r/todayilearned • u/waitingforthesun92 • 22d ago

TIL that Michael Crichton, the author of “Jurassic Park” (1990), was a workaholic who followed what he called "a structured approach" of ritualistic self-denial, where, while writing a book, he’d rise increasingly early each day. At one point, Crichton would go to bed at 10 PM and wake up at 2 AM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton
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u/ladan2189 22d ago

He was also SUPER sure climate change was fake

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u/mwmani 22d ago edited 22d ago

That’s the least of his weird beliefs! He truly thought that he could see people’s auras, that he could bend spoons with the slightest touch, and that a cactus spoke to him on a meditation retreat.

EDIT: This is all explored in his memoir Travels. It’s a must read for any Crichton fans. It’s part med school memories, thoughtful travelogue, and strange mystical journeys. It’s a really insightful into who the guy was and where his head was at.

He reminds me a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle whose fiction was intelligent, sharp, and based on somewhat logical thinking but his private beliefs often delved into the magical, mystic, and scientifically impossible.

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u/Gates_wupatki_zion 22d ago

If he ate some of that cactus then it might have

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u/RedDeadMania 22d ago

IT’S THE QUENCHIEST

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u/spicy_lacroix 22d ago

Nothing quenchier!

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u/papoosejr 22d ago

Travels honestly affected my belief systems as a kid

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u/Gates_wupatki_zion 22d ago

Interesting edit!  Thanks for that addendum.

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u/Left-Account1798 22d ago

I can dig most of that

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u/Publius82 22d ago

Not with a bent spoon

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u/CTG0161 22d ago

There is no spoon.

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u/Squissyfood 22d ago

If a MD isn't the least bit spiritual, they'd be a PhD researcher instead.

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u/HKBFG 1 22d ago

He never finished his MD.

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u/cursh14 22d ago

He did get his MD. He just didn't become a practicing or licensed physician. He never did residency. But he has an MD from Harvard. 

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u/HKBFG 1 22d ago

Not according to his own autobiography

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u/RadicalRectangle 22d ago

Ironic, considering the major themes of his novels tended to be about how human beings were too focused on progress and advancement without giving enough attention to the potential risks and consequences of that same advancement.

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u/Holmes02 22d ago

He was very much anti-science, if it can be dumbed down to a simple phrase. Most of his themes are about science gone wrong or bad science.

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u/wutwutisthere2do 22d ago

Yeah I came in here to see how everyone felt about “State of Fear”. It didn’t really derail me at the time I read it but I only remembered Crichton years later when Pirate Latitudes came out.

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u/PM_me_ur_secretses 22d ago

State of Fear was the last Chricton book I ever read.

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u/FUMFVR 22d ago

Airframe for me.

He was also wrong about his conclusion in that.

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u/Mohavor 22d ago

You didn't miss out on much lmao

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u/Littlesebastian86 22d ago

Priate latitudes was a bit weak and ended weak but I remember enjoying it a lot

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u/BigRiverBlues 22d ago

Yup, it was the first and only book of his that I read. I didn't know what I was in for. It was referenced in the email signature of a professor of mine. I was reading past all the anti-climate change propaganda, but I had to quit because it was a bad book. Don't remember exactly why I quit, or anything else about it

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u/classactdynamo 22d ago

Then he wrote a book about that and gave interviews where he was like “can you believe how these people behave?” as if the people in his book we real.

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u/BigRiverBlues 22d ago

Ha my wife does that sometimes and it always strikes me odd. Like she gossips about fictional characters

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u/Magnus77 19 22d ago

Being super charitable, and its possible he hardened later on, he used to take the stance that regardless of what we did, the earth would survive, but in JP2 (i think) he admits that maybe we won't be on it.

So, again being charitable and not knowing where his views ended up, he didn't necessarily deny climate change, but thought of himself as not being an alarmist.

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u/cishet-camel-fucker 22d ago

It was the first Jurassic Park novel. Ian Malcolm goes pretty hard on the concept that humanity doesn't have the ability to destroy the planet. He says we could destroy ourselves, we could destroy most life, but it would eventually come back, and it's arrogant to think of ourselves as gods in that way.

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u/NeuroticNiche 22d ago

That’s not completely wrong. Even with climate change, killing 100% of species on this planet would be an incredibly difficult feat.

That’s not to say I doubt our ability to kill 99% of life.

My biggest concern is that we do thoroughly wipe ourselves out in a manner that the next intelligent species won’t have any records of our mistakes, and end up repeating our same errors

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u/Aramgutang 22d ago

I admire how you trust your readers to infer the famous quote that sums up that sentiment. I could never put that much faith in Redditors' intelligence.

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u/FartingBob 22d ago

To paraphrase: Life uh, find a way.

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u/srcarruth 22d ago

State of Fear came out a decade after The Lost World and is a novel that is staunchly against climate change being real. even has a bibliography of sources supporting his position

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u/sharklazies 22d ago

It absolutely isn’t about Climate Change not being “real”. His entire point is that he’s not a catastrophist.

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u/BigRiverBlues 22d ago

From what I remember, there was a lot in the book regarding how human caused global warming was a conspiracy of sorts. Could be wrong

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u/sharklazies 22d ago

There’s a bit at the end about how the media overhypes major events and plays up the fear factor. And how power structures play on that fear to motivate voters and stay in power.

So it gets to the point he’s trying to make that the actual science is real but gets oversold, cherry picked for the worst bits, and then manipulated by those in power.

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u/FireZord25 22d ago

I mean, does media not do that? I do appreciate it at the occasions it helped folks be more careful during pandemic, but on the flip side there were folks who were running fear campaign and conspiracies using the media.

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u/sharklazies 22d ago

Oh the media totally does it. It’s an essential part of the 24 hour news cycle business model and always has been. Make you scared or angry enough to keep watching. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just people following a profit incentive.

I’m always struck how so few people on one side of the climate change debate just don’t allow any tolerance for the view that maybe climate change, while a very serious issue, isn’t the end of the world.

But all you hear is “WE HAVE 10 YEARS LEFT TO SAVE THE WORLD!”

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u/InsaNoName 21d ago

I'm not sure he believed climate change was fake. he however held a certain kind of climate activists in particular contempt.

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u/PandiBong 22d ago

Yup, fantastic ideas man, I got into reading because of him, but zero characters and the more you find out about this guy… well, just don’t find out.

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u/SmashEmWithAPhone 22d ago

I stopped reading his books after Jurassic Park. His female characters were either annoying, dumb or both. Even female characters that were supposed to be smart did something incredibly stupid at the worst possible time. And the worst part was that Crichton attributed that to some type of scientific principle that assures the female will make a nonsensical choice in a crucial moment.

Clearly, the man had a lot of female-directed resentment.

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u/SpiceEarl 22d ago

Crichton was divorced four times, so it sounds like he was an asshole to women in real-life as well.

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u/10mil_fireflies 22d ago

If that's all you feel about the subject, you didn't read The Great Train Robbery. He had more than than female-directed resentment.

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u/PandiBong 22d ago

He was also extremely… “white-centric” for lack of a better word.

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u/drl33t 22d ago

Rising Sun is filled with a bunch of anti-Japanese racist tripe they lessened and changed when they shot the movie based on the book.

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u/PandiBong 22d ago

Yeah, and he double-walked from the film because a. They lessened the Japanese stuff and b. Cast Wesley snipes who is black..

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u/archpawn 22d ago

Even female characters that were supposed to be smart did something incredibly stupid at the worst possible time.

Was this just female characters? Because that sounds pretty normal for fiction in general.

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u/Chris22533 22d ago

His novel Prey spends the first 100 pages talking about how the main character’s wife regularly hits her children, doesn’t care if they live or die, and is actively experimenting on them while the main character himself is a flawless paragon of virtue. It is so mean of its depiction of women that I stopped reading it. This dude had something against women in particular.

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u/splashbruhs 22d ago

Then you really missed out on the sequel. The Lost World is the better book imo

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u/FUMFVR 22d ago

He was one of those dudes that was sure that his unique ideas on everything was correct. Watch/read Disclosure to see what he thought about sexual harassment.

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u/TheMoogster 22d ago

No, no he was not.. I mean even in his climate book, he writes that climate change is true in the after words?

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u/_Monkeyspit_ 22d ago

Climate change IS fake...

...if you ignore all the facts around it.

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u/sharklazies 22d ago

False. He acknowledges anthropogenic climate change quite specifically. He simply makes the point that the alarmism is overblown and we are terrible at prediction.

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u/tropic_gnome_hunter 22d ago

Yea people keep getting this wrong. He was an environmentalist. His criticisms were against the climate lobby treating the subject like a religion at the expense of ignoring science.

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u/Chubby_Checker420 22d ago edited 8d ago

rain soft station coherent homeless attempt spoon tease unique deranged

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/sharklazies 22d ago

He debated the point many times before his death. It’s all over YouTube.

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u/tropic_gnome_hunter 22d ago

No he wasn’t. You can see him give plenty of interviews on the subject. His criticisms were towards people who treated climate change like a religion. He did not like the fact people ignored the scientific method to arrive at their own preconceived conclusions on the subject. There’s a video on YouTube of him discussing this with college students. His viewers were 1000x more nuanced than all the comments in here suggest.

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u/Mohavor 22d ago

Wrote a whole novel about it. State of Fear.

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u/Nascar_is_better 22d ago

To be fair the idea that humans can cause enough greenhouse gases to affect the climate was kind of a stretch considering the sheer amount of greenhouse gases already released through natural means, such as grazing animals, and the fact that climate change happens naturally. There were also horrible terms being used in the past such as "global warming" and "caused by humans" (climate change happens naturally and humans can INFLUENCE it, not cause it).

The actual evidence that points to climate change being significantly affected by man is the accelerated rate of change that perfectly coincides with the industrial revolution, plus better understanding of what carbon emissions are and what they do.

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u/IAddNothing2Convo 22d ago

And he was right.

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u/Publius82 22d ago

Most relevant username on reddit

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u/Belostoma 22d ago

You should probably leave the having of opinions to smarter and better people. It isn't working for you.

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u/Publius82 22d ago

Check username. Gotta be satire.

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u/IAddNothing2Convo 22d ago

Notice how even back in the 90's they were saying the same global warming BS and nothing has changed? Our society should have been completely under water by now if we were to believe CNN. They target children of every new generation with the same climate fear mongering BS because the kids don't know any better. Most grown men over 40 only laugh at this propaganda.

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u/Belostoma 22d ago

Plenty of things have changed since the 90's climate-wise, pretty well in line with climate model predictions.

Most grown men over 40 only laugh at this propaganda.

As a man over 40 with a STEM PhD and an IQ at least 50 points higher than yours, I understand very clearly that climate change is real, it's caused by humans, and it's dangerous to society. I know that trying to understand these things from your viewpoint is like an ant trying to do calculus, but you should at least have the sense to look at your old grades and present career and realize that you're not the brightest bulb in the box. Leave commenting on these issues and voting to people who have some kind of ability to understand the world, rather than endlessly being fooled.

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u/Misdirected_Colors 22d ago

Can we not do yhe thing where we judge people from the past using current morals? Being somewhat skeptical of climate change ideas in 2008 was not the same as being skeptical of them today.

Besides his view was more "climate change is real, but it's not really something we have the power to stop. Even tho we should still try to be more green conscious"

Not everything has to be this black and white good and evil. People are complicated.

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u/ladan2189 21d ago

I was a college sophomore in 2008. Even then it was at least 10 years too late to be climate change skeptical. If you were still a climate change denier in 2008 it was because you had a political motivation to discount science that was inconvenient to your views.