Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) was born in Chicago and earned an MD from Harvard Medical School in 1969, but he never practiced medicine. While still a medical student he wrote paperback thrillers under the pen name John Lange, partly so that future patients would not worry about turning up in his plots. The Andromeda Strain (1969), in which a team of scientists tries to contain an extraterrestrial microorganism that kills within minutes, was his first novel under his own name and set the template for much of what followed.

A Crichton novel usually takes a real field of research and pushes it a step past the present: microbiology in The Andromeda Strain, genetic engineering in Jurassic Park (1990), time travel in Timeline (1999). The outcomes are cautionary, often about people who assume they can control nature or technology. He also worked in film and television, writing and directing Westworld (1973) and creating the series ER (1994–2009). He published 25 novels in his lifetime, and his books have sold more than 200 million copies. Several more novels appeared after his death in 2008, some finished by other writers from his notes.

Start with Jurassic Park rather than The Andromeda Strain. Both show his method, but Jurassic Park has a larger cast and a faster plot, and it is the book his later work is usually measured against. Readers who know only the films should expect a darker, more technical book: during development Crichton expanded Ian Malcolm from a minor character into the voice for a large amount of material on chaos theory.

Next, read The Andromeda Strain for its step-by-step account of a scientific investigation, then Timeline, which sends a group of history students to 14th-century France to rescue their professor. For something without a science premise, The Great Train Robbery (1975) is a historical heist novel based on the Great Gold Robbery of 1855, a theft of gold from a train in Victorian England.