Hmmpost

Can’t miss mentioning the sad passing of author Michael Crichton, claimed by cancer, who if you don’t know the man by name like Stephen King, you have to know at least one of his works: The consistent themes of his work are the consequences of man’s own hubris and a thoroughgoing paranoia. Someone is always coming up with a brilliant notion in Crichton, and it always goes hideously kablooey. Bring dinosaurs back to life? Okay, but they’ll escape and gobble you up. Organ transplants? Fine until the medical establishment starts harvesting them for profit. Robots? Forget about the robots: they’ll shoot you down ("Westworld") or come after you with knives ("Runaway"

Crichton (pronounced "cry-tun") is responsible for some fantastic fiction and movies (Westworld is one of my favorites of all time) over the years including dinodrama Jurassic Park. Although the title of my post suggests there won’t be any posthumous works, I’m hoping he had some more stories in the pipeline or a book of ideas that could be given to somebody else to continue his work. That’s what the great ones do. He was that kind of quality writer that you want to see their work continue. They’ve done it with the James Bond novels, so why not do it with Crichton. Although some of his book to movie adaptions were lackluster (e.g Congo, Sphere), he had very few bad books. Sphere remains one of my favorite books. The first Jurassic Park movie was great, but it was downhill from there. Not to mention the guy was behind the hit TV series ER. We’ve lost a good one at age 66. Think I’ll go on a Crichtonthon this weekend in his honor and re-watch some of his great movies over the years.