Personally, we remember reading The Andromeda Strain at the shore one summer, and then the following year, in my first real job, as an usher, we got to see the movie version about 30 times. Enjoyed it every time.

Later came Jurassic Park and ER, but if you read his memoir, Travels, you’d know that he was at one time convinced that he was locked in psychic combat with, in his words, The Entity. His strange real-life psychological struggle was never made into a work of fiction. Truth is stranger than fiction, after all, especially that kind of personal truth.

Here’s his sensible synthesis of the interconnection between belief in aliens and the promotion of Global Warming. Only Crichton could have written it, lectured it , or gotten it published. Even so, for essays like this, and for making a best-seller like with State of Fear, which dissents from popular scientific myth-making, Crichton is, and will be, ridiculed as much as a mega-successful author/filmmaker could be, by far far lesser talents.