R.I.P. Michael Crichton

I should have mentioned this last week, but things got a little hectic. My favorite all time author, Michael Crichton, passed away on Election Day last week and for the first time in a long time, I really felt like I lost something that I can never get back. Michael was more than just an author. He was responsible for the way that I looked at the world and how I understood the difference between morals and murals. I read “Jurassic Park” when at the age of15 in 1993. That book changed my life in a significant way. I taught me that there is a choice between doing it because I can, and doing it because I should or not doing because I shouldn’t. Do you know the difference? If you could time travel to the past or the future, would you do it just because you can? The next question you should ask yourself is: should you? Anyway...

It was books like Sphere, Congo, Prey and Timeline that held me in suspense and made my mind wander into placed that it had never been before. As soon as I finished “Jurassic Park”, I started wondering about things like Chaos Theory and moral implications on doing something groundbreaking. “Timeline”, perhaps one of his best all around novels, again asked the question about doing something because I can versus should I, but it also re-introduced a theme that a lot of Crichton books talk about: Greed. If you’ve read his books, 90% of them revolve or are started by a man or woman who don’t mean to let greed rule their actions, but that’s what ultimately happens. And that is perhaps the ultimate question of morality that I learned.

I don’t want to go on and on about morals and choices, but I do also have to say this. Another thing that Michael Crichton did to allow my mind to expand was to introduce new concepts to my mind and interest me to explore them. “Prey”, although not his best work, introduced me to the concepts of Grey Goo and the Uncanny Valley. I have also found that I have an extreme interest in nanotechnology, and how it will apply to future generations. (Although, he was a genius, he did make one prediction that was off and that was when he called video games “the hula hoops of the 80’s.” and “already there are indications that the mania for twitch games may be fading” in his 1983 book “Electronic Life”.

Michael Crichton will be missed by me in more ways than one.

Michael Crichton
Born: October 23, 1942
Died: November 4, 2008