Michael Crichton died yesterday, at the age of 66. He was almost without peer as an action/thriller writer who knew how to communicate aspects of the frontiers of current science. The rampant success of his work almost created the hard-science techno-thriller genre.

Ultimately, though, I think the flavour of most of Crichton’s science fiction was ‘faux-hard’. (This is not to denigrate his work; I loved it and clearly lots of other people did too.) He pushed boundaries of mainstream fiction by introducing contemporary hard science themes, but he was at his best when he was free to weave fiction together with fact without being beholden to the latter. For example, the chaos theory strand in Jurassic Park was at best a metaphor; if I’m not misremembering it, nothing in the actual plot really had anything to do with chaos theory. On the other hand, managing that kind of metaphor is an achievement in itself. With State of Fear he seemed to forget that — it was based on old science that was obsolete before the book was published, and he set himself up for a fall by presenting it as anything other than pure fiction.

An interesting thing about so many of his books was that all the action happened somewhere remote. This gave his stories an aura of plausibility — the idea that they could be going on right now, and we would never know. It was, I’m sure, a good part of his books’ appeal. The theme of science and technology as double-edged swords is also highlighted by this approach; unfettered research is the threat, and we’re lucky, the stories seem to say, that these crises can be averted with a little help from the maverick scientist-hero.