 05, 2008, 01:12:37 PM
I heard he died of Andromeda Strain
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: MyNameIsMethodis on November 05, 2008, 01:14:48 PM
I heard he died of Andromeda Strain

http://www.instantrimshot.com
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: siamesedreamer on November 05, 2008, 01:15:00 PM
I'm stunned. Easily my favorite author.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Mr. Gundam on November 05, 2008, 01:16:22 PM
I loved Jurassic Park, Terminal Man and Andromeda Strain back in 5th-6th grade, but his other works never interested me.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Van Cruncheon on November 05, 2008, 01:26:42 PM
juvenile fiction will miss his contributions :'(
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Akala on November 05, 2008, 01:29:26 PM
 :-\

I read a lot of his stuff back in middle/high school and liked it.

The only thing of his I've read in recent memory was Timeline, which I found in an airport on a layover. It was better than expected, and much better than the movie lol.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Eric P on November 05, 2008, 01:36:03 PM
i liked his stuff when i was in middle school

but i understand he went crazy after 9/11
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: GilloD on November 05, 2008, 01:37:31 PM
Ugh. Good. I mean: Not good. I'm sorry he died. But was a shitty author, a malicious and hateful person and a general crackpot.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: drozmight on November 05, 2008, 01:41:47 PM
Sad.  I liked a few Crichton books.

Being an Engrish major it's like you're supposed to be a better person and not read books like his, but I'll be damned if they can't be entertaining, so fuck you Dr. Fuckastuffagus.

Him and the others like Steven King.  I'm going to go to the super market and buy a book of his I haven't read in memorial.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Eric P on November 05, 2008, 01:42:56 PM
except that stephen king is a good author.

great essayist

i wish he would do a follow up to Danse Macabre
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Van Cruncheon on November 05, 2008, 01:53:26 PM
stephen king is in fact a much better essayist than he is an author of fiction. lisey's story was probably the worst book i read in 2007, excluding a james patterson novel i read on the sly.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Howard Alan Treesong on November 05, 2008, 02:01:11 PM
stephen king's pretty okay

I really liked some Crichton as a kid, but his later novels got increasingly poorly written and hateful. He spent like two pages turning a journalist he disagreed with into a child molester in NEXT. Real classy, that.

anyways, OBAMA WOO
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Tauntaun on November 05, 2008, 02:06:15 PM
Didn't he write or talk about writing a book where the main character sexed a baby not too long ago?  ???
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Don Flamenco on November 05, 2008, 03:20:00 PM
His only regret is that he had bonitis.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Mupepe on November 05, 2008, 03:20:29 PM
I haven't read a Crichton book in ages.  They were awesome when I was younger though.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Eric P on November 05, 2008, 03:21:47 PM
stephen king is in fact a much better essayist than he is an author of fiction. lisey's story was probably the worst book i read in 2007, excluding a james patterson novel i read on the sly.

King just isn't nowhere near as good at horror as he used to be. Maybe even dramatic fiction, but the last drama piece I read of his was The Green Mile.

everything's eventual was an excellent collection, but i've always loved his short form moreso than his novels.

Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Olivia Wilde Homo on November 05, 2008, 03:27:55 PM
Never read anything he wrote and don't intend to
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Howard Alan Treesong on November 05, 2008, 03:37:12 PM
"In this latest novel Next, Crichton introduces a character named Mick Crowley, a Yale graduate and a political columnist from Washington D.C. who is a child molester. Not just that but a molester of a two-year old child still in diapers. Maybe this is a coincidence but there is a Michael Crowley in real life - a columnist for the New Republic magazine based out of Washinton D.C. who is also a Yale graduate and who happened to have lambasted Crichton's previous novel - State of Fear. In fact, Crichton goes into even more sordid details regarding the act and how Crowley manages to do some damage to the kid despite being "small"."

(http://i35.tinypic.com/1qlwty.jpg)
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Mr. Gundam on November 05, 2008, 05:03:23 PM
who

Crazy wacko Sci-Fi/thriller author. He created Jurassic Park and ER.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: muckhole on November 05, 2008, 05:27:36 PM
I'd read a handful of his books years ago, but I was unaware he was a loon. What kind of crazy stuff are we talking about here?
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Mr. Gundam on November 05, 2008, 05:31:10 PM
I heard he went nuts after 9/11. His novel State of Fear is probably the only Anti-global warming thriller ever created, and it won him an award from the big oil companies.

Quote
Journalists like to think of themselves as presenting as accurate a picture as they can of the real world.

The American Association of Petroleum Geologists takes a broader view. It is presenting its annual journalism award this year to Michael Crichton, the science fiction writer whose latest book, "State of Fear," dismisses global warming as a largely imaginary threat embraced by malignant scientists for their own ends.

"It is fiction," conceded Larry Nation, communications director for the association. "But it has the absolute ring of truth."

That is not the way leading climate scientists see it. When the book was published in 2004, climate experts condemned it as dangerously divorced from reality. Most of these scientists believe human activity, chiefly the burning of fossil fuels, is changing the atmosphere's chemistry in ways that threaten unpredictable, potentially damaging effects.

The book is "demonstrably garbage," Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford climatologist, said in an interview yesterday. Petroleum geologists may like it, he said, but only because "they are ideologically connected to their product, which fills up the gas tanks of Hummers."

Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who directs the Harvard University Center for the Environment, called the award "a total embarrassment" that he said "reflects the politics of the oil industry and a lack of professionalism" on the association's part.

As for the book, he added, "I think it is unfortunate when somebody who has the audience that Crichton has shows such profound ignorance."

The book has high-profile admirers, though. One is Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who calls global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

Mr. Nation said there had been "some pushback" on the award from association members who had written to association publications to protest it. "Whenever you get to the global warming issue you have legitimate scientists on both sides of the issue, as we do in our own membership," he said.

But he praised Mr. Crichton as "a high-profile writer" who had brought attention to the topic "to really create some good." He said readers would "have a very good informational read" about science and sometimes the way science is made."
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: TVC15 on November 05, 2008, 06:08:29 PM
Anti-global warming thriller?  The concept is so bizarre that I almost feel compelled to read.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Joe Molotov on November 05, 2008, 06:38:11 PM
Anti-global warming thriller?  The concept is so bizarre that I almost feel compelled to read.

It's awesome. It's just page after page of global warming people getting owned. They're like "Bubububu, science says global warming is real!", and the HERO is like "Nuh uh, here PROOF." and they're like "OH SHIT, SCIENCE IS A LIE!" Then they get into a gunfight with eco-terrorists for a few pages, then it's back to owning global warming. I listened to the audiobook when I was driving to my friend's house last summer, and it was awesomely bad.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Howard Alan Treesong on November 05, 2008, 06:42:29 PM
I read Prey, it was incredible shit...it was all like, I dunno, gun fights with nanomachines
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: TVC15 on November 05, 2008, 06:51:49 PM
I read Prey, it was incredible shit...it was all like, I dunno, gun fights with nanomachines

Sounds like a must read for MGS4 fans.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: HyperZoneWasAwesome on November 05, 2008, 06:55:57 PM
one of Creighton's critics he fictionalized as a homosexual child rapists in State of Fear.  Yes, really.

On another note, he actually had a fairly decent cinematic career, as a director/writer.  Up until Spielberg, he directed the best adaptation of his own work (that would be Coma).  Its to my detriment that I haven't seen his other critical and commercial successes of the 70's, but he had em' (The Great Train Robbery, Westworld, which has the robot cowboys).

His films in the 80's got kinda crazy, but I dare you to not derive some entertainment value from his mid-80's thriller Runaway, starring Gene Simmons and Tom Sellick's awesome mustache.

So today we lost a man of many talents, his personal views and the quality of some of his may have been debatable, but he did have his high points.  So lets be happy about that.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: TVC15 on November 05, 2008, 06:58:52 PM
Westworld is pretty fuckin awesome
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: TVC15 on November 05, 2008, 07:06:18 PM
Wait a second. . .Jurassic Park and Westworld are basically the same movie.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Joe Molotov on November 05, 2008, 07:07:22 PM
I forgot one of my favorite parts in State of Fear, where the one guy that refuses to believe that global warming is a sham eventually gets eaten by cannibals. I think that might have been the moral of the story.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Joe Molotov on November 05, 2008, 07:08:04 PM
Wait a second. . .Jurassic Park and Westworld are basically the same movie.

AHHHH I CAN'T UNSEE IT!  :o
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Janus on November 05, 2008, 07:22:41 PM
Man really sad news, he was my favorite author growing up.  I still have two boxsets of his books, but I have not read any of them in the longest time.  Not sure what I would call my favorite book because I liked the majority of them, but it probably would have to be The Great Train Robbery.
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: Great Rumbler on November 05, 2008, 07:26:45 PM
Wait a second. . .Jurassic Park and Westworld are basically the same movie.

Noooooooooooooo.....  :'(
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: xnikki118x on November 05, 2008, 10:21:15 PM
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).

^ from Wiki. That's very cool!
Title: Re: Michael Crichton died?
Post by: trippingmartian on November 05, 2008, 10:33:02 PM
That sucks. His novel, Sphere rocked my world when I was 11. Same with Eaters of the Dead.

I remember reading the part in Jurassic Park where Nedry gets eaten alive and couldn't believe how violent it seemed compared to the movie.