Saturday, December 11, 2004

Literature: Michael Crichton, right-wing noodge?

Despite my proud status as as a quirky but horribly pretentious connoisseur of literature, my longest running guilty pleasure has always been Michael Crichton. His plot-driven page turners/heavily-researched essays let me turn my brain off but still maintain a non-fiction pulse, and that's always fun. But Bryan Curtis makes the case that Crichton's right-wingish politics are becoming increasingly loud, for when he decides to right a novel on global warming (inevitable, of course), he sucks the right wing teat a little too heartily:

State of Fear is a 600-page tirade about global warming. Crichton thinks environmentalists have become overheated about the threat and have substituted demagoguery for hard science. So he unleashes a cabal of ruthless greens, who build weather machines to punish their SUV-drivin', carbon-dioxide-emittin' neighbors with a plague of hurricanes and tsunamis.
Demagoguery for hard science? How about caution versus convenience?

After watching The Day After Tomorrow, the worst movie I've seen in years (besides the atrocious adaptation of one of Crichton's better novels, Timeline, and of course, everything by the bastardizer of Hitchcock cinematography Manoj Knight Shyamalan), I think I might skip out on State of Fear. If my curiosity will let me.

Update: an AP article, where Crichton claims he's still an environmentalist.

4 comments:

Danielle Solzman said...

he's a republican?

Garrett said...

Republican, I'm not sure. But there are definitely some hard-right underpinnings to some of his work.

jomama said...

Read it.

It's called science.

The fact that some twits make it political
is irrelevent.

Garrett said...

I believe I'm more than sufficiently trained in the scientific method to realize that the majority of scientific data supports global warming. Only very selective use of the data supports the opposite stance, and Crichton, a fiction writer, not a scientist by any means, is not particularly qualified to assert otherwise. An unused HMS degree doesn't grant him free pass.