I read the recent news of Michael Crichton's death with equal measure of shock and sadness. I had not heard that he was ill, and despite the fact that many of his novels were written before I was 10 years old, I viewed him as a young man. Indeed 66 years old is young in this day and age. Still, it seemed like an untimely end to one of the greatest writers of our time. While I can't boast of having read each and every one of his novels, Crichton's work has certainly influenced me as a writer and a human being, and I am sad to learn that I won't be surprised or thrilled by any new Crichton novels after his last posthumous publication.
I can remember the first time I read Jurassic Park. In 1990, when the book was released, I was nine. About a year later, just as I was entering the 6th grade, a friend of my father's sent me a copy to read. My parents had some reservations about the subject material and it's appropriateness for a ten-year-old, but decided to encourage me. While I had ventured from the children's section into adult literature a few times already, Jurassic Park had a scientific flavor that I had not encountered in other books. I was fascinated with the detailed descriptions of the cloning procedures and Ian Malcom's pontifications on chaos theory and paradigms. With a father who had raised me on chemistry sets and computer science, I was drawn to the technicality presented in the material, even if only to realize later that it was intelligent fiction, but still fiction.
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