Somebody occasionally points out that vastly more words have been published about Kafka than Kafka himself wrote in his lifetime. Somebody’s probably writing a book about Kafka this very minute. I’d wager the same cannot be said of Michael Crichton. Article continues after advertisement
That isn’t to say Crichton is an author whose reputation needs resuscitating. He doesn’t require a critical enterprise on the level of the Kafka industrial complex to keep his name above water; the man was his own industrial complex. The world-conquering achievements of the Jurassic Park franchise—two novels that rampaged through the bestseller list like a genetically-engineered indoraptor on the loose, a film series seven deep and ever-growing, theme parks, Lego sets, a brand whose imperial conquest of the collective imagination stands just a rung below that of Harry Potter and Star Wars—ensure that a story he wrote will be known to large numbers of human beings as long as there are human beings who consume stories. His conceit, an ingenious and just-scientifically-literate-enough confection about the profit-motivated resurrection of dinosaurs, is wired into our general consciousness as firmly as the stories of the Bible. Maybe more so. If someone tells you to imagine God, I’m not sure who’s going to pop into your mind; if someone tells you to imagine a dinosaur, I know for a fact that you’re imagining a dinosaur from Jurassic Park. It’s never going anywhere.
