The Crichton Formula
Michael Crichton is one of those interesting modern writers who had seeds of greatness in him that fell on thin soil. I say this not to demean his work - quite the opposite. He himself said that he never wrote great literature, and when he said it, there was a hint of sorrow in his voice.
Crichton was the son of a respected newspaperman. He got his first piece of writing published at the age of 12 by the New York Times, and from thereon out he wrote with focused intensity. He attended Harvard for his undergraduate degree, then went to medical school at Boston University and wrote several novels on the side. He became a full doctor and achieved his first success as a writer at nearly the same point in time and - after agonizing about which path to follow for a month - he swung sharply into the writer's world. It was not long before he was driving a shiny convertible through Los Angeles and working on the seeds of his next novel: a dinosaur-themed science fiction thriller called Jurassic Park.
Crichton had a great deal of natural talent combined with intense work ethic. But the thing that drew me most to his writing when I was a young teen was a foreign texture to his writing and worldview that created immense resonance with my own luddic sensitivities. I could not put a finger on it at the time, but in retrospect I would say that what I loved about Crichton's novels was their portrayal of natural revelation. Revelation is the process of making visible things unseen, obviously, so natural revelation is the process of nature's reappearance amidst and in spite of modern, delicately-constructed human systems. Put a little more plainly: Crichton liked to put human systems in tension with nature and watch where they fell apart.
Natural revelation is a less popular subject for fiction than its inverse - something I might call "human revelation" in which nature tests humans and the humans manage to cobble together the fires of civilization in the midst of chaos. You might look to The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers or even The English Romantics for this sort of thing. Even Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Human revelation works by starting with a natural environment and then delicately pruning and interpreting the scene until it is commensurate with higher human conceptions of things like "divinity" or "majesty" or "courage." Think Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Jules Verne, with his stories about humans taming new environments, such as volcanoes or the depths of the ocean (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) is another good example. This is young-civilization literature.
But Crichton does something different. He operates in a world of excess civilization, particularly of excess technological civilization. The problem is not a shortage of romance or sentiment. Instead, the problem is that there is too much. He writes about nature clawing its way back into these clean ordered systems. While Jurassic Park is certainly the most prototypical example, the dozen novels I read by him all follow this general pattern.
I found this inversion to be exhilarating. After all, civilizations have collapsed just about as often as they have been born throughout history.
And on this note - to say that there is no spiritual message in Crichton's work would be a terrible mistake. He presents as a disenchanted writer, exposing humans to chaos and seeing how they react. But it is precisely in these chaotic environments that virtuous characters are sifted apart from the decadent ones. It is not always a triumph of the strongest. Often (as in Jurassic Park) it is the children or nerds who come out on top. But it is not pure rationalism that brings them through. Rather, it is inspired use of knowledge and imagination.
Crichton seems to be pessimistic about the ability of institutions - particularly corporations - to confront the trials of nature, but optimistic about informal human friendships or, in other cases, the ingenuity of the individual.
I am taking pains to describe Crichton's writing because he is one of the few writers who was brave enough to write about burning problems of modernity. The burning problems of modernity are about how far human-built systems can grow and extend beyond nature before being torn apart by their own internal inconsistencies. As we build ever more complex supply chains, data centers, and AI models, we achieve great amazing feats of engineering and yet have rather little understanding of the telos of what we have built.
The solution to the excesses of high technologies, in Crichton's novels, is a return to the extremes of primordial nature. In the year 2026, one could argue that we are living in a globe-scale Michael Crichton novel. The United States alone has allocated over a third of its GDP to artificial intelligence. In the short term, some of the architects of this vast undertaking will make money and achieve their goals. But on a longer timescale it is anyone's guess how the story will end. Many people argue that it will elevate the state of man - bring him greater wisdom and creative power. But it is equally possible that as hubris outstrips caution, we will not encounter the next level of civilization, but rather the end of our civilization and a soft return to nature. It is very possible that what lies beyond is something very ancient and _un_thinking.
Perhaps the attitude of Crichton's best characters - a willingness to accept nature as it presents itself, to continue showing virtue and care for one's friends, while at the same time abandoning all platitudes and corporate moralisms - will serve us well in this brave new world.