Saturday, August 31, 2024

Interview about Michael Crichton

 Science Fiction Book Club

Interview with Gilberto Diaz-Santos (August 2024)

Gilberto Diaz-Santos is a Coordinator of Teaching and Learning at the Community College of Vermont. A Michael Crichton fan for more than three decades, he recently published the article “Recreating Facts and Documenting Fiction: The Legacy of Michael Crichton’s Narrative.”

John Grayshaw: What makes Crichton interesting from a critical perspective? What first drew you to his work?

My first encounter with Michael Crichton's work was in the early 80s, when I enjoyed late-night TV showings of Coma, Looker, The Great Train Robbery, and The Andromeda Strain. At the time, however, I wasn’t paying much attention to film credits. A decade later, while teaching English at the School of Math and Computer Science of the University of Havana, a colleague from the Computer Science Department, Dr. Katrib, handed me his copy of Jurassic Park as he thought I might find some passages useful for my classes. I never asked where or how he got the book—finding contemporary English paperbacks in Cuba was, and still is, a challenge; typically, they’re passed along by someone who found a copy left behind by a tourist or received it as a gift from abroad.

Reading Jurassic Park changed my professional life in many ways. As I devoured the novel, I couldn’t avoid thinking about how to incorporate passages into my lessons, a practice I’ve continued ever since. Then, my collection of Crichton’s works grew slowly, thanks to hunting trips to secondhand shops whenever I traveled to Canada or the UK for professional conferences.

What has kept me hooked for nearly three decades is Crichton’s masterful blending -or blurring- of fact and fiction. I recall reading The Andromeda Strain, about a year and a half after Jurassic Park and being struck by how convincingly real it all seemed—right down to the references which included published works by some of the characters. Intrigued, I went to the library—this was before I had access to the internet—and discovered that the referenced works and some of the journals listed didn’t exist at all. Instead of feeling deceived, I appreciated the clever joke and became a more critical reader and thinker, skills that are invaluable in today’s world, where we must constantly fact-check things we hear or see.

Damo Mac Choiligh: Crichton was concerned with the impact of technology on humans, especially human-machine interaction. Did he read any cyberpunk, or did he have an opinion on it?

Given his wide-ranging interests and his engagement with contemporary scientific and technological debates, it’s likely that he was at least tangentially aware of authors like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. He explored the intersection of technology, corporate power, and societal impact in The Terminal Man, The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Disclosure, Rising Sun and Timeline which somewhat intersect with cyberpunk’s focus on the dark side of technological progress. Again, while we can’t definitively say that Crichton was aware of -or even influenced by- cyberpunk, there are thematic overlaps that suggests he was at least operating in a similar intellectual space.

Damo Mac Choiligh: Did Crichton consider himself to be a science fiction writer? Did he engage with the genre much, e.g. did he know any SF writers or meet any SF fans?

Crichton was often reluctant to be called a science fiction writer as he felt that the term SF didn't accurately capture the full range and depth of his work. In an interview, he once said, "I don't think of myself as a science fiction writer at all. I write stories that interest me and that involve technology and science, but I don't think that the label science fiction fits."

While it is true that most of his stories are about, or include elements of, science and technology, there are others like The Great Train Robbery, Eaters of the Dead, Congo, Pirate Latitudes, and Dragon Teeth that lean more to the adventure genre. So, confining him to a particular genre, especially since he also wrote non-fiction, can be a bit tricky.

In other -academic- circles, Crichton is considered a FASP author. FASP stands for fiction a substrat professionnel, and obviously the term was coined by French scholars to identify contemporary works of fiction that have been created, produced, or supervised by people with inside knowledge of the specialized domains fictionalized. Some FASP authors are Tom Clancy (military weapons and operations), Robin Cook and Michael Palmer (medicine), Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs (forensics), and John Grisham (law). In a recent publication, I argue that Crichton is a very peculiar and special case because while his main background was in medicine and anthropology, he successfully wrote about several other disciplines as substrats professionnels.

John Grayshaw: Who were some of the writers Crichton grew up reading? Who are some writers that were his contemporaries that he enjoyed/admired?

He was an avid reader; one of his biographies says that he would read 300 books a year. But that wouldn’t mean cover-to-cover. At some point he said that he would spend a lot of money on books on a great variety of topics that sounded interesting and even not very interesting. And he would read fragments and then put that book aside or read three books at the same time. No doubt that is how he continued to hone his research skills for his next book project. For example, according to the Bibliography section of Timeline his research for the novel involved more than 200 titles, 81 of them about the medieval world.

The first writer he really liked was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and it’s obvious that H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines had a great impact on him to later write Congo. He also read Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Orwell. However, I strongly believe that given his background in medicine, anthropology, and science writing, with a deep interest in the intersection of science, technology, and society, it is very likely that Crichton read the works of scholars like Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, Thomas Kuhn, and Clifford Geertz. Crichton’s portrayal of scientists, whether in an actual laboratory setting (The Terminal Man, The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park) or in the field (Sphere), and the implications of their work, could suggest that he was influenced by or at least aware of the ideas presented by Latour and Woolgar. Additionally, the theme of “paradigm shifts,” inspired by Kuhn, permeates Crichton’s exploration of disruptive scientific discoveries and their societal impact -one of Jurassic Park’s episode is titled “Almost Paradigm”. Finally, while Geertz’s influence might be less direct, Crichton’s novels consistently delve into and revisit the cultural implications of science and technology.

Damo Mac Choiligh: Did Crichton keep writing reviews of books throughout his life or did this type of work peter out after his own novels became so successful?

He was the book review editor for the Harvard Crimson, he also reviewed movies, and one of his fiction works “reviews” the works of Jasper Johns, but I am not aware of any other explorations in this genre. I would believe that in the early 1970s a lot was coming to his plate: more novels, screenplays and film directing, so eventually fiction writing became his top priority.

John Grayshaw: Did Crichton have any particular writing habits or routines he stuck with?

All of his book projects took several months, or even years, of extensive research, browsing, and note-taking. Pirate Latitudes, for instance, published posthumously in 2009, was a project he had been working on since the late 1970s. Early in his career, he realized that his writer’s block often happened because of not knowing exactly what he wanted to say. So, he wouldn’t sit down to write until he had thoroughly thought things through and had a clear plan in mind for what he wanted to say.

In various interviews, he mentioned that he had no set routine or regular workday. He found that being still slightly sleepy helped his creativity, so he preferred to start writing in the morning, typically after making a cup of coffee and having a cigarette. Sometimes, he would work for up to sixteen hours a day, producing as many as ten thousand words in a single day.

There’s an interesting anecdote that highlights what might have been once thought of as a ritual. In 1978, while working on a movie script at Claridge’s Hotel in London, his process involved typing, cutting, and then pasting pages together. Without a tape dispenser handy, he improvised by cutting several strips of tape with scissors and hanging them from the knob of a drawer. When he returned to Claridge’s a year later, he found that in his new room the staff had meticulously recreated this setup, with rows of Scotch tape strips hanging from the desk drawers.

Ed Newsom: The early seasons of ER which focused on the process of becoming a doctor were brilliant. I like to imagine this was Crichton's influence. How much involvement did he have with the series, and for how long?

ER was several years in the making and without a doubt it was the final product of someone with extensive experience in busy emergency rooms. Crichton was first a resident at the Boston City Hospital, Boston Lying-In Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital. He wrote about his experiences with such accuracy that when a A Case of Need was published -under the pen name of Jeffery Hudson- other residents would comment that the author was someone who knew Harvard Medical School very well. Next, he published Five Patient: The Hospital Explained in 1970, a work of non-fiction where he focused on the hospital experience and treatment of those patients and on what he thought might happen with several areas of healthcare in the next few years. Then in 1978 he used his own experience as a resident in a medical ward again when directing the movie version of Dr. Robin Cook’s medical thriller Coma. No wonder that in 1994, he was more than ready to turn the manuscript he had written two decades before into a great success.

But it wasn’t an easy journey; producers back in the 1970s were not very interested in the screenplay of ED (for Emergency Department) which Crichton had intended as a sort of “quasi-documentary” showing a typical day in the emergency room; interestingly enough, the first episode of ER is titled “24 Hours”. It was the combination of Crichton’s literary success, the involvement of Spielberg -who suggested shooting a two-hour pilot rather than a feature film- and that of Amblin Television that made the project come to fruition…and success. Along with John Wells, Crichton was credited as Executive Producer until his death in 2008.

However, as I’m answering these questions now, there seems to have been a new “plot twist” around ER. Michael Crichton Estate is suing Warner Brothers Television (WBTV), producer John Wells, actor Noah Wyle and others over breach of contract which include how Crichton is credited in a new series, The Pitt, about which the news says has great similarities to ER.

Ed Newsom: Writers sometimes create characters who are stand-ins for themselves. How much did Crichton identify with ER’s John Carter?

I am aware that Dr Carter has been identified as Crichton’s “avatar”; Actor Noah Wyle might not be that tall, but his face resembles a young Crichton. However, Dr Carter could also be Robin Cook’s young Dr Peters.

Contemporary characters seem to be more of a composite of several real-life personalities rather than an exact stand-in for their creators. For example, in the “Acknowledgements” of Jurassic Park, Crichton explicitly says that mathematician Ian Malcolm was inspired by the late physicist Heinz Pagels. A similar acknowledgement, however, was not made in the case of Dr Jeremy Stone of The Andromeda Strain whose academic credentials had a lot in common with those of Joshua Lederberg: both held chairs in bacteriology at Berkeley; won Nobel prizes in their thirties; wrote to government entities about dangers of spacecraft returning to Earth, eventually working for NASA; and became strong voices in scientific circles. 

However, when you read Travels you realize that many bits of Crichton’s personal life experiences are spread out in his characters, even if they do not have a leading role. For example, when Congo’s primatologist Peter Elliot loses his footing on the edge of a ridge, and crashes down a slope and into the midst of nine gorillas, it’s a recreation of Crichton’s own encounter with silverback gorillas near Zaire. Both, Crichton and Elliot stood motionless and tried to control their breathing until the gorillas lost interest in them and moved off. Another example is when mathematician Ian Malcolm explains to attorney Donald Gennaro how the dinosaurs would not fit in the contemporary environment and says “The stegosaur is a hundred million years old. It isn’t adapted to our world. The air is different…The oxygen content is decreased. The poor animal’s like a human being at ten thousand feet altitude. Listen to him wheezing”, which is a direct reference to Crichton’s ordeal when climbing the Kilimanjaro- he felt really elated when he reached the summit, though.  

In sum, I would say that Crichton is not just one but many of his character who recount some of his life experiences but also who voice his own –and often controversial- views on topics such as abortion, euthanasia, animal cruelty, genetic manipulation, sexual harassment, US-Japan economic relationships, air travel safety, climate change, and the role of the modern media among so many others. 

Ed Newsom: Did training as a doctor give Michael Crichton an analytical nature or was he always like that?

I would agree that his training as a doctor contributed to that analytical nature. But listening to his patients was even more interesting because he often thought about how to use complaints and symptoms in his books.  So, in addition to being focused on providing good treatment and care, he couldn’t help but envision his next literary project. The fact that he also studied -and taught- anthropology, did science writing postdoctoral work at the Jonas Salk Institute, and had regular contacts with people from different walks of professional lives definitely allowed him to broaden his intellectual curiosity and pursuits, and to perfect his research skills, and eventually his storytelling.

But as a medical student he also acquired the skills of moving from one project to another or those of dealing with more than one project at a time. In one interview he said “Medical training is a prolonged period of time in which you acquire one new skill after another… Inevitably, you become very adept at picking things up very quickly: technical procedures, jargon…” No wonder he was able to successfully keep several balls in the air. 

Ed Newsom: Why didn't Crichton become a doctor?

Crichton graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, received his MD from Harvard Medical School, and then did a postdoctoral stint at the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies. However, in his memoir Travels, he explains that in the summer of his third year he was already considering quitting. On the one hand, he was disappointed with several aspects of medical training and medical care, and he was feeling numbness in his right hand and shoulder that could be associated with multiple sclerosis. On the other hand, he had been writing thrillers to pay for his college bills; he would write during weekends and once he completed a book in ten days. At some point the writing inevitably became more interesting and rewarding than medicine. He received an Edgar Award for A Case of Need – he wished that nobody in the hospital would see the ceremony on TV or read about it in the news- and the filming of his The Andromeda Strain was about to begin. No doubt that it was a good decision; and surely, we’ve seen Crichton use his medical skills in his writing. 

John Grayshaw: What were some of Crichton’s hobbies other than writing?

Crichton was a fervent traveler with a deep enthusiasm and passion for exploring the world, both geographically and culturally. His wanderlust took him on journeys for both leisure and research for his novels. In fact, his 1988 memoir is titled Travels. If he were alive today, it's easy to imagine him eagerly boarding a SpaceX or Blue Origin shuttle. He loved hiking, scuba diving, and tennis. Beyond physical activities, he was fascinated by visual art, architecture, and even the paranormal.

Damo Mac Choiligh: How did Crichton get into the business of directing films?

Curiously, everything started when young writer Michael Crichton was invited to the set of The Andromeda Strain and a young director named Steven Spielberg was asked to show him around the MGM studio. Andromeda’s director Robert Wise allowed Crichton to watch the shooting and also invited him to sit in at the dailies. He also watched Paul W Williams and Blake Edwards film two of his novels, Dealings and The Carey Treatment (A Case of Need) respectively. Since Crichton thought he could do this, he continued to hang around sets and learn from the likes of Jeannot Szwarc, Spielberg, and Arthur Penn -from whom he learned the difficult task of directing actors.

He subsequently wrote a script for ABC television based on Binary, which he had written under the name of John Lange and under the condition that he would direct it; Pursuit was released in December 1972. A year later, he convinced MGM to let him direct his own screenplay for Westworld, and then in 1978 he directed Coma, based on the novel by Robin Cook. Coma opened doors for him further and he directed The Great Train Robbery in England and Ireland. In his memoir Travels he recounts having a hard time with his British and Irish crew, as they did not fully trust him nor were they following his directions…until they watched Coma and decided that he knew what we was doing. Actually, he enjoyed directing very much but as his books became more successful, especially after Jurassic Park, there was higher demand from both audiences and publishers, and he focused on writing.   

John Grayshaw: Some critics of Crichton claimed his novels were written with eventual movies too much in mind. What do you think?

Definitely. There are several ingredients or elements to consider here. One, his stories are built around immediate life-or-death stakes, with a sense that things will go wrong at any moment, which keeps readers, or viewers, engaged. His scenes and locations are described vividly and in detail, whether they are medical wards, laboratories, under-ground or under-water facilities, or the lush and dangerous landscapes of the Virunga region or Jurassic Park. And these visual details makes his plots easy to translate from the printed page to the big screen. Think, for example, of how the Spielberg movie recreated several pages of genetic engineering techniques as a short cartoon for kids. His novels are structured and paced like screenplays with short, punchy passages or chapters that build suspense and maintain a fast tempo, jumping from one location to another or from one perspective to another, which mirrors the way film directors and editors might cut between scenes. And also, his dialogues is often snappy and functional, helping move the plot forward like in a film script. For example, he often resorts to exchanges between experts and novices, where the expert uses a technical term or makes a specialized statement, then a “what is…?” question is asked by the non-expert, and finally a simplified or illustrative response is given by the expert.

Since he had the chance of becoming a director, a role that he enjoyed, and the chance of directing his own screenplays barely four years after his first work was made into a movie, he definitely wrote with the movie version in mind, whether it would be taken to the big screen by him or by renowned directors like Spielberg, Barry Levinson, or John McTiernan.

John Grayshaw: Did Crichton have favorites of his own works?

That is always a difficult question for writers, producers, musicians, movie directors, especially when there is so much good material to choose from. Every project is a different experience, whether enjoyable, challenging, exhausting. But think I read somewhere that it was A Case of Need.

Ed Newsom: A major theme running through much of Crichton's work is how systems fail. Why did he gravitate toward this? Was he pessimistic by nature?

Crichton was always fascinated by cutting-edge science and technology and about their possibilities. But he was skeptical about unrestrained or undisciplined enthusiasm with their power and potential. And enthusiasm is a human trait, and not always a good one when we want to push some limits. I would then think that he was worried about how his characters with their talents but, above all, with their arrogance, could make things go wrong. So, yes, A Case of Need, The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, Westworld,  Jurassic Park, Sphere, Timeline are among many examples in which systems fail; but these are systems created by humans and it’s mostly the flaws of the characters what make things go even worse.

One interesting example is Airframe where things take wrong turns not only technology-wise. It was not exactly a systems failure on Transpacific Airlines 545 which almost caused the aircraft to crash but the “intervention” of an uncertified crew member who manually outmaneuvered what the autopilot identified as an issue which could be fixed automatically. And at the same time, it was the stubborn and reckless behavior of a news producer who was willing to sacrifice truth or compromise the journalistic integrity of a story in order to advance her career and achieve personal success.

In Jurassic Park, for example, Crichton explores the belief -and sometimes the obsession- that humans can fully control or master nature -and society- through technology; ten episodes of the novel are titled “Control”. The park's creators believed they could control genetically engineered dinosaurs through technology, and that they could monitor their lives in the confinements of the park, but the systems to exercise that control inevitably failed

Jurassic Park is probably the best example where Crichton, greatly influenced by James Gleick’s bestseller Chaos, delves deeper into complex systems and explores the unpredictability that can arise when overconfidence in scientific prowess, technological complexity, and human ambition can lead to catastrophic consequences. So I wouldn’t say that he was pessimistic in the traditional sense but that he adopted a realist's perspective, acknowledging both the wonders and dangers of technology and cautioning that while failure is almost inevitable in complex systems, awareness, humility, and ethical considerations can guide us toward better outcomes.

Damo Mac Choiligh: Was Crichton a genuine climate-breakdown skeptic? Did he have doubts about the science behind it? Was he surprised by the backlash against ‘States of Fear’?

State of Fear was not his only work that got some backlash; Rising Sun was also highly criticized as a Japan-bashing book. But I cannot talk much about that since I moved the States about eight years after he died; obviously, I missed a lot of what the media said about his works, especially about State of Fear. I would probably say that it was not much about doubting the science behind climate change but about how data is interpreted and used -with great participation of the media- especially in predicting future events.

Personally, I learned about the term “climate refugee” having heard it so many times in Vermont in the last few years. So, we have new Vermonters who wanted to leave high temperatures…or city noise behind. But in July 2023 we had huge floods which brought a lot of destruction and financial losses to many of our towns. And this July, exactly one year later, torrential rains hit some towns again and other places in the state or in Connecticut. So, I wonder if those who moved up here are now reconsidering their decision.

The average person today has experienced the realities of climate change, and that includes someone with the intellectual, and practical, breadth and depth that characterized Crichton. Probably, what made him uncomfortable was, as he responded to a similar interview question twenty years ago, some “fundamentalist tinge” in environmental thinking and how data has been used to predict things that did not happen in reality, like the Y2K fear (an example he provided)…or more recently the red wave in our 2022 election cycle.

Ed Newsom: Crichton is sometimes perceived as a research hobbyist who wrote books to fund his temporary obsessions. Is this a fair portrait? Was the learning more important to him than the writing? In the early books he seems more invested in the stories than he is in the latter works.

I wouldn’t say “obsessions” but rather “intellectual pursuits”. The fact that they may seem “temporary” may be due to at least two reasons. One is that he had a wide range of interests; his novels are mainly centered around failures of complex systems and human beings; but he also explored topics such as animal behavior, life on the frontier, corporate culture and sexual harassment, manipulation of images. The other is that he did not like to do the same thing twice -his movie or TV scripts, for example, were not exactly like his novels-; so obviously he was moving on from project to project.  

Most of his stories required a lot of reading and research; sometimes travelling, to the Caribbean or to Africa, was also part of the research. While this research and learning was important to overcome his writer’s block, it was also important to be able to explain complex matters or intricate technical details to the average reader, and doing this in ways that blend science and fiction rendering a great story which would entertain and educate readers.

I’m not sure which novels you are referring to as “latter works”. Pirate Latitudes and Dragon Teeth are two of his works that have been published posthumously, but these were book projects that started in the 1970s. And recent projects that have been completed by other authors…I’m not sure how much Crichton is in them.

John Grayshaw: Another criticism was that his characters are much less developed than his stories. What do you think?

I have heard that many times. From a young age he was interested in stories in which the individual personalities didn’t matter. In one interview he said, “Once an oil spill starts, I don’t think it matters who the president of Exxon is, whether he’s a good or bad guy…I was interested in the oil spill itself.” He even “recycled” names and last names such as Harry, Karen, Ross, Stone, Hammond, Levin/Levine/Lewin/Leavitt, so his focus was obviously on developing the story rather than the characters.  

To me, probably the only character that really evolves during a Crichton novel is Eaters of the Dead’s Ahmad ibn-Fadlan; learning the language of Northmen, whether they were Scandinavian or Rus, or some of their customs or skills, like shifting weapons from one hand to the other, is a sign of character development. Maybe the very circumstances in which he was part of this journey put him in a position to share -different- values and a common enemy.

However, I’d like to share here a different perspective. I would say that Cricton’s characters have already developed, at least professionally, before they enter the story line with their backgrounds and research/procedural methodologies, interpretation of phenomena or scenarios, biases, pressures, ambitions… Crichton’s introductions of his characters are something that I have used in my teaching because they often read like a Linked In or website bio. Take, for instance, how he describes Dr Jeremy Stone in The Andromeda Strain or systems engineer John Arnold in Jurassic Park. In class, I have asked students to read those introductions and rewrite them in CV or resume formats, and the results have been really amazing because it is about interpreting information that has been written as fiction but is echoing professional writing.

And it’s very interesting that these characters, or most of these characters, hardly change during the story or even after an undeniable failure. One example is John Hammond, who kept thinking that nothing was wrong with his park and that Ian Malcolm’s analysis was quite incorrect, even when compys were all over him, chewing his neck.  Or Disclosure’s Meredith Johnson, who left DigiCom feeling no remorse for cutting corners or harassing her assistants, but just thinking that she had been used and “screwed by the damn system”. 

John Grayshaw: How much do you think his height, he was 6’9”, affected his personality and writing?

In his memoir, I sensed moments when he associated his height with occasional clumsiness and even embarrassment. During a trip to Thailand, for example, he unwittingly became the center of attention in an open market. “[Four or five hundred people] were all laughing at me, pointing and laughing…I was on display,” he recounted. His thin and tall frame posed challenges, from squeezing into a circular bathtub to being near Buddha statues —appearing taller than the revered “Enlightened One” was not a good thing.

I imagine him as a composed and soft-spoken individual, with great aplomb and attentive demeanor, listening to and processing other people’s stories or diverse viewpoints. And he might lecture you on any simple or complex topic by humbly starting “I’m not entirely certain, but…”

And your question happens to be a bit funny because at some point I daydreamed of inviting him to deliver a talk at the School of Math and Computer Science, and I still picture my students very amused at the contrast between Crichton, towering at 6’9", striding alongside me, a mere 5’3", through the corridors of the University of Havana.

John Grayshaw: Four books have been released posthumously. Is there an end to how many more we’ll see in the future? 

That would be a great question for Sherri Crichton, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more books yet to come. He would often work on several projects simultaneously, which could involve finishing a novel or movie script while also gathering ideas, browsing, and taking notes for future projects. Given his prolific nature, it's likely that drafts and notes remain on hard drives or tucked away in his office.

For instance, Pirate Latitudes and Dragon Teeth were discovered on his computer and published posthumously in 2009 and 2017, respectively. These were likely completed or nearly finished projects that only required minor editorial work. Additionally, some of his unfinished works were completed by other renowned writers, such as Micro by Richard Preston and, more recently, Eruption by James Patterson from notes that Crichton was probably making through years. I have yet to read Eruption, but I must admit some hesitation. While I greatly enjoyed Preston’s The Hot Zone—even finding points in common with Robin Cook’s Outbreak — and respect his credentials, I couldn’t get past a few pages of Micro. It simply didn’t feel like Crichton’s writing. Perhaps it had to do with my own expectations, but I found very little of the captivating style that keeps me returning to Crichton's works. Well, many years ago I also put down Sphere because the first copy I could get hold of was a Spanish language version; so I postponed this reading until I could find the original English language publication.

I’m a bit skeptical about how well another “voice” can truly sound like a distinctive one. It’s a bit like the band Journey: while Arnel Pineda does a remarkable job of replicating Steve Perry’s vocals, I still prefer Perry’s original sound.

(Note from John Grayshaw: I reached out to Sherri Crichton and asked her this question about future posthumous releases. We have previously talked over the phone and through email, but she has not, at this time, responded).

John Grayshaw: What are some of the most interesting things you’ve found in your research of Crichton?

In a previous answer I mentioned that I found first in Jurassic Park and then in Andromeda, Rising Sun, Disclosure, and Airframe a lot of interesting material that I could use in my English for Science and Technology (EST) classes; I still have assignments and learning modules which I haven’t used yet.

Since my background is mostly in applied linguistics, not precisely in literary studies, and since I worked for many years teaching English to students of Math, Computer Science, Chemistry and Biology, I was very familiar with the specialized discourse analysis literature in the area of EST which Crichton uses in his works in a very peculiar style. So, I sort of revisited almost five decades of his published works of fiction and some non-fiction and looked at them from an angle not fully explored by literary scholars, media critics, or even FASP researchers. 

The Andromeda Strain is probably the first and one of the best examples of how he blends techniques used in both fiction narrative and in the discourse of science and technology. This book is structured like a typical fiction paperback but is framed by Acknowledgements and References sections, giving it a scholarly -and authoritative- feel. Other later works have Introductions, Conclusions and Recommendations, and passages that read like short literature reviews. Within the narrative, Crichton explores both real and fictional ideas, theories, hypotheses, methods, and experimental procedures; he defines, classifies, exemplifies, compares and contrasts, uses chronology and highlights causality-results. The story’s realistic atmosphere is enhanced by maps, graphs, tables, microscope and computer-generated data, transcripts of radio communications and other -fabricated- “top-secret” documents.

This combination of narrative resources is then used in his following works, whether the plot centers around technology, like Jurassic Park, or around a field trip to find rare diamonds in the lost City of Zinj (Congo). For someone with an academic background, Crichton creates the impression that one is reading a novelized account of real scientific or technical event, enriched with the factual and occasionally classified data that are never included in published research or news reports. While the average reader might not see these works this way, they will always get to the end the story with a deep feeling that what they have read is based on events that happened in real life. 

John Grayshaw: What is Crichton’s legacy? Why was his work significant at the time? And why is it still important today?

Crichton’s legacy, for his readership as well as for contemporary or aspiring authors is his distinctive narrative, his idiosyncratic deployment of identifiable traits of academic or professional writing to document his fiction with scientific verisimilitude. That is why I titled my article Recreating Facts and Documenting Fiction. Of course, to do that an author will need to have the intellectual curiosity as well as the research skills and discipline that he had. 

The themes that he discussed in his novels and films are timeless. Perhaps for my youngest daughter, a data science major in her senior year, some of the technology he described might be a bit “outdated” but the issues that he discussed still remain and will remain relevant.    

Monday, August 26, 2024

Interview about Brian Aldiss 2

 Science Fiction Book Club

Interview with Paul Kincaid (July 2024)


Paul Kincaid’s book on Brian Aldiss, part of the Modern Master of Science Fiction series was

published in 2022. His writing has appeared in a wide range of publications including New

Scientist, Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, New York Review of Science Fiction,

Foundation, Science Fiction Studies, Interzone and Strange Horizons. He is a former editor of

Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association.


Damo Mac Choiligh: The Helliconia trilogy is widely regarded as one of Aldiss’s greatest works and some, in other words me, regard it as one of the greatest works in all of SF. Would you agree with that statement, do you personally hold it in such high regard? And was Aldiss himself satisfied with its scope and direction?

PK: To be honest, no, I don’t think it is one of his best works, though it is certainly one of his most ambitious. I think he was at his best with works that had a tight focus. He was an experimentalist by nature, constantly trying out new ideas. That’s why he wrote so many short stories, they gave him a chance to experiment with what he was writing. The idea of writing a big multigenerational work with an environmental focus was another experiment, of course, but I think it got away from him. The change between the second and third volumes: the much shorter book, the way the whole thing revolves around just one character, the limited geographical range, not to mention the fact that there was a much longer gap between two and three than there had been between one and two, all suggest to me that he was rethinking the trilogy at that point. I suspect he felt it hadn’t worked as well as he had expected (he practically says as much in a comment addressed to his son when he says, ironically, that the better the book the worse the sales), and so Winter, my favourite of the three, was just the quickest way he could get out of the contract. The later Squire sequence had a somewhat similar range, but a much tighter focus.

Damo Mac Choiligh: Do you think it’s right to think of Hothouse as a forerunner for the ideas in Helliconia?

PK: That’s a good point, and the answer is probably yes. But it is actually broader than that. In the very early 60s he read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring practically the moment it came out. It had a profound effect on him. He had had an interest in the environment ever since his time in India, but now it became one of the central themes in his work. It is there, for instance, in Hothouse, in Greybeard, in The Dark Light Years, in Earthworks, in Barefoot in the Head, and in countless short stories. So another way of looking at it is that Helliconia is the culmination of one of the most persistent themes in his work.

Ed Newsom: I think of Aldiss as constantly playing with the idea of science fiction, poking at its definition and edges. Was this the way he saw his work?

PK: I’m pretty sure he did. As I said above, he was an experimentalist, constantly playing around with what he could do with his writing, how far he could take it. That is why he was such a good fit for the new wave of New Worlds, even though he was older than anyone else in the New Worlds circle, the only one who had fought in the war, more conservative in his politics, more inclined to opera than pop, and so on. His taste in sf, as evidenced from the many anthologies he edited, was very traditional, but in his own writing he was very untraditional.

Alan Kovski: Aldiss offered interesting critical judgments about pre-1930s writers in Trillion Year Spree (and Billion Year Spree), but for post-1930s writers he seemed unable to maintain a critical distance. Do you see that? And was he a good critic of his own writing?

PK: This is tricky. As a historian myself I can testify that it is increasingly hard to maintain a critical distance the closer you come to your own time. And of course Billion Year Spree was 50 years ago, so I can look at it now with a critical distance I just wouldn’t have possessed when I first encountered it. With that proviso, and bearing in mind that I disagree with him profoundly on a lot that he writes about sf before Mary Shelley, I think he was a pretty good critic of sf up to and including the Second World War (he is often very good on H.G. Wells, for instance); and he is a reasonably good critic on sf up to the moment it fractured with the arrival of the new wave. He had an affinity for sf from the 40s and 50s, as shown by his many anthologies, though personally I think he could be too forgiving in his assessments.

As for whether he was a good critic of his own work: no. But then few writers are. The quality of his writing varied immensely, and he just didn’t see it. And he never caught on to the fact that books like, for example, Hothouse and Report on Probability A, were not going to appeal to exactly the same audience simply because they both featured a world in stasis.

Damo Mac Choiligh: Aldiss worked with Harry Harrison on many collections of SF stories, including a series of ‘Best SF…’/‘Years Best…’ collections in the 1970s. Were the two close in terms of how they saw SF, or did their opinions of various writers or types of stories vary a lot? Were they personally close?

PK: The two were very close. They were best friends from the time they met, in I think the early to mid 60s, until Harrison’s death in 2012. They went travelling together, they attended conventions together, they name-checked each other in their work, they went on drunken binges together. Indeed, sometimes it seemed that Aldiss spent more time with Harrison than he did with his wife. And their tastes in science fiction were practically indistinguishable. I would defy anyone to go through one of their joint anthologies and say with any degree of certainty that was Harrison’s choice, or that was Aldiss’s choice. That was why they jointly created the John W. Campbell Memorial Award when Campbell died.

John Grayshaw: Aldiss said that the difference between fantasy and Science fiction is that at the end of a fantasy novel the evil is defeated, and the world is restored to the way it was, but in a science fiction novel the world is changed forever. Then he said we all live in a world that’s changing forever. It’s never going to go back to what it was in the ‘60s or ‘70s. Do you think this is an apt difference between the genres?

PK: That, I’m afraid, is the sort of easy comparison that Aldiss would make when he wasn’t really thinking about it. The trouble is, it is easy to think of sf stories in which the world is restored, and fantasy stories in which it is changed forever (The Lord of the Rings is a very good example of this latter). What’s more, the world changing forever is something that can happen in mainstream fiction also. And he is right, we all live in a world that is changing forever; but then, everyone who has ever lived has lived in such a world. So no, it’s not an apt description.

John Grayshaw: Aldiss worked with David Wingrove on the ‘Trillion Year Spree’ that gave his analysis of SF up to the 1980s. What made Aldiss interested in writing about the history of science fiction in this book? What do you think were his most interesting findings?

PK: There is a very long answer to this question. In fact at the beginning of this year I gave a 7,000-word paper at an academic conference that was entirely about answering this question. Let me start by saying that Billion Year Spree is more interesting than Trillion Year Spree. He started writing Billion Year Spree at the very beginning of the 1970s, just after the publication of Report on Probability A and Barefoot in the Head, and at the point when The Hand-Reared Boy was about to come out. So Aldiss liked to claim that he had been so disappointed by the reception of the two sf novels that he had abandoned sf in favour of the mainstream; and therefore that Billion Year Spree was his return to sf. That doesn’t actually hold water. In the first place he had considered having both Report and Barefoot published as mainstream. Secondly, Hand-Reared Boy was already doing the rounds of publishers before Barefoot was completed. And thirdly, between Barefoot and Billion he produced one book of essays about sf, The Shape of Further Things; four collections of short stories; and he edited or co-edited something like seven sf anthologies. That is not the work of someone abandoning sf.

So why did he write Billion? My theory is that the new wave had put him in an increasingly uncomfortable position. His writing placed him very firmly in the new wave camp; but his tastes, as shown by the anthologies he edited, were equally firmly on the traditionalist side of the fence. As the dispute between new wave and traditionalist became ever more bitter, Aldiss found himself on both sides of the divide at the same time. So I think he had an agenda in writing Billion, which was to show that the new wave of the 60s was a natural development from the traditionalist sf of the 50s, which in turn developed from the 40s, and then the 30s, and so on. So there wasn’t a gap after all, and so Aldiss could be comfortably in both camps at the same time.

Because there was this polemical aspect to Billion I’m not sure we can really talk about findings. But what was both interesting and important about the book was that for the very first time he showed that it was possible to write a narrative history of science fiction. And that has, I think, totally changed the way we look at the literature.

Damo Mac Choiligh: Did they ever consider continuing on into the 90s or beyond? Or was Aldiss more interested in the origins and history of SF?

PK: Trillion came about because Billion was one of Aldiss’s most successful books. (Aldiss really liked to make comparisons between himself and H.G. Wells, and of course Wells’s most successful book was An Outline of History, so I think Aldiss would have been secretly pleased about the coincidence.) Anyway, because Billion was a hit, there was a certain amount of pressure to produce a sequel. But I’m not sure Aldiss was really interested in repeating himself, which is why he got David Wingrove involved. Now I don’t think Wingrove was necessarily a good choice for a project like this, and so I suspect that Aldiss wasn’t as happy with Trillion as he had been with Billion. And anyway I’m not sure there was the pressure to repeat the enterprise again. I don’t think there was ever any suggestion that they should do a Quintillian Year Spree.

John Grayshaw: What interested Aldiss about the world of ‘Greybeard’ and the idea of sudden collapse in fertility and an ageing population? What makes it a significant work?

PK: You need to understand the circumstances in which Aldiss wrote Greybeard. He had just split up from his first wife, and she had moved away to the Isle of Wight with their two children. So for the first time Aldiss was separated from his children, and for a while at least imagined he would never see them again. That is the emotional basis for the work. Yet curiously it is the only Aldiss work that I know of which features a happy, enduring, companionable marriage.

So you have on the one hand the symbolic loss of his children, and on the other the desire for a stable relationship. Add to that his ongoing interest in the environment, occasioned as I mentioned earlier by his reading of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. If you imagine the silence is not caused by the absence of wildlife but by the absence of children, then you have everything that goes to make the novel.

Why is it significant? Well so far as I am concerned it is simply one of the two or three best things he ever wrote. And it confronts a really important issue.

Damo Mac Choiligh: What did Aldiss make of the success of the novel ‘Children of Men’ by PD James and its film version? Was he in any way irritated by how close the concepts in that novel and film were to his own work ‘Greybeard’? (Personally, I dislike the book, but I really like the film.)

PK: I really don’t know. I don’t recall seeing anywhere any comments he made on either the novel or the film. He knew PD James – he called her “the Dame” – but I don’t think he was necessarily a fan of her work. And I certainly wouldn’t expect him to be a fan of Children of Men. But I can’t say for sure. (And like you I think the film is way better than the novel.)

John Grayshaw/Damo Mac Choiligh: What interested Aldiss about the world of the Generation ship in ‘Non-Stop’. What makes it a significant work? How did Aldiss think it compared to other works, such as the later ‘Universe’ by Robert Heinlein? What do you think he would have made of Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Aurora’, with its very pessimistic view of generation ships?

PK: Non-Stop was actually written in response to Universe. Aldiss was annoyed by the heroic, competent man story told in Universe. He wanted to present a contrary viewpoint on the story, one without heroism, one in which the people involved could not suddenly produce an answer to their situation, one in which the universe is not a puzzle to be solved but rather an existential threat. Generally, Aldiss did not approve of the sort of competent man stories advocated by John W. Campbell and written by people like Heinlein. He felt it was a false picture, so he deliberately wrote a novel that echoed Universe but undermined every assumption that Heinlein made. What makes it significant, therefore, aside from the simple fact that it was his first sf novel, and a very good one, is that it presented a counternarrative to the then dominant sf narrative coming out of America, the narrative that says that straight, white, American men can solve every conundrum that the universe throws at them. It was something that we hadn’t really seen in sf to that point, and so it declared that there was a different way of writing sf.

As for Aurora, I suspect he would have recognised how much Robinson borrowed from Aldiss’s novel. And Aldiss always approved of things like that.

John Grayshaw: What interested Aldiss about the Artificial lifeforms in “Super-Toy All Summer Long”? And was this story significant in terms of Aldiss’ works before Kubrick and Spielberg’s interest in it and adapting it into the movie “AI”?

PK: Aldiss produced an awful lot of stories that dealt with robots, robot independence, and the like. Just think of stories like “Who Can Replace A Man?” of “The Girl and the Robot with Flowers”. It was one of the interests he kept returning to, it allowed him to play with questions about the nature of intelligence and the role of humankind. I suspect that “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” was just another variant on a theme. At least until the Kubrick/Spielberg film came along. Then, of course, it became significant. It’s interesting that in 2001, the year the film was released, Aldiss suddenly produced four more supertoys stories: “Supertoys: Play Can Be So Deadly”, “Supertoys: What Fun to be Reborn”, “Supertoys in Other Seasons”, and “Supertoys When Winter Comes”. Though I don’t think any of these (not even the original) stand out among his short fiction. I’m reluctant to say he was cashing in, but he was at least taking advantage of a story that had attracted unexpected attention.

John Grayshaw: You said in the last interview that “The Girl and Robot with Flowers” is one of your all-time favorite science fiction stories. Can you tell us why it is significant and why it is your favorite?

PK: Did I say science fiction stories, or did I just say one of my all-time favourite stories? I rather incline to the second. This is partly because “The Girl and the Robot with Flowers” isn’t actually science fiction; and partly because it is, to my mind, the story that epitomizes the British new wave.

I’m not going to go into arguments about the nature of the new wave, because none of us have time for that. So let me just say that the new wave in Britain and the new wave in America were two very different things. In America the new wave was a reaction against the constraints by which sf writers unquestioningly avoided topics like sex and politics. In Britain it was more a way of opening sf up to a slew of literary influences like modernism and experimentation. And for me the Aldiss story is the archetypal example of that literary openness.

“The Girl and the Robot with Flowers” is not a science fiction story, it’s a story about science fiction. It’s a story about a writer, unnamed but living in Oxford with a wife called Margaret and friends like Harry Harrison, so a pretty good match for Aldiss himself. He’s about to go for a picnic with his wife and friends, but before they do he needs to talk about the story he has just finished. It’s a very traditional sf story about an interstellar robot war, and he is uneasy about it, and his wife expresses unease also. It’s a story that questions the nature of sf, while fixing sf within the here and now, and it is beautifully done. It’s a story that says we shouldn’t be writing about robots in space, but about a humming refrigerator in Oxford today, because sf is about the contemporary human experience. It is a story that could have been published in any literary journal, but because it appeared in New Worlds it subtly changed the whole nature of sf.

John Grayshaw: “Report on Probability A” has been called an antinovel and a seminal work in British new wave. And in our previous interview you said that “Barefoot in the Head” was the place to start to get a sense of what new wave was. Can you go into more detail about what is significant about these novels?

PK: Report was originally written right at the beginning of the 60s, and was an attempt to write something in the style of the French nouveau roman, or “anti-novel” as they were popularly called. It was rejected by multiple publishers, and shelved. Then in the mid-60s Moorcock asked if he had anything suitable for New Worlds and Aldiss dug out the rejected novel. He added the extra layers of observers, just to make it more science fictional, and changed the title from Garden with Figures to Report on Probability A.

At the same time that he was preparing Report for publication he was asked by the editor of Science Fantasy magazine if he had a travel story, and so he wrote the first part of Barefoot.

They were both written as science fiction, but they were both written to draw on influences from the mainstream, the nouveau roman in the case of Report and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in the case of Barefoot. And indeed, as I hinted earlier, Aldiss contemplated having them both published as mainstream novels.

What these two novels exemplify, therefore, is the sense of a literature that crosses over between the overtly science fictional and the overtly realist. And it is that cross over, that sense that they belong on two sides of the divide at once, that exemplifies what was happening in the British new wave.

John Grayshaw: Aldiss called “White Mars” a counter-argument to the idea of terraforming. What do you think are the most interesting ideas in this novel?

PK: I’ll be honest, I think White Mars is one of the worst novels that he wrote. Not quite as bad as The Eighty-Minute Hour, perhaps, but not far from it. It was, of course, written just after the death of his wife, Margaret, and I’m pretty sure his mind wasn’t on it, but at the same time he was emotionally invested in it. He was very touchy about it. There is an appalling letter in Foundation in which he really attacks someone who wrote an essay on the book that was, at worst, mildly critical of come of the ideas in the book.

I am not sure there are any interesting ideas in the novel. The characters are never better than two-dimensional; the science (despite the influence of Roger Penrose) is full of a lot of hand-waving and coincidence; and the whole point of the book comes down to Mars being a living entity. Like a similarly-titled novel, Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven, it is clearly written in response to the success of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, but Robinson includes far better arguments both for and against terraforming than you will find in White Mars.

John Grayshaw: Other than the ones we already talked about, what are some of Aldiss’ best short stories and what makes them stand out?

PK: That is a big question. You know that, if you include the various pieces that made up The Brightfount Diaries, he wrote something like 400 stories in his career. Without wanting to go into details, my personal favourites include:

Poor Little Warrior
But Who Can Replace a Man?
Old Hundredth
Man on Bridge
Man in His Time
The Girl and the Robot with Flowers
The Saliva Tree
Confluence
As for our Fatal Continuity
Last Orders
The Gods in Flight
How the Gates Opened and Closed
But ask me again and I’ll probably come up with a different list.

Damo Mac Choligh: In many of his shorter works, especially in the Zodiac Planets stories, Aldiss seems very interested in Chinese culture and power. Where did this interest come from? Was he apprehensive about Chinese dominance in the future?

PK: Like so much else in Aldiss’s life and career, you can probably trace this back to his time in the army. After the war, his final posting before he returned to Britain in 1947 was in Hong Kong, where he was posted after serving time in Sumatra. His time in the army was the time he felt most alive, most free, most happy and so the places he associated with the army, the East – India, Burma, Sumatra, and Hong Kong – had an almost mystical hold over Aldiss’s imagination ever after. It became equated with sex and warmth and joy and mystery. I don’t think he was ever apprehensive about anything to do with the East, it was something he relished and wanted to return to.

John Grayshaw: What interested Brian Aldiss about mini-saga the form of extremely short stories he invented?

PK: As I’ve said a couple of times already in this interview, Aldiss was an experimentalist. He loved to play around with the form, stretch it in new directions, try out different things. The short story was an obvious way of conducting his experiments, because it didn’t take much in the way of time or of words to lay out the new idea. But sometime in the last third of his career he seemed to become impatient even with the short story and started to look for ways to cut things down even more, get straight to the point and then move on. I do wonder if he began to feel time’s winged chariot, and so wanted to do more and more in less and less time, but I suppose we’ll never know. Anyway, he began writing ever more concentrated pieces, such as the various Enigmas and the mini-sagas. To my mind the mini-sagas in particular seem to take on the lineaments of a joke: a quick set-up and an even quicker punch line. They feel limited in what they can achieve, though I suppose if they work they work instantly.

John Grayshaw: What interested Aldiss about Yugoslavia? He wrote a travel book about it in 1966 called ‘Cities and Stones’ and some of his novels and short stories are set there.

PK: I think it’s quite simple: he loved the place. He visited with family and friends (I’d have to check, but I think Harry Harrison was on that trip) and financed it by arranging to write about the place. Which turned into Cities and Stones; and I think that became the standard against which he measured any other trips abroad that he made.

John Grayshaw: What can you tell us about Aldiss’ interest in art. It sounds like it had a sci-fi element to it. He had an exhibit in Oxford in 2010 titled “The Other Hemisphere” and one of his paintings was called “Metropolis.”

PK: I’m not really a good person to ask about art. I know a little, but not much. There does seem to have been an artistic strain in the family, his daughter Wendy is a very fine photographer. But where his own interest in art came from and how it developed I just don’t know. It’s not something that crops up in his autobiography, for instance. So his own art, like his interest in poetry, seems to have remained a private interest until quite late in his career.

John Grayshaw: What kind of feedback did you get about your book on Aldiss?

PK: Interesting. It hasn’t been as widely reviewed or as well received as the book on Iain Banks, which doesn’t totally surprise me. Aldiss is a more divisive figure than Banks, for a start. But the book did earn me my first review in the Times Literary Supplement, which is a kind of badge of honour, I suppose. The one thing that did interest me was the fact that female reviewers latched on to what I called his “priapic masculinity”, and ended up largely reviewing Aldiss the man. Male reviewers, on the other hand, tended to focus on which books I praised and which I criticised, so their reviews tended to be about whether or not they agreed with my assessments. Nobody seems to be neutral about Aldiss, and nobody seems to be comfortable with saying some of his work was good and some of it was bad.

What that says about me, about my book, or about Aldiss, I just don’t know.

John Grayshaw: What myths about Aldiss do you hope your book clears up?

John Grayshaw: What is the most important idea you hope readers will take away from your book on Aldiss?

PK: I’m going to take these two questions together as one. I had no settled view on Aldiss when I set out to write the book, and my opinions changed during the writing of the book. For instance, the first time I read Report on Probability A I hated it, but when I revisited it as part of my reading for the book I came away convinced it was the best thing he ever wrote. Meanwhile my journey on The Eighty Minute Hour was in exactly the opposite direction, I went from thinking it was okay, rather fun, to feeling it was the worst thing he ever wrote. That ambivalence is something I hope people take away from the book.

Much the same holds true about the person. I knew him slightly and always found him excellent company, though he could be prickly and ever ready to attack anyone he didn’t feel was fully on his side. And yet the more I read, both in his autobiographical writing and in his fiction, the more unhappy I became about his attitude towards sex and women (that whole “priapic masculinity” thing). Again, I want people to take that ambivalence from the book.

And then there is his place in science fiction. I feel he was of vital importance in giving character to the British new wave, yet the more I went into the issue the less I felt he was actually a new wave writer. Similarly, his history of science fiction is the first narrative history of the subject, the first work to treat it as a whole, and as such it is of extraordinary importance. In a sense it is how we learned to see ourselves. And yet the more I examine it, the more I disagree with just about everything in Billion Year Spree. Again, ambivalence: but that approach, unsettled and unsettling, is essential not only in considering individual writers like Aldiss, but in considering science fiction as a whole.

So what should you take away? Aldiss was an incredibly important writer, but that doesn’t mean that everything he wrote was important, or even good. Aldiss spent his entire career trying his hand at different things, some of them worked many of them didn’t, but it is as important to consider the failures as it is to consider the successes. Aldiss is divisive, no one will agree on what was good and what was bad, what was important and what wasn’t; you have to find your own way through, you have to make up your own mind, but the journey is worth it.