Michael Crichton was a man I admired immensely. Very handsome, very tall, very smart, very charming, very contrarian, very funny and now, sadly, very much missed.

He trained as an MD at Harvard, but wrote novels as he studied. The Andromeda Strain was one of them. But it was Jurassic Park, the book and movie, that brought him wider fame and fortune. Always an exciting read, his books are chock full of well researched facts, including footnotes, often opening eyes to new ways of thinking. His prose acted as the wrapping around the fantastic nuggets of knowledge that are at the core of his writing. Reading Crichton was not just entertainment, you were assured of actually learning something. 

His work included 26 novels, gobs of screenplays, TV shows, speeches, essays, and lectures.

 I was currently preparing a post based on his own prediction of the end of the media.

Mediasaurus is a 1993 speech he gave at the National Press Club that was published in Wired Magazine. It was shocking at the time, especially to the press. This is how it begins –

“I am the author of a novel about dinosaurs, a novel about US-Japanese trade relations, and a forthcoming novel about sexual harassment – what some people have called my dinosaur trilogy. But I want to focus on another dinosaur, one that may be on the road to extinction. I am referring to the American media. And I use the term extinction literally. To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace.”

 An interview in Slate in May of 2008 acknowledges how right he was. As usual.