MICHAEL CRICHTON
Oct. 23–Nov. 4, 2008
By Stephen King
I only met him once in person, and although I'm 6'3'' (used to be 6'4'', but I've settled in shipping), he was the tallest writer I ever stood next to. It was at the Los Angeles ABA, and it was in an elevator. I felt like Scotty Pippin next to Michael Jordan.
We didn't exchange a single word, but that's okay. I read all his books, so he talked to me plenty. I didn't enjoy all the words — his politics were infuriating, and his willingness to ignore certain scientific truths (as in State of Fear) in favor of his hobby-horses could be depressing, but as a pop novelist, he was divine. A Crichton book was a headlong experience driven by a man who was both a natural storyteller and fiendishly clever when it came to verisimilitude; he made you believe that cloning dinosaurs wasn't just over the horizon but possible tomorrow. Maybe today. And I actually lost sleep over the possibility of a microbiological invasion from space after reading The Andromeda Strain. Nor was I alone. He saved the cleverest — and funniest — for last. In Next, tortoises are genetically engineered to flash advertising signs on their shells.
If he is remembered for anything as a littérateur, it may be for bringing science fiction out of the ghetto where it had lived for the first seventy years of the 20th century and turning it into science faction, a genre that has become a staple in the years since. That qualifies him as a towering figure in the annals of popular fiction.
And man, he was towering.
Crichton, 66, died after a battle with throat cancer in L.A.
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