Goodbye to Crichton

Aside from all the hubbub and hullabaloo going on yesterday, I was saddened to see that author Michael Crichton passed away.

I might be dating myself by saying this, but when I was starting sixth grade, the first "grown-up" book that I picked up was a beat-up paperback copy of Jurassic Park that my mom found at a garage sale. Having seen the movie not long before, I decided to tackle the 399-page monster, which was three times larger than any book I had faced before. I decided that I was going to finish it, in addition to my daily schoolwork, and it was the first book that I ever became enthralled with. The ragged book still sits proudly on my bookshelf.

The following year, I trudged through the seventh grade, scraggly and pimple-faced. I wasn't the best student back then, as many subjects, primarily anything relating to math or science, seemed completely incomprehensible. It was, indeed, a difficult time. But come Christmas, my parents gave me the hottest commodity of the year: the recently released sequel to Jurassic Park. I was once again sucked into a world where egotistical scientists try to control nature, only to find that man can never successfully play God. Call him a modern day Mary Shelly. From there, I was hooked.

Any time an English class would call for a book report to be done on a book of our choosing, I'd reach for another Crichton. The Great Train Robbery, Sphere, and Congo made up a good portion of my early literary exposure. As I got caught up with his back catalog, he'd release a new book every few years, which would be given to me as a Christmas present from the parents. I remember starting Timeline by a fire on Christmas Day in 1999 and not being able to put it down until I'd blown through the first hundred pages, even if I was neglecting visiting relatives.

Perhaps this is one of the nerdier elements that has followed me into my adult life, but I have read all of his fiction books as well as some of his nonfiction, and as I look over the collection of his books that have gathered on my bookshelf, I see flashes of times in my life associated with each of his books... While the family took a car trip to Tahoe, I sat on the floor of the Toyota Previa reading The Andromida Strain, getting carsick from reading in the car but not wanting to stop until I finished the chapter... While I was in an SAT prep course in high school, the teacher said we should always be reading in order to build our vocabulary, so I found a used hardback copy of The Terminal Man on Ebay... During my senior year of college, I sat in my girlfriend's bedroom reading his nonfiction Five Patients, a brief history of the modern hospital, while she watched Gray's Anatomy in the living room. After the show, I tried to relate to her interests by explaining Crichton's retelling of the evolution of surgery, which she interrupted to extatically tell me that the blonde nurse hooked up with that scruffy doctor.

While there is certainly better literature out there, Crichton's books always connected with me. Beign a graduate of Harvard Medical School, he brought a scientific background to his adrenalin-infused brand of science fiction. He would create a bizarre science fiction nightmare, whether it be dinosaurs, super-monkeys or alien ships, and explain scientifically how it could all actually happen. It wasn't just space wars or monsters, it was a textbook in nanotechnology, or gene patentening, or Japanese business culture in America. Many of his books ended witn a long annotated bibliography, directing the reader to further works on the topics that he had covered in the book. Too often, his books were turned into sub-par summer blockbusters, which really took away from the essence of his books: a science lesson made cool.

Every other Christmas or so, my parents would get me his newest book and I'd read it over the holliday. Most recently was Christmas 2006: his book Next, an exploration into the world of genetic experimentation, both in the labratory and in the courtroom. I read it as I moved into my new apartment in Sacramento, moving to a new city for the first time by myself. A few weeks ago, I realized Christmas was approaching and checked out his website to see if there was a new book I should be asking my parents to get me. The site provided no details into his latest work, and I wondered, "What's the deal?"

On Tuesday, Michael Crichton died of cancer at the age of 66. Appropriately, I found out through my mom, who sent me an email this morning. It wasn't until then that I realized how I could trace my growth, from the age of 12 to 25, by simply glancing at my bookshelf. I'm sad to see that I'll no longer be able to carry on this small tradition, and that the world has lost one of its great creative minds.