Michael Crichton – A Man of Many Roles

The man who made a superstar out of a T-Rex and created many more gripping works ranging from science fiction to television series, Michael Crichton, succumbed to cancer at the age of 66.

To the world Crichton was a best-selling novelist and the creator of the fantastic creatures of Jurassic Park. Other than that, he was also a medical doctor, a television producer, a movie director as well as the creator of the long-running television series ER.

Crichton’s novels have sold more than 150 million copies around the world. His best-known works like The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, The Terminal Man, Prey mainly fall in the genre of science-fiction thrillers with most of them underlining the premise that has been popular since the day of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, - Scientific hubris will inexorably end in disaster. However towards the end he also began exploring offbeat but upbeat endings as in the biogenetic novel, Next.

Other than writing Crichton was also deeply interested in the public policies of the day and later in his life he took an explicit stand against archly ideological environmentalism. His 2005 book State of Fear is a fictionalization of his view that environmentalism is a belief system based on faith, not on facts. Crichton then went on to testify before a Senate committee on the politicization of climate-change policies.

Crichton fans will however best remember him as the author of several riveting novels of which they can expect the last one to be published by Harper Collins in the days to come.