What To Read Instead #6 -- One Crichton book out, another in -- Garbo

 

This week I reject one of Michael Crichton's novels in favor of another of his books. Crichton was smart, talented, and clearly a troubled soul. Normally I am never quite sure where I am at any particular moment when it comes separating the writer from what he or she has written. But in this week's post, I didn't have any trouble getting it sorted. 

This week's recommendation is based on my objections to offensive language and belittling attitudes which so permeate the text that I found it impossible to enjoy reading the novel. I noticed that I was turning pages and waiting for another painful instance. 

Book to skip:  The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton

Reason to skip:

Pernicious, repetitive, unnecessary homophobia kept popping up all through the second half of this 1972 science-gone-wrong thriller. There's a character who needs to hide in an urban lair to plan his terrible revenge. Crichton needed a crummy, I-didn't-see-anything-Officer neighborhood, and he chose a gay-tolerant area to indicate how corrupt and noir-ish this environment is. Thieves, junkies, strippers, and gay people.  Crichton, who died in 2008, was socially conservative, and he clearly despised the laissez-faire attitudes of sexually-liberated Los Angeles.   

Of course, the farther one goes back in fiction, the modern reader encounters more and more dated, offensive cultural depictions. I'm skilled at skipping over brief yucky bits of otherwise-good books while feeling glad that people don't think that kind of crap is okay these days. But Michael Crichton was particularly nasty, childish, and spiteful when slapping at his perceived enemies in his books: The author infamously named a character in Next after a critic who gave Crichton's earlier book State of Fear a bad review. The reviewer had objected to a plot centered around eco-terrorists planning mass murder to save the planet from humankind. These bad guys were invented by a man who refused to accept scientific proof for the concept of climate change. When Michael Crowley criticized State of Fear harshly, Crichton  made that character in Next, the one with the same name as the reviewer, a child molester. There was no development of that character in the rest of the book. It was simply a cowardly, libelous attack. And that's how the homophobic slurs in The Terminal Man seem to me; no reason for them except that Crichton had found a group he could get away with mocking cruelly. 

In The Terminal Man, Crichton takes every pot-shot he can, reported what "people said" about the gay-tolerant neighborhood, which allowed me to include a number of unplesant epithets. At one point, someone is searching a strip bar for the dangerous guy, and the audience of lustful men is sprinkled with a number of lustful women with suspiciously short hair. Sigh.

Oh, and a national group for people with epilepsy didn't appreciate the book being built around a character who blacked out and became violent during his seizures.

Prey, also by Michael Crichton

Why?

I wanted to use another Crichton book in this post because I'm no fan of making an author, artist, or musician a villain and using that as a reason to ban their work. I've enjoyed (selectively) some of Crichton's work, having started with The Andromeda Strain.  I chose Prey as today's substitute because I found novel suspenseful. Crichton's skills kept me from predicting what would happen. and I got a good scare: rogue nanobots happen to be one the things I find most terrifying in the entire world. 

A note on the image at the top of this post:  Crichton explained his antisocial issues came the discomfort he felt as a young man over his height. Crichton was very tall, at six feet eight inches. I dunno. Is that a valid excuse? Interestingly (to me), In 1992, People magazine named Michael Crichton (who'd been a cast member in the TV show "ER") one of its 25 most beautiful people. Seems like that ought to have healed his cantankerous soul a little. 

READING TIME COMPARISON

The Terminal Man     4 hours

Prey    7 hours  -- a longer read but a better read, with significantly better-developed characters and a plot that's more complex and interwoven

Disclaimer:  I suggest skipping books, but there's always a substitute offering in these posts. I never suggest skipping a book and playing more video games or spending more time doomscrolling. And I am not banning, condemning, harming, or trashing the books I recommend skipping. There's nothing wrong with the titles I suggest skipping; it's just a matter of making choices with limited time to read in a busy, busy world. 

Garbo