It occurred to me, 20 years after reading the first Jurassic Park book, that the most unrealistic thing in all those movies might be a Tyrannosaurus rex spending hours in San Diego without being shot once by a single police officer.

Michael Crichton was a mediocre American science fiction writer who, almost by accident, had a few very important works, including Westworld and The Andromeda Strain. Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World, require no introduction.

He lived from 1942 – 2008. Between junior high school & college I read nearly every book he published in his own name.

He was an embodiment of privilege & ADHD, academic merit combined with mediocre personality.

I can relate to that.

Here is my personal eulogy of Michael Crichton.

He got his M.D. from Harvard & some other degrees but quit medicine after school to become a writer. He had used a few pseudonyms already, but at that point began using his own name.

His first novel under his own name was The Andromeda Strain (1969). This was one of the first that I would have read, after Jurassic Park.

His medical knowledge gave it a verisimilitude ahead of its time. It became one of the most important pieces of 20th century science fiction.

His next decent work was Eaters of the Dead (1975), loosely based on Beowulf. Imagine if Vikings had been in conflict with Neanderthals. Not bad as a premise for a historical sci-fi thriller, and I think he might have been the first writer who did it.

The cognitive dissonance around Neanderthals eventually helped me recognize young earth creationism as misinformation.

In 1980, he wrote Congo.

It was inspired as a modern retelling of King Solomon’s Mines, a genre-defining adventure novel about colonialism in Africa. It was written by the colonizers during colonization to romanticize white supremacy, and it is racist garbage.

Congo impressed me in high school. Certainly it was better than its inspiration. It doesn’t romanticize racism, but it doesn’t exactly age well either.

In 1987 he published Sphere, about a psychic alien spacecraft at the bottom of the ocean.

Sphere took him 20 years to finish. Perhaps he needed inspiration from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).

In 1990 he published his most famous work, Jurassic Park.

He wrote velociraptors running 70 mph & tyrannosaurs running 50.

The movies were a bit more realistic.

Ever since 1993, kids have loved dinosaurs and adults have wanted to know more about them. As a matter of fact, as soon as anyone knows anything about dinosaurs, they have questions and want to know more. Jurassic Park did that.

I don’t think any one movie ever had as much impact on me.

In 1992 he published Rising Sun, a corporate crime thriller.

I will say it was a bit racist with a plot about the Yakuza.

Like most of his writing, it was also a bit misogynistic with a male-gazing view of women: either conquests or unrelatable forces of nature that defy conquest.

His next novel, Disclosure (1994) was a corporate crime thriller of a different sort.

According to the plot of Disclosure, if we believe women when they complain about sexual harassment in the workplace then women will be equally free to harass men and men will be the real victims.

Crichton projected all-too ordinary male attitudes & behaviors onto an extraordinary female antagonist.

As a result of this novel & the film adaptation which came out the very same year, it became harder for women who were victims of workplace sexual harassment (which is what most often happens) to tell their stories. It became harder for men to relate to women’s stories. And it became easier for men who were experienced predators to defend themselves.

Crichton defended himself against the predictable charges of misogyny by arguing that his story helped show the consequences of things that could happen & thereby served a constructive end.

In other words, he wanted credit for making men more conscientious about their behavior when actually he was making them more paranoid & resentful.

If he wanted credit for advancing gender politics then he should have written a story where a protagonist & his wife both have to deal with similar situations at the same time & get through it by being honest with each other. Instead, his protagonist gets through the situation by telling his family as little as possible.

None of the characters learn anything or develop in any way. All that happens is the protagonist’s ex tries to ruin his life, he ruins hers instead, his revenge is validated and his family is none the wiser.

If Crichton couldn’t write this story to do justice to the everyday experiences women have in the real world then he wasn’t the person to be writing it. He should have left well enough alone & not given story to false narratives.

In 1995 Crichton published The Lost World, Jurassic Park’s sequel.

The movie was a very loose adaptation.

The tyrannosaurs got much slower in this second movie & struggled to chase down fleeing humans even on foot.

Otherwise one imagines the San Diego incident would have been more Lovecraftian.

In 1997 he published Airframe, I believe his only novel with a female protagonist. One imagines this was a sort of correction for Disclosure.

Nevertheless the female protagonist is still less of a three-dimensional character and more a force of nature that resists conquest.

In 1999 he published Timeline.

The book really succeeded:

• in showing the difficulties historians have deeply understanding the past
• in showing a narcissistic tech bro dying alone in a hell of his own making
• & in showing how good people can make a heaven of any hell

In 2002 he published Prey.

This was more or less a retelling of The Andromeda Strain (& Sphere) with nanotechnology instead of with extraterrestrials.

In 2004 he published State of Fear.

I was very impressed with this in high school but by the time I had a few college classes in geology I knew it was nothing but climate change misinformation.

Then I understood that my favorite science fiction writer no longer did the slightest due diligence with his research & simply wrote straight from his ass.

The last work he published alive was Next (2006).

He was so offended by truth-tellers about State of Fear, he made a real-life reporter his antagonist & had him be a child molester for no reason.

With this blood libel his turn to the right wing was complete – & thus he prefigured right wing politics ever since.

For a personal eulogy of this man, I cannot do better than tell the truth about his books, the impact they had on me, the alternative facts they spread & what I learned while I was learning better – & to direct your attention to better science fiction by better people.

I would say the main thing I learned from Mr. Crichton is that a man’s narcissism will be his downfall.

In all his books, female characters are one of two sorts. Either they are a conquest or they are a force of nature that defies conquest. Always, they are two-dimensional.

As long as my personality took the same shape as Mr. Crichton’s, I had the same perceptions & the same sorts of relationships.

It seems he was rewarded for his personality with too much success & so he never learned. I had the opportunity to learn better while I was still young.

For that, I’m grateful.

I got to see how his narcissism deranged him in real time, not only from connection with the women in his life, but also, ultimately, from factuality.

A dying shame, especially for a writer of science fiction.