Michael Crichton died a few days ago at the dismayingly young age of 66. Appropriately enough, his glowing obituaries have collectively formed one of the most readable, engaging tributes I've read to any author in the last few years—a tale packed with dazzling statistics (at one point, he was simultaneously responsible for the number one film, book and TV series in America: Jurrasic Park, Disclosure and ER), precocious narrative leaps (he published his first article in the New York Times aged 14; he funded his way through graduate school by writing novels), personal eccentricities and extremes (Crichton was six feet nine inches tall; he used to shut himself up in a near-empty room and get up at 2am to finish his books) and, of course, tremendous success.
As a writer, Crichton had his critics, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world—Martin Amis's demolition of The Lost World in the Sunday Times in 1995 is one of the most thorough maulings of a prose style I've ever read ("Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of clichés, roaming free. You will listen in ‘stunned silence’ to an ‘unearthly cry’ or a ‘deafening roar’. Raptors are ‘rapacious’. Reptiles are ‘reptilian’. Pain is ‘searing’ "). But Crichton had an extraordinary gift, both for weaving fictions around his hopes and fears for the world, and for articulating his thinking outside of fiction with exemplary clarity. Here, for instance, he is in full flow in 1993 on the topic of the media, and why many of its modern giants are doomed to crumble:
"I want direct access to information of interest to me, and increasingly I expect to get it. This is a long-standing trend in many technologies. When I was a child, telephones had no dials. You picked up the phone and asked an operator to place your call. Now, if you've ever had the experience of being somewhere where your call was placed for you, you know how exasperating that is. It's faster and more efficient to dial it yourself.When I was young, I devoured Crichton's books, almost always finishing them within a day of purchase. Quality of prose was not uppermost in my mind. These were texts that took me places—that showed me what the written word can do, what a tremendous impact it can have and pleasure it can give, when it's done right. They're not books I feel a great urge to re-read, today, or that I would ever flick through for the pleasure of a sentence or paragraph. But they are proper, worldly writing, and further evidence—if you need it—that audiences are ready to grapple with big ideas, so long as writers are able to make them listen.
"Today's media equivalent of the old telephone operator is… the front page editor, or the reporter who prunes the facts in order to be lively and vivid. Increasingly, I want to remove those filters, and in some cases I already can. When I read that Ross Perot appeared before a Congressional committee, I am no longer solely dependent on the lively and vivid account in the New York Times, which talks about Perot's folksy homilies, and Frank Capra, and gives a lot of other flashy chrome trim that I am not interested in. I can turn on C-SPAN and watch the hearing myself. In the process, I can also see how accurate the New York Times account was. And that's likely to change my perception of the New York Times, as indeed it has…
"But my ability to view C-SPAN brings us the third trend: the coming end of the media's information monopoly. For two hundred years, since the inception of our nation - the American Revolution was the first war fought in part through public opinion in the newspapers, and Ben Franklin the first media-savvy lobbyist to employ techniques of disinformation - for 200 years, the media has been able to behave in a basically monopolistic way. The media has treated information the way John D. Rockefeller treated oil - as a commodity, in which the distribution network, rather than product quality, is of primary importance. But once people can get the raw data themselves, that monopoly ends. And that means big changes, soon."
You can read the complete speech from which this extract was taken here (and James Fallows's fine tribute to Crichton, which directed me towards it, here).
