Crichton never had any credibility

All the silly references to chaos theory in Jurassic Park show he doesn't know anything about math either.

I've finished three of his books, and they were all REALLY fun to read. That's where his skills are. I didn't even realize anything was wrong until I tried to describe the stories to others: ...uh, well...I know it sounds really stupid, but...uhm.

Sometimes Crichton is a decent practitioner of popcorn entertainment, and I enjoyed both the book and movie of Andromeda Strain on those grounds, despite the "evolution ex machina" ending. If nothing else, it's probably one of the only science fiction movies I can think of where lots of screen time is devoted to scientists trying to solve a crisis through doing labwork and other sciency stuff (inaccurate as some of it may be). Today with the Michael Bay mentality, they'd find in a way to work a chase scene featuring somersaulting cars.

Well, the scene with the lasers and the automatic detection system was kind of stupidly unscientific, and was a kind of slo-mo chase scene.

I liked I stopped reading Crichton after Jurassic Park. The damn book read like a screenplay rather than a novel, and the subsequent ones just got worse.

That Andromeda Strain was an interesting movie to some of us probably had a lot to do with its director Robert Wise who was also responsible for The Day the Earth Stood Still.

But the lysine deficiency!

The lysine deficiency!

Yeah, Jurassic Park was obviously a screenplay.

The worst thing was that he pre-inserted product placements: Land Rovers, Macs, whatever...then you saw the movie, and everything was changed around because Jeep and some other computer company shelled out more cash.

Wasn't such a bad introduction to the economics of the movie industry, I suppose

Crichton is a major league BS artist, and this is nowhere more glaring (at least to me) than when he inserts snippets of what he imagines to be computer code. Aaargh! It's painfully obvious that he doesn't have a clue. "Prey" sucked big time in this regard.

I always thought Eaters Of The Dead was quite good.
The rest? Feh.

Jurassic Park certainly did NOT read like a screenplay. It read like a treatment. Kind of a rough sketch of what the eventual story will be. It wasn't fleshed out nearly enough for a screenplay.

Yeah, Jurassic Park was obviously a screenplay.

What was amazing was that when JP was actually made into a movie, Spielberg took what could have been shot straight from the book's pages and made into a fairly crisp thriller and dumbed it down even more. For example, there was the whole "lysine deficiency" thing. In the novel, it's something they've engineered into the dinosaurs to make their survival dependent on eating the GM foods on the island; if they escaped into the mainland they'd die fairly quickly. (Maybe that's not bulletproof biology, but it's the kind of sci-fi story concept an audience can suspend disbelief for just to follow the story, like "warp speed" in Star Trek.) So in the novel it's clear the rich guy and the people running the park have indeed thought about and taken steps in consideration of the dinosaurs getting loose. But in the movie, nobody working at the park appears to have given two seconds' thought to the dinosaurs getting loose at all, the main characters get "duh-whaaa?" reactions from everybody when they even mention "Hey, don't you guys think raising dinosaurs might be dangerous?", and the concept of the "lysine deficiency" is given one throwaway line of dialogue, when one character actually says, "Should we implement the lysine deficiency?" Like it's a fucking switch they can flip! D'oh....

Anyway, if I go on with everything about that movie that sucks, this would be the longest blog comment PZ's ever had, so I'll stop while the night is young.

AndyS: Good call about Wise. Those opening scenes in the plague-stricken town are dynamite, and a great example of a master director at work.

Never read any Crichton, but I guess the only genre fiction I read is medieval. I do remember a stupid sexist "mommy" thing going on w/ the Laura Dern character in that JP film (like, what's his obsession w/ theme parks gone wrong?). Was that in the book too?

I remember reading Andromeda Strain and thinking "this guy was a medical student?"

His explanation of X-ray crystallography (for example) is a profile of ignorance.

has anyone read "State of Fear" - it was just recommended to me by a fellow professor teaching an introductory environmental science course. She had post-it notes strewn throughout her copy and I suspect was using it in class. I haven't read it - is this book crap as well?

"I remember reading Andromeda Strain and thinking "this guy was a medical student?"

It's perhaps fortunate that he didn't end up practicing. I actually read almost all of his books up through Disclosure, but in my defense I was just 13 when I started and by the time I was done I was pretty convinced he'd suffered severe brain damage during childhood. I saw him on an interview show a year or so later (well before State of Fear) and his response to a question about environmentalism was essentially "the earth is just too awesome for us to ever hurt it".

JLem, "State of Fear" is the worst of the lot.

And he doesn't just get the climate science wrong in that book.

Filmmakers know that good science, good math, etc. - i.e. reality - make for incredibly boring movies. For example, the next time you watch a Star Wars or Star Trek movie, mute the sound on your TV during the space battles.

Karl: No, the faux-feminist/mommy BS with the Laura Dern character was not in the book. In the book her character has a doctor boyfriend in Chicago we never see and there isn't even a hint of a relationship between her and the character Sam Neill plays. She never spouts that "women will rule the world" bullshit in the book either. What was so condescending and intelligence-insulting about that part of the film was that all of the Laura Dern character's feminist sloganeering was ludicrously dishonest. Because her character's main motivation in life turns out to be to have babies by the Sam Neill character (whom the script takes great pains to underscore doesn't like children, which in the Spielberg-verse makes you a Bad Man who must be Corrected -- this, BTW, was also not in the book). Cue Family Values⢠Subplot #3,612.

As much as you can legitimately slag Crichton's novels for, the movie versions often make them look like timeless literary masterworks! But then, Crichton has both script and director approval over his film adaptations, so since he signed off on the changes made to his story, he doesn't escape responsibility for the suckage.

I warned you you shouldn't set me off about this movie!

Hell must have frozen over. JMcH just said something entirely factual! [passes out]

Actually, it's more like no one in Hollywood knows how to make movies featuring realistic science that are interesting to audiences. Though the subplot about exploring Galapagos in Master and Commander was well done. But then, mass audiences didn't embrace that movie.

*snicker* He said "flaccid ending"! *snicker*

Crichton writes decent fiction, but the reason it works is suspension of disbelief. Who would've guessed the entire Republican party had decided suspension of disbelief was good public policy. And George Will? I don't know what the hell to think about him.

"Filmmakers know that good science, good math, etc. - i.e. reality - make for incredibly boring movies. For example, the next time you watch a Star Wars or Star Trek movie, mute the sound on your TV during the space battles."

Have you seen Firefly? It is quite possible to use the lack of sound in space artistically as well as practically.

As far as Crichton goes, he is best at turning ideas (either ones he generates or gets from elsewhere) into money by adding enough sizzle to sell them. His plots tend to be cardboard thin and his characters flatter still, but he is well tuned into pop culture.

I much prefer Kim Stanley Robinson who does a better job of capturing the excitement of real science (and who for one thing acknowledges the reality of global climate change!).

"Never read any Crichton, but I guess the only genre fiction I read is medieval."

What, "Timecode" didn't strike your fancy? ;)

Re: silence in space-- Joss Whedon knows! And so his Firefly sci-fi series and movie ("Serenity") has silent scenes in open space, even battle scenes, which are pure ballet. But that's only marginally Hollywood.

( I see Diego beat me to it on Firefly's fidelity - good. )

Crichton did an early book of essays, generally autobiographical, about his travels - TRAVELS? - which had some quite good psychological insights on risk perception and self-deception ... and also uncritically reports on attending a conference of spoon-benders. Hmm.

His EATERS OF THE DEAD was cited above, and although it's clearly a pastisch it's skillfully done. But those two titles are his best bet at enduring.

"Have you seen Firefly?"

Isn't that that SciFi show that hardly anyone watches?

Now *that* is a troll.

No, it was a joke, and I am actually one of the people who hardly watches it. *smirk*

"has anyone read "State of Fear" - it was just recommended to me by a fellow professor teaching an introductory environmental science course. "

That someone should use that book in a science class is scary, much more scary than some of Crichtons stories :-) "State of Fear" is pure crap, a piece of propaganda written to "prove" that global warming is just a myth. Here is one review by a climate scientist:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74

I don't remember much about his book Sphere, but I do remember thinking "This guy sure seems to have a problem with women."

Now I haven't seen Jurassic Park in some time, but I'm pretty sure the "women will rule the world" line was just a throwaway gag intended to defuse the tension after Malcolm's portentous little "tampered in God's domain" speech. No need to get angry at it.

Eaters of the Dead was great IMHO

and firefly and especially serenity are very well done

Ray wrote:

Now I haven't seen Jurassic Park in some time, but I'm pretty sure the "women will rule the world" line was just a throwaway gag intended to defuse the tension after Malcolm's portentous little "tampered in God's domain" speech. No need to get angry at it.

I'll side with you on this one, though "pretentious" might be a better word for Malcolm' speech than "portentious".

Actually, I'd say that both Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park were drastically improved when they were made into movies. Neither would be on my list of Desert Island DVDs, but to just kick back and enjoy, I consider them pretty solid material.

Now I haven't seen Jurassic Park in some time, but I'm pretty sure the "women will rule the world" line was just a throwaway gag intended to defuse the tension after Malcolm's portentous little "tampered in God's domain" speech. No need to get angry at it.

As a film professional myself, bad screenwriting tends to make me angry. ;) It was a completely unnecessary deviation from the book that added nothing to the story, and made one major protagonist an entirely dishonest character.

Eh. I read part of Disclosure, but it didn't interest my 13 year old self beyond 1) its value as pseudo-porn and 2) the fact that its author seemed to be the only other human being on the planet at that point willing to admit to themself that sexual harassment wasn't entirely and by definition a men-to-women thing (clearly more policymakers and sheep-attitude-definers need the experience of cheerleading-squad-like numbers of cheerleader-type-personalities hurling every synonym of "homosexual" in the book at them like a shrill, sleazy Greek chorus...).

As for Crichton...meh. I haven't read him in years, and at the time I didn't have the breadth of knowledge to really critique it...but I recall finding Ian Malcolm pretty pretentious and irritating, and wondering wtf all the fancy math stuff had to do with the commen-sense problems the park would present.

You know who's bad about science? Dean Koontz. First, because he shamelessly abuses "mad scientist" straw men like it was the 1950s (and we won't even get into the tired old stereotypes about atheists), and second, because of the tedious blather stemming from his (please circle one) A. Incredibly boneheaded B. Deliberately dishonest C. Both conflation of quantum physics and New-Age-Christian metaphysics, particularly in the form of characters who "understand the quantum structure of the universe" (is that statement even meaningful or coherent under current theory?) and consequently can apparently, by will alone, circumvent...if not the laws of physics, then the approximations of those laws that define "consensus reality."

I really really admire the film "Andromeda Strain"- it's commitment to art design and detail, and building up the perceived safety of the containment facility, then slowly tearing it down. Films these days would not be commited to such a pace.

I saw it once on a black and white tv when I was a kid and remembered liking it, but caught 20 minutes last week on Sundance channel, in color, letterboxed and was impressed.

I read the Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park at school. I thought they outlined (and exploited) chaos theory in a pretty good way... until (prompted by those books) I actually got a book that was really about chaos theory. Man, talk about a shock!

I still thought he was a passable writer of pulp, though, until I read that time-travel one*. Whoah. What a stinker.

*Not that I read all his book until that one, mind. I think it went A.S, J.P., stinker.

I found the Andromeda strain great when I was at school. Binary wasnt too bad either.
But that was before I knew any science...

Then I read "Sphere" and "Congo" or whatever it was called.
And kind of enjoyed them, but found them dull in some ways.

What you all need to know/ remember, is that there is no need to read any Chrichton if you read Science fiction.
None at all.
He just rips off his ideas from SF, 10 years after SF authors have already chewed the idea to death.
Take nanomachines- Sf authors have been writing about them for a decade, one of the more famous examples being "The Diamond age" by Neal Stephenson.
So what does Crichton do? A popular, junk science treatment of the dangers of grey goo, which IIRC at least 2 major SF authors covered in the 90's.

So I say that if you have any pretensions to reasonable science, dont read Crichton. In fact I wouldnt even read his stuff now if I wanted to read a thriller, I find his work rather boring now.

All the silly references to chaos theory in Jurassic Park show he doesn't know anything about math either.

Oh please for the love of {insert deity here} do not get me started...

Andromeda Strain was the big book for Crichton. I enjoyed it a lot when I first read it. I was 14 at the time. I devoured Crichton's writings up to and including Jurassic Park. Disclosure and Rising Sun were interesting but started to signal that Crichton felt that his social commentary was as important as his sci-fi. (I would disagree about that idea.)

After reading Airframe, The Lost World, and Timeline I realized that either I was becoming a more critical reader, or he was starting to simply write crap. His recent books are a bit more paranoid, and his characters are no more developed than they were 30 years ago.

It's sad, because Crichton has made some positive contributions. I would count Andromeda Strain, Westworld, Jurassic Park, Congo (the book but not the film), and, of course, ER, which has been a very good TV drama for a decade (even if it's gotten far less interesting with the departures of most of the original cast, esp. Anthony Edwards). But his recent books are stapled together pre-movies and not terribly interesting.

His autobiographical collection Travels gives you some insight to his thinking. I found the talking cactus particularly amusing.

The Andromeda Strain... Isn't that the book where a virus that lives in space comes to Earth, but finds out it can't live outside the normal values of human pH for some reason, gets pissed off and switches to eating rubber?

At least that's how I remember it.

"Hell must have frozen over. JMcH just said something entirely factual!"

Don't be scared - he is terribly wrong as we are used to. Any scifi afficionado knows that it is the interactions between different fields (deflector, suspension, tractor, weapons, tangle, stasis, ...) that generates the sounds inside the vehicle. It is very scientificial.

As anyone who has read Terry Pratchett knows one does not have to ditch reality for a good story - it is after all mostly chances of one in a million that really happens all the time.

Crichton - I read Andromeda Strain when I was young and enjoyed it even though it has the usual flaws of scifi. When I picked up Sphere years later, it was too bad on plot, characters and science to read. Of course I knew more of science, but that wasn't the only reason. I see from the comments that I haven't missed out on much.

Amazing how much credibility you can get from having been a medical student. He gets away with a lot in the real world for having taken those courses and basically swum away with his ABD degree.

I did thoroughly enjoy Jurassic Park, though, on the 'popcorn entertainment' level. You can't go wrong with monsters chasing kids, eating lawyers, and each other.

The ending of "Sphere" was a real throw-the-book-against-the-wall moment for me. At that point I decided not to read any more Crichton, but for some reason I read "Timeline" several years later anyway.

I should have known better. The weird thing about "Timeline" is that the book admonishes us repeatedly not to think of its medieval characters as stupid just because they lived in an earlier time... and then shows them behaving with unbelievable stupidity, such as when the bad guy imprisons the heroes in a room in which he himself hid readily available weapons.

Yeah Timeline is the one that put me off Crichton good and proper. Talk about written like a treatment. Especially when I read Doomsday Book by Connie Willis shortly thereafter. Yeah, that's how a time-travel book should be written! Similar to watching MI:2 followed by The Great Escape. "Yeah, that's how a motorcycle really works!"

To continue my stream of consciousness, if you're looking for a good SF movie, check out V for Vendetta. Saw it last night, and all I can think is, "Yeah, that's what happens when religious nuts take over." It's Ingsoc with Reagan hair. Pretty damn scary. Plus, Natalie Portman with real lines and directing!

V for Vendetta was an interesting movie, but I wouldn't call it sci-fi simply because it's set in the future. It was nice to see Natalie Portman with an interesting role. I still have to wonder if her best work has already been done. But it's not her fault Leon (aka The Professional) was so great. Stephen Fry was particularly good as the talk show host, I thought.

V for Vendetta makes for a good litmus test. Some people really cannot stand the movie at all. I find it correlates with the "you must respect my authoritay" types.

While there's certainly room for criticizing Crichton for mis-use of science, I think people need to lighten up a bit whenever their profession is depicted in fiction. Indiana Jones is a horrible archaeologist. Courtroom scenes rarely depict accurate lawyering. ER doctors don't scream orders and sprint around when treating trauma patients. A certain amount of artistic license has to be allowed for.

I thought the Jurassic Park novel was crap. But I liked watching the computer-generated dinosaurs on the big screen and thought the flick was a decent thriller. Am I an ignoramous for that?

Johnny Vector, RickD: So you both liked V for Vendetta?

I had been keen to see it before it came out, but since its release I've gone right off the idea. A combination of Alan Moore having dropped it like a hot potato, and the press panning it, and suddenly it doesn't seem like too good an idea any more.

I don't know anyone personally who has seen it, so I'm still in two minds about it. I might just get it at some later point (video shop, download, TV) rather than pay for the cinema experience for a lousy film.

Johnny Vector, RickD: So you both liked V for Vendetta?

With the sure knowledge that there is no thread moderator to kick me for veering violently and voraciously offtopic, "Yes, I did like V, a lot." What's not to like in an exploration of an evil government using religion, relentless propoganda, and violence to keep the populace in tow, fought by a comic book superhero who has issues of his own?

It's probably safe to say that if you like Joss Whedon (and yes, he is my master now), you'd like V. Not just for the themes, but the satisfying use of genre and callbacks, some beautiful cinematography, and very nice set pieces.

I do wish the final battle had been a real fight, rather than pure Wachowski CGI, but Hugo Weaving isn't Summer Glau, so what can you do?

Ithika:

I just saw V for Vendetta a week ago. Not being at all familiar with original Alan Moore story, I have to judge the movie on its own merits -- and taken by itself, I'd say it's pretty darn good. Like all films in which explosions figure prominently, it should be seen on the largest screen possible. (With theater prices always on the up-and-up, you may wish to smuggle in your own popcorn and a box of Junior Mints.) I was able to tell when a plot twist was coming up and guess which way it was likely to turn, but that's probably because I've spent too many years geeking over movies and thus "speak cinema" fairly well.

The effect of her receiving good lines and good directing made me literally not recognize Natalie Portman. I swear: it was like watching a different actress.

I haven't really kept up with movie reviews lately, but I think the one in The Onion A.V. Club is pretty perceptive:

http://www.avclub.com/content/node/46300

I was very disappointed in V for Vendetta. It started off well, and the dystopia was handled well, but it failed to touch on that interesting and scary transitional zone between heroism and vigilanteism, or between rebellion and anarchy, that Moore's book explored so provocatively. And the ending just flopped down dead and laid there.

I've always blamed popular knowledge (misknowledge, really) of the second law of thermodynamics.

I know it's widely misused by creationists as well, but outside their sphere of influence, I've found innummerable individuals who thing that 2nd law predicts that dinosaurs will escape your theme park. It's entropy, man! Closed systems tend toward disorder, your park charges admission and has turnstiles, ergo, it's a "closed" system and we'll be eaten by thunder lizards!

Back to Crichton,

I was loaned _Prey_ a couple years ago, by someone who said it was great, and I found it interesting. But not in the way you would normally expect. The plot was disjointed, the characters changed dramatically between the sections, and the science was poor.

However, I found the structure of the book interesting. It was in three parts. The middle section appears to be stand-alone short novella, which stylistically reads as if it was written in the early 1990's during the height of the nanotech craze. The beginning and concluding sections are obviously added on, poorly, in order to expand the novella into a full-length novel.

It made me suspect that he was going through his old, unsold, short stories and novellas, padding them out and giving them to his publisher. After all, his name alone will sell thousands of books no matter how poorly written. Not that I deplore an author re-using rejected material, that happens all the time. Usually though, an author isn't quite so blatent about it.

Cheers,

-Flex

Crichton's books often have a central interesting idea that could have been handled so much better than he did.

The jurassic park movie was fun when it came out just for the great effects (quote from the newyorker, I think: "Realistic dinosaurs make up for people who aren't.") - it was quite a long time ago.

It's kind of sad how much difficulty people have telling (intended) fact from fiction, whether it's the Da Vinci Code, State of Fear, or the Book of Esther. It's kind of scary when that includes the President.

Courtroom scenes rarely depict accurate lawyering. ER doctors don't scream orders and sprint around when treating trauma patients.

Actually, yes we physicians do sometimes scream orders and run around while treating trauma patientssometimes. The E.R. can be a high tension atmosphere, chaotic and noisy. Sometimes you have to yell to get people's attention over the ruckus, and seconds can count, which is why we sometimes are running around, particularly when there are multiple victims.

What we don't allow is having relatives in the trauma bay while we're doing invasive procedures or even CPR on the patients, something that E.R. shows with depressing frequency.

Sturgeon's Revelation is proved to be accurate once again!

Despite whatever is wrong with Jurassic Park, I read it for a science fiction lit class and rather liked it. There ARE things he describes that are accurate but I doubt many Westerners would get it because it doesn't deal with data or plot, it deals with attitude and world-view.

Talking of films that feature scientists, does anyone remember a George Romero film "The Crazies?" I saw that AGES ago, and thought it was a ton of fun... I'm sure it was totally unbelievable (how could it not be?), but I remember the scientist characters trying to deal with the escalating craziness (ha ha) relatively soberly compared to the usual hair-pulling, nutball scientist stereotype. Oh, and of course there was the hugely entertaining horror part... although aside from crazy people filling up the medical facility, I can't actually remember what they were doing that was so crazy....

Oh, yeah...I read Andromeda Strain when I was a kid, staying up late with the flashlight under the covers. It seemed very cool then--but one thing that really bothered me at the time (still does, I guess, since I remember it 30+ years later!) was that the alien bug causes some fighter jets to crash, and it turns out to be from the spacegerm eating the pilots' facemasks--which, it is revealed in a chapter-ending Fraught Moment, is a new experimental polymer that is remarkably similar to human skin!!!!!!! But then the incident and concept never appear again...both are dropped like a hot potato/red herring burrito.
He did stick a bit of medical physiology in there, though...one tidbit I recall is that the 2 survivors of the infected town both had body-fluid pH outside of normal reference values (as noted by somebody above), the baby from crying all the time and consequent respiratory alkalosis (too much CO2 blown off), and the old wino from acidosis induced by chewing aspirins and drinking Sterno (!)

On another topic, I'm thinking about developing a non-majors science course structured around screening movies with scientific content, which as noted above is nearly always Bad (e.g. Jurassic Park), and then spinning the course content off of criticizing the flicks. Other suggestions are hereby solicited...thanks.

Perhaps the reason _Eaters of the Dead_ is considered one of the more tolerable Crichton book is because it is "Beowolf" retold in modern English.

"While there's certainly room for criticizing Crichton for mis-use of science, I think people need to lighten up a bit whenever their profession is depicted in fiction."

That's a true point, but what's grating is that for some reason Crichton is taken as being more factually correct than most fiction writers (see Bush, GW, consultants on climate change).

I went through a Chrichton phase when I was younger, but the whole thing with Jurassic Park killed it. I thought it was a fun book, but the movie was butchered. Then again, I have a very personal distaste for it, because the movie came out right as I was starting graduate school. I had to endure a thousand conversations that went: "What are you doing after graduation?" "I'm going to grad school to study paleobotany." "Cool, did you pick that because of Laura Dern?" [muffled curses]"Yeah, I'm choosing my life career based on a MOVIE."

CCP wrote:

On another topic, I'm thinking about developing a non-majors science course structured around screening movies with scientific content, which as noted above is nearly always Bad (e.g. Jurassic Park), and then spinning the course content off of criticizing the flicks. Other suggestions are hereby solicited...thanks.

You hereby have my blessings. More importantly, here's a link:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/index.html

As the name suggests, this mostly covers astronomy, with some other stuff in there too. For physics, check out the following:

http://intuitor.com/moviephysics/index.html

I know, it's just fiction, and should be read for fun...but I read Jurassic Park on a plane, and wanted to pop out one of the windows and watch it get sucked out and lost forever. It was that Malcolm character's ignorant rants about science grad students acquiring vast powers with no responsibilities that irritated me no end. Vast powers on a diet of ramen and mac&cheese, I guess.

I've read only 2 things by Crighton, but that was more than enough. I disagree that he makes for an exiting read, even a 'popcorn' one. His plot development is jerky, often making unexplained jumps, and his characters inspire instant dislike. Not a good recipe for an entertaining read.

Jurassic Park definitely makes my 10-worst books Read list. Throw 'em all to the dinos!

I've finished three of his books, and they were all REALLY fun to read. That's where his skills are. I didn't even realize anything was wrong until I tried to describe the stories to others: ...uh, well...I know it sounds really stupid, but...uhm.

Really? All science aside, I find his plots overly predictable and his characters wooden.

V for Vendetta makes for a good litmus test. Some people really cannot stand the movie at all. I find it correlates with the "you must respect my authoritay" types.

I like to think I don't fit your data very well. I have as much horror of theocracy as anyone, and did enjoy V for Vendetta as an action film. But I couldn't completely sympathize with V, because another V-name kept popping into my head -- Timothy McVeigh. He thought he was attacking a faceless bureaucracy, but ended up killing husbands, wives, and children. In the movies, it's easy to portray the government as something so opposed to ordinary people that bombs, guns, and knives carry no moral ambiguity. Even in East Germany, it was never as easy as that.

And a purely cinematic complaint: how in the hell could V do what he did without henchmen? I'm thinking especially of a certain plot twist that can be carried off only because awkward scenes are filmed only in closeup. I can be flexible with plausibility, if it makes for an interesting plot. But inserting an absurd impossibility and just pretending it doesn't exist -- that pisses me off.

On the other hand, I agree that it's cool to see Natalie Portman do something substantive. Previously, I'd only seen her in the Star Wars slop.

It was that Malcolm character's ignorant rants about science grad students acquiring vast powers with no responsibilities that irritated me no end. Vast powers on a diet of ramen and mac&cheese, I guess.

When you were in grad school you had ramen and mac&cheese? Well, hoity toity!

The ending of "Sphere" was a real throw-the-book-against-the-wall moment for me. At that point I decided not to read any more Crichton

Yeah, it had a kind of "f**k you for reading this book" feel that completely put me off of reading anything else by him. I still think Jurassic Park and Andromeda Strain are both pretty good "something to read that works as a simple adventure" books. Yeah, the science is bad, but that's not the point - nobody tried to pretend they were science books. I can still enjoy "Alien" even though the science is pretty laughably bad there, too.

Why people are trying to do that with Crichton's later works is beyond me ...

Blake Stacey:
thanks man!
of course, to use those suggestions I'd have to learn some astronomy and/or physics...(self-paced Physics at Michigan State was great for time-flexibility but I didn't learn shit, long term.)

Space battles in movies and TV with sound are actually an area which illustrates how a basic scientific approach of "test and change opinion based on new information" was used in a nonscientific contect. Supposedly Gene Roddenberry had Star Trek's opening sequence originally done silently (no swooshes), but some test viewing found it odd and boring. So it was changed. Similarly, silence was considered for Babylon 5 but rejected for the same reason.

I read Andromeda Strain once. Can't have been terribly fun, since I hardly remember it.

"I know, it's just fiction, and should be read for fun..."

I'm going to argue that there's no such thing as "just fiction," because the brain is always learning, no matter what we are doing. The conscious, normal brain is never in a state of not learning, even when someone is "just" playing video games or reading the utter garbage from a rotter like Michael Crichton. That's the problem! A good example is the mess that shows like "CSI" have made out of potential jury pools by setting up in people's minds unrealistic standards of physical evidence and reasonable doubt.

(I don't know how many people have told me that this or that program is "just fiction," and then asked me if I, as a belly dancer, take my clothes off--the answer is, OF COURSE NOT--and when I inquire as to what the hell they were thinking, they invariably reply, "That's how I saw it on television/in a movie." And when I reply, "I thought that TV and movies were just fiction?" I get a confused look and an "Oh, yeah. Right." Oh, yeah, right--there's no such thing as just fiction, not matter how stupid, because the brain just sucks up stereotypes. That's another problem.)

And yes, it's terribly difficult to write interesting, engaging fiction that has a sound scientific basis, because it's terribly difficult to write any kind of fiction that doesn't, in some way, simplifiy, distort, fall into clichéd pablum, or just blatantly misrepresent something. However, I think that writing such fiction should be attempted, and that it can be done. It's what I'm trying to do, and it of course has been done by great sci fi writers. I hope I'm successful, but who knows, maybe my stories just plain old suck. We'll see.

People have pretty much covered Crichton, but no one have commented on the reviewer Alexei Panshin, and his writing. His book Rite of Passage is well worth your time. It's by no means hard science fiction, but it's damn good writing in my opinion.

"On another topic, I'm thinking about developing a non-majors science course structured around screening movies with scientific content, which as noted above is nearly always Bad (e.g. Jurassic Park), and then spinning the course content off of criticizing the flicks. Other suggestions are hereby solicited...thanks."

I used The Core for a non-majors geology class. It's so gorgeously bad that even the ones who slept through class could pick out the stupid parts.

CCP, I totally want to take your class. Drop me a line when you post a syllabus...

(I've always thought a "Bad History Goes to the Movies" film fest would be great fun, too. The sad thing is that "Holy Grail" is so much more authentically medieval than anything else that pops to mind...)

I had a great time going to see The Core with a bunch of geophysics grad students - we made fun of it the whole way through.

I was so young when I read Andromeda Strain (like, age 10 maybe?) that I wasn't 100% sure it was fiction -- things like the Congressional hearing transcripts at the end were far outside my fiction-reading experience at the time. My scientific knowledge was enough to identify certain aspects of the story as plausible, and not enough to spot the holes. So it had me riveted, and kind of afraid to ask if it was fiction or not.

(Hey, I also thought one of my schoolteachers had been replaced by a robot, and that I could psychically communicate with seagulls. Cut me some slack, I was a kid.)

I used The Core for a non-majors geology class. It's so gorgeously bad that even the ones who slept through class could pick out the stupid parts.

I am debating using the zinc oxide part of Kentucky Fried Movie (can't show the whole thing for what should be pretty obvious reasons) in this summer's freshman chemistry class - just to see if any of them spor that it's a parody.

...and to lead into a discussion of why they should care about chemistry.

Because her character's main motivation in life turns out to be to have babies by the Sam Neill character (whom the script takes great pains to underscore doesn't like children, which in the Spielberg-verse makes you a Bad Man who must be Corrected -- this, BTW, was also not in the book).
And, in fact, the book specifically mentioned that the Sam Neill charater liked children.

I hated the movie turning those two into a couple as well--wholly unnecessary, just like changing the stegasaurus to a triceratops. But another beef I had was that they changed the roles of the children--in the book the boy was older and helped keep his sister from losing it in the scary parts--and they made her such a computer genius that she could look at their schematic and figure it out in about five seconds.

Have you seen Firefly? It is quite possible to use the lack of sound in space artistically as well as practically.

Firefly? Pah! Lack of sound in space was pioneered by Kubrick's 2001. The only sound effects occur during Poole and Bowman's space-walking scenes, and that's just the space-suits' life-support and the astronauts' breathing.

Late edit: Actually, I guess the Meliere's Le Voyage Dans La Lune was technically the pioneer, but that was the silent era.

"Realistic dinosaurs make up for people who aren't."

There were people in 'Jurassic Park'?

I just liked the dinosaurs. Driving home after the movie, I half expected to go round a corner and see a brontosaurus staring at me.

"But I couldn't completely sympathize with V, because another V-name kept popping into my head -- Timothy McVeigh. He thought he was attacking a faceless bureaucracy, but ended up killing husbands, wives, and children. In the movies, it's easy to portray the government as something so opposed to ordinary people that bombs, guns, and knives carry no moral ambiguity. Even in East Germany, it was never as easy as that."

That's the point though; You aren't supposed to fully sympathise with V. This is, in my opinion, one of the reasons the movie is set in a recognizable locale; So that when V vaporises a building, you don't just go "Fuck yeah!" you also say to yourself, "Damn, it's too bad about Big Ben".

The setting, as well as many of V's methods, are meant to make you identify with V's opponents. One of the things the movie wanted you to do was think about people like Mr. McVeigh.

Frankly, that alone is worth a recomendation fronm me; How many action movies gleefully show the tough cop breaking the rules and beating up suspects and blowing things up without ever going into the inevitable consequences of these actions?

You'll note that the criticism of Dr. Meyers is the opposite; He thinks V was too sympathetic and indetifiable. I kind of agree, but at the same time, I don't really think that V was any less sympathetic in the book. I felt that most of the flaws of the movie were also present in the book, although it has been a few years since I last read it, so take that with a grain of salt.

Anyway, to sum up, see V for Vendetta. It isn't perfect, but it's still quite good.

Now, I don't think I've ever read much Crichton, but I did start Jurassic Park. I was doing fine until the part where a little girl is confronted by a dinosauur and can't figure out what it is. A little kid who doesn't know about dinosaurs!? I can only accept so much, Mr. Crichton.

That pretty much turned me off the book and I don't think I ever finished it.

Crichton -- with willfull suspension of disbelief -- is enjoyable beach reading; however it did lead to the wonderful The Science of Jurassic Park and The Lost World by (if I recall) a couple of people at AMNH.

Someone in this thread stated:

"On another topic, I'm thinking about developing a non-majors science course structured around screening movies with scientific content, which as noted above is nearly always Bad (e.g. Jurassic Park), and then spinning the course content off of criticizing the flicks. Other suggestions are hereby solicited...thanks."

I suggest such a course might be better served by inspiring students to author works like the one I cited above or various other such as -- The Science of:
- Star Trek
- The X Files
- etc

To follow up on the "willfull suspension of disbelief" that I mentioned in my previous post...

I recently read Cephalopod Behavior by Hanson and Messenger. That, combined with internet Cephs vids that -- no doubt -- PZ can provide references to, is truly spooky. How, for instance, can a clam with an attitude -- that lives only a couple of years -- and with no color vision, perform so well at camoflage?

I welcome out Octopus Overlords!! (with a little white sauce, freshly ground pepper, and dry vermouth as dressing)

what's his obsession w/ theme parks gone wrong?

when's Creighton's "Dinosaur Adventure Land" book/movie coming out? Maybe Mel Gibson could play Kent Hovind.

Who's Alexei Panshin? And why should his criticism have any more weight than anyone else? I'm just asking.

Thomas Palm was the only one that commented on State of Fear referenced in the link. I'm surprised that didn't cause more discussion. Global warming proponents using fear to get power?

Google for him- I dont have the url of his site with me at work.
Panshin is the bloke who did a rather good take down of much of Heinleins work back in the last 60's or early 70's. His critiscisms are to my mind entirely valid. Since then Panshin has written various SF novels, bits of critiscism etc. I dont know how well known he is nowadays, but if your old enough the name would be familiar.

For the record: Rising Sun is as bad on Japanese culture as his SF work is on actual Science. A little learning is a dangerous thing....

I loved Andromeda Strain growing up, but I never considered it "science": it was just SF written as a geek would write it, with details and charts and scientists at work. I still think that's the book's strength: not its science, per se, but its portrayal of scientists at work on a problem under pressure from government and technical issues.

I read a copy of Jurassic Park that was owned by a guy who had been an obsessive creationist. (He's still obsessive...) All of the 'language' had been blacked out, along with any blasphemy. There were also liner notes explaining what was wrong with the science from a creationist point of view. Sigh. Poor Crichton, just can't please anyone.

Stab me, I'd forgotten Rising Sun was one of Crichton's. Never read the book 'cause the movie was so screwy. Not the Japan-bashing so much, not even Eddie Sakamura suddenly deciding not to run from the assassins just because having him free would have wrapped the plot too quick, but the enormous f-you at the end, where Sean Connery's character basically tells Wesley Snipes that the denouement of the plot was a lie, and then bribes him to keep quiet with Tia Carrera. So cynical.

Google for him- I dont have the url of his site with me at work.
I did and I found those Heinlein's criticisms and a few books. I thought there was more that I was missing. His review of The Andromeda Strain seemed kind of petty.

Crichton's documentation is fake, his expertise is false, and even his basic problem turns out to be a fraud

I think he wrote the review just to write that.

Panshin's The World Beyond the Hill: SF and the Quest for Transcendence was quite highly regarded when it was published, even winning a Hugo.