Michael Crichton: Politics and Hackdom, a Merry Tango
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KTK
I have never been that impressed with Michael Crichton. Some of his work has been quite clever, most is lowbrow pulp nonsense (surprising only because he used science in interesting ways in a few of his books), and when he gets into territory he doesn’t understand he’s as clicheic and naive as the worst of them. He’s done a Christopher Hitchens in the last few years, making a sudden swerve to the right and cranking out talking-points propaganda disguised as plots - which came in for much-deserved lambasting from both literary and political/scientific critics. But that wasn’t bad enough: having discovered he can’t take the heat, he’s descended to the most scurrilous attacks on his critics.
When one commentator gave him a bad review for his recent garbled thriller on (the lack of) global warming, he wrote a one-scene character into his next book using that commentator’s name as the character name (changed from “Mike” to “Mick”), and describing him as a homosexual child rapist with a small penis.
The March [review] article that Mr. [Michael] Crowley referred to concluded: “And now, like a mighty t-rex that has escaped from Jurassic Park, Crichton stomps across the public policy landscape, finally claiming the influence that he has always sought. In this sense, he himself is like an experiment gone wrong — a creation of the publishing industry and Hollywood who has unexpectedly mutated into a menacing figure haunting think tanks, policy forums, hearing rooms and even the Oval Office.” . . .
The character that Mr. Crowley says he believes is modeled on him mostly appears on two pages in Mr. Crichton’s [just-released] 431-page novel.
On Page 227 Mr. Crichton writes: “Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers.”
Mick Crowley is described as a “wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate” with a small penis that nonetheless “caused significant tears to the toddler’s rectum.”
Mr. Crowley writes that Mr. Crichton’s Mick Crowley not only has a similar name but is also a graduate of Yale and a Washington political journalist. Mr. Crowley contends that Mr. Crichton has tried to escape public censure for his literary attack by hiding behind what has become known as “the small penis rule.”
The rule, Mr. Crowley writes, is described in a 1998 article in The New York Times in which the libel lawyer Leon Friedman said it is a trick used by authors who have defamed someone to discourage lawsuits. “No male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis — that’s me!’ ” Mr. Friedman explained.
Very classy, Crichton. Moving Republican science policy forward by leaps and bounds.
Crichton’s a jerk. Also, apparently in his memoir he talks about bending spoons with the power of his mind, just like Uri Gellar. So guess that makes him a crazy jerk.
Comment 12/14/2006
You’re joking! I had never heard that.
Crichton has an MD from Harvard, and his first two books were a (somewhat interesting) non-fiction book detailing a number of emergency-room cases he had seen as a medical resident, and then the novel Andromeda Strain. The latter, and the movie made from it, made him rich and famous, and I think ended his medical career (showing how dedicated he was to it in the first place). What was interesting about AS, though, was its extreme reliance on real science. The story, famously, is about a viral plague that comes to earth from the upper atmosphere (briefly thought to be from another galaxy). The book is fictional, but is written in the format of a technical scientific report submitted after the incident; it is filled with footnotes to actual research papers, and a fairly straightforward discussion of the possible science of such an incident.
So he does have a strong technical background, and in his early days he was a stickler for scientific accuracy. And he tried to at least give a nod to real science in Jurassic Park, although that was far more fanciful. But after that he just took leave of his senses and began drilling out crap sci-fi and embarrassingly stereotyped social-issues thrillers. Now he claims he can bend spoons? I guess that explains a lot of things.
Comment 12/14/2006