Who is Michael Crichton? What sort of books does he write about?

Answer 1

Wikipedia is your friend.

But off the top of my head: Jurassic Park and Andromeda Strain.

What used to be called "hard" science fiction.

Also, he writes some travel stuff. I believe he's also the author of some medical research (but I don't think that's covered in the article).

Answer 2

Michael Crichton also wrote the original stories for the TV series ER - starring George Clooney & Noah Wyle.

Answer 3

Michael Crichton writes techno-thrillers.

They are action books with technology/medicine heavily featured. He wrote Jurasic Park.

Answer 4

did you like the film jurassic Park, well mr crichton wrote the original book

Answer 5

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.

This genre is usually based on the action genre, but with technology heavily featured. Many of his future history novels have medical or scientific underpinnings, reflecting his medical training and science background.

Crichton was born in Chicago,[2] Illinois to John Henderson Crichton and Zula Miller Crichton, and raised in Roslyn, Long Island, New York.[1] Crichton has two sisters, Kimberly and Catherine, and a younger brother, Douglas, a co-author on the pseudonymously published "Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues."

He was educated at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, A.B. (summa *** laude) 1964 (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 France.

Crichton has admitted to once, during his undergraduate study, plagiarizing a work by George Orwell and submitting it as his own. The paper was received by his professor with a mark of "B−". Crichton has stated 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. Crichton admitted to plagiarizing when he was on the stand in the course of a lawsuit trying to defend the authenticity of Twister, a movie which one individual claimed was based on his story entitled "Catch the Wind".

He is married to Sherri Alexander and has a daughter, Taylor, with ex-wife, Anne-Marie Martin.



In several of his books, Crichton popularised scientific and technological concepts which had not previously received widespread attention by non-scientists. Many of the ideas he used were novel to the average person, despite previous attention to them being given by some in the scientific community.

For example, before Jurassic Park, Robert T. Bakker's theory of warm-blooded and fast-moving dinosaurs had not received a great deal of attention in the popular media. Laypeople were accustomed to seeing stop motion clay dinosaurs crawling sluggishly over the volcanic prehistorical terrains.






Crichton'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.

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, long 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 scholastic 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.

Answer 6

He writes spy novels I believe