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My first true post is about this man whom I consider one of the greatest writers of science fiction who lived in the 20th century, Michael Crichton. Now, I don't want to write an essay or a biography here, which probably is already written by someone else anyways (like this one here), so I will mostly talk about the things that make him a great guy in my mind.
Crichton was a Harvard Medical School graduate, with a background of literature and anthropology from Harvard College. Writing had always been an interest for him since childhood, and he started writing at the age of 7. His works are mostly science fiction novels may also fall into the techno-thriller category. Most of his novels were adapted to screen or TV; perhaps most famously, Jurassic Park, which was adapted to a movie directed by mighty Steven Spielberg. He was also the creator of the TV series ER, which lasted 15 years before being discontinued in 2009. He passed away at the age of 66, in 2008.
One of his most successful novels is "The Andromeda Strain"(1969) where an extraterrestrial microorganism that has extraordinary mutation capabilities makes its way to Earth and wreak havoc at an instant contact with humans. One interesting concept that I liked in this novel was the so-called "Odd-Man Hypothesis" which, albeit fictional, is a hypothesis that states, out of all other people, unmarried males are better choices to entrust control of thermonuclear bombs as they are thought to make the most realistic and emotion-free decisions even in the case of self-destruction of a facility that they are inside of. This, of course, is a good point to discuss: deciding whether men or women makes the best call in the case of a crisis. My view on this is that it is not something that can be generalized based on gender, though I agree on the fact that an unmarried person would be a better choice for the task due to the basic fact that an unmarried person will probably has less emotional bounds that may affect his/her judgment. Using a fictional concept as truth, as in this case, is called false document literary device, which Crichton used frequently in his novels.
Some of you guys may wonder if there's anything you may not like about the guy at all, well, there is. His novel State of Fear, although can be considered less fiction than his other books, has been a source of controversy because of Crichton's notion that global warming is not really a great danger after all. Don't be prejudicial though, he made use of lots of scientific data (which was thoroughly referenced) in forms of charts and graphs all along the book to led people to (almost) believe that scientific data shows that global warming is not really dangerous. However, some people that was referenced in the novel told that their work has been misused against global warming (see this NYT article). In the appendix of the book, Crichton pointed to the the danger of politicized science to the global warming research, but even his book couldn't escape from the wrath, as State of Fear was given Journalism Award by American Association of Petroleum Geologists (I know, LOL).
All in all, he contributed valuable insight on the realm of sci-fi writing, and I'm sure that even though he wasn't the greatest sci-fi author by merit, he was (probably) the greatest sci-fi author by height :). (he stood 2.06 m which is quite a lot)
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