By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

LIKE a twist in one of his books, news of Michael Crichton’s demise arrived as a shock. No one knew the author was even sick, so finding out Crichton was really dead at 66 after a battle with cancer was truly startling.

What it also does is remove one of the few authors who really had a following after all these decades. Crichton was never the easiest author to read. His prose tended to be heavy with dense paragraphs of explanations, often moving at the speed of crawling magma. The movies adapted from his books essentially pared down his narrative to just action. He always considered explaining how these things happened as important as why.

What he never lacked was the big idea. This was partly because of his truly unique background. He moved from studying English at Harvard to studying medicine at Harvard, writing in his spare time before finally quitting med school. Most readers know Crichton hit the big time when his dinosaur-redux novel “Jurassic Park” gobbled up the competition on the shelves in 1990 and then the box office in 1993. That movie changed our idea of modern day monsters forever, launching a merchandising empire and making dinos cool again.

The real defining moment of Crichton’s writing, in my mind, came much earlier, in 1969, when he wrote “The Andromeda Strain.” That novel, plus the 1971 Robert Wise movie, came to define our idea of pandemic panic. Its claustrophobic setting became the definitive environment for any unseen bug that runs wild in a lab. That very same paranoia informs every single sickness movie today, from “Outbreak” to “28 Days Later.” Plus the stark, minimalist 1971 film is superior in every way to the slick but stunted, nearly unintelligible 2008 TV remake. He made us fear the biohazard symbol. It was then that Crichton hatched his idea that science can indeed be scary.

After an early stint writing books under the pseudonym John Lange, he has since explored that theme, from time travel (“Timeline”) to aircraft safety (“Airframe”), from robotics (“Westworld”) to nanotechnology (“Prey”), from aliens (“Sphere”) to mutant apes (“Congo”), even delving into social issues (“Disclosure”) and courting controversy by railing against the very concept of global warming (“State of Fear”).

That Hollywood often failed to capture the essence of his books did not stop the movies from being successful for the most part. “Congo” and “Sphere,” in particular, were turkeys. Ironically, “Jurassic Park” was, among his more recent work, the movie that hewed closest of his book, it was the sequel “The Lost World,” that really ran off the tracks. The movie hardly even resembled the book in any way. The third and planned fourth film were not adapted from novels. He did many other things, of course, directing films (“Coma”), writing films (“Twister”) and creating TV series (“E.R.”).

It should not be surprising then that his best books also resulted in the best movies, though decades apart. “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park” don’t even seem to have anything in common save for their author, yet both stand as remarkable explorations of science and the zeitgeist at the time. Even as he terrified us with the prospect of science unleashed, he told us why and how it should be. He gave mad science a face, whether it was the invisible organism, Yul Bryner’s cybernetic cowboy, or the T-Rex chomping down on a lawyer. He made science a star, and that we will miss the most.