Respect Authority

We’re getting to the age, or at least I am, where people we know are going to start up and dying on us. Not the obvious people: grandmothers, great aunts and friends with heroin problems, but celebrities – movie stars, musicians and authors.

Author and filmmaker Michael Crichton passed away in Los Angeles Tuesday, after what his family called a prolonged but private battle against cancer. He was 66.

For those living under a rock, Crichton penned best-sellers that included Jurassic Park, The Lost World and Congo. He’s also the creator of medical drama ER, which consequently is also in its final season. His most recent novel, Next, about genetics and law (a Crichton favorite) was published in December 2006.

I suspect that most people these days associate Jurassic Park more with Steven Spielberg, animatronics and a quirky Jeff Goldbloom performance than the novel, but trust me when I say the book was, to be frank, pretty fucking awesome. As was The Lost World – and you can tell, since Jurassic Park III was by far the worst Jurassic Park of them all (and a front-runner for worst movie ever, though it will likely be trumped by 2010’s Jurassic Park IV), likely because it wasn’t based on a Crichton book. In fact, the film industry is likely as devastated by this death as the publishing one, Crichton was also behind sci-fi thriller Sphere and Twister.

If you didn’t spend significant portions of your childhood plugged into the wide world of adult mass market paperbacks, Crichton’s passing is just another drop in the bucket of old and/or sick people eventually dying. But for those like me, who at age 12 boasted a massive collection of books by Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Mary Higgins Clark — at the expense of real live friends? Psh, no, of course not — Michael Crichton will most definitely be missed.