I own just about all Crichton’s works, despite not being aware of them until high school, which was late 90′s, and most of the books legitimately creeped me out, especially if I read them at night!

Jurassic Park and The Lost World are great to read back to back, but Congo and Andromeda Strain scared the poop out of me. So did Sphere, despite the lack of killer sharks, which I thought would have been a no-brainer for a story taking place underwater (but I guess kudos to him for avoiding such a contrivance). I love medieval and ancient warfare, and I majored in math, so the quasi-quantum physics and battles in Timeline were thoroughly enjoyable. Terminal Man, Airframe, Disclosure, Rising Sun, Prey and the global warming one were all interesting reads as well.

I guess my favorite Crichton-moment in my life was eliciting weird stares from my uncle and aunt when my then-high school sophomore self laughed off the animatronic gorillas in the movie Congo, citing “they were much scarier with stone paddles!”

Haha ;)

(Also, does it say bad things about me that the main thing I remember from Red Dragon is not the woman on the table, but suddenly knowing what autoerotic asphyxiation was?)

http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2008/11/06/a-writer-of-unique-talents-i-hope/

In some ways he will always be under rated. His style was minialistic in many ways. His characters were mostly cyphers. Yet, he was always even in his worst works INTERESTING. Bringing together thoughts and plots in a way that always got one thinking.

In my mind, it is always the andromeda strain that I go back to. The recent remake should be seen to just show the strengths of the original work and the robert wise movie.

Sometimes less is more.
I will miss him.

I loved Congo and remember reading it when I was young and feeling quite accomplished because of that. I loved Amy. I absolutely hated the movie (it almost ruined the book for me). Actually, this was the book/movie that made me decide to never both read and watch something ever again. If this comment makes no sense, sorry guys. I’m sick and have a very foggy head right about now, but felt to need to comment anyway.

Anyhow, I’m in a beach house at night, with the blackness of the ocean filling the windows behind me, and I read the prologue where the baby compys break into the Costa Rican mom’s house and eat her baby, and I promptly flip the fuck out.

The Andromeda Strain: Tried this in 7th grade. I got through the creepy town full of corpses (again, flipping the fuck out), the emergency assembly of scientists, the decontamination ritual and the initial briefing. Then I zoned out through about 100 pages of science, only to tune back in during the thrilling conclusion.

Sphere: Beach vacation, 8th grade; flipped the fuck out.

Congo: I can’t put a firm date on when I read this one. However, my very first exposure to it came when a kid was reading it surreptitiously next to me in French class in 7th grade. “Dude,” he whispered, sliding it beneath his desk. He indicated the passage in the prologue where one of the gorillas throws a human eyeball at the protagonist. I flipped the fuck out.

Rising Sun: I actually read this in the spring of 2006, the weekend nearest my birthday, having bought it from a used bookstore in Kenmore Square. I’m sure that Crichton’s warnings about the Japanese business powerhouse looked really intimidating in the days before zero percent interest rates; as it is, I just found it comical.

As for Clancy…now that’s a whole other topic of discussion. Where is Jack Ryan now?

He got involved in movie and TV production after his work started crossing over. He was the executive producer of a lot of his stuff – most notably of _ER_, which is one of his babies I really should or could have mentioned in my elegy if I had really identified with that part of his work personally.

So, yeah, for a lot of authors, it’s either “I exert only a little bit of control and are okay with it” or “I exert a lot of control and frequently get frustrated.” For Crichton, eventually it became “I do it myself.”