Science fiction writers are inevitably children of their times. Many consider the genre's mission is to foresee the future, but often its greatest practitioners reflect the fears, anxieties and concerns of their own age and society. The literary phenomenon that was Michael Crichton would not have been possible in any era but the late 20th century, in the age of the personal computer, the Human Genome Project and the threat of global pandemics from deadly microbes mutating.
The best-selling American author and filmmaker, who died on Tuesday of cancer, aged 66, mesmerised a generation of readers and movie-goers around the world with works built on high-concept science and cutting-edge technology. He managed to make otherwise nerdy subjects exciting in an age that glorified technically proficient and obsessed individuals - the computer whizzes of the dotcom era. High scientific or social concepts, rather than flesh-and-blood characters, are the heroes in virtually all his novels. Examples are the genetically recombined dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and deadly pathogens in The Andromeda Strain. The economic rise of Japan was perceived as a threat by many Americans in the 1980s, just as that of China is today. Crichton personified these fears with diabolical Japanese businessmen in The Rising Sun. Sexual harassment at work became a major cultural preoccupation in the 1990s; Crichton subverted it by making a male executive the victim in Disclosure.
If there was a multidimensional character in the Crichton phenomenon, it was Crichton himself. More interesting than most of his fictional creations, he graduated from Harvard, taught at Cambridge, climbed the Great Pyramid, wrote best-selling novels and created blockbuster movies and a TV series, ER - all before he was 30. And he never let up. At his best, he saw through social and scientific trends ahead of the crowds; at his worst, as in his recent, lesser effort, Prey, his books could read like technical manuals. In old age, he drifted increasingly towards right-wing ideology as he denied global warming and denounced environmentalism as a potentially terrorist movement. Fortunately, what most people will remember is the erudite, intellectually inquisitive polymath.
