Interview About Damon Knight

 

Science Fiction Book Club

Interview with Richard Wilhelm (October 2024)

 

Richard Wilhelm is the son of Kate Wilhelm and the stepson of Damon Knight. Richard runs InfinityBox Press, a publishing company that Kate started with him, his wife, Sue Arbuthnot, and brother, Jonathan Knight. You can purchase many of Wilhelm’s and Knight’s novels and short fiction from their websites, infinityboxpress.com and reanimus.com.

As an opening note, Damon was born on September 19, 1922, in Baker—now Baker City— Oregon. Soon after, the family moved to Hood River, Oregon. Not at all athletic—although he tried—Damon preferred to read—and at the ripe age of eleven, found his first science fiction story. Here's his description:

In the thirties I became intensely aware of pulp magazines. There were Spicy Adventure and Spicy Mystery, which I did not dare buy, even in the dingy little secondhand store at the bottom of a side street in town. There were air-war magazines, which I did buy. One story concerned a squadron leader who was having headaches and whose hair was falling out; it turned out that a German agent had been concealing a capsule of radium under his pillow.

Then I saw and bought an issue of something called Amazing Stories. It was bigger than other pulps, about 8-1/2 X 11, and the cover, in sick pastels, showed two helmeted and white-suited men aiming rifles at a bunch of people. This was the August-September 1933 issue, and the cover story was "Meteor-Men of Plaa" by Henry J. Kostkos.

That was the beginning.

Note: When I add direct quotes from Damon, these are from his 1989 autobiographical sketch from Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 10. For further reading about Damon Knight, his books, The Futurians and Writing Short Fiction are recommended. There also many online sources for further understanding his life and work.

Bill Rogers: Richard, what sort of relationship did Knight have with the more politically vocal/militant members of the Futurians like Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, and Donald Wollheim?

Damon was desperate to leave Hood River. He had graduated high school, moved to Salem, Oregon’s capital, and was enrolled in a WPA art school, when he sold a story to Donald Wollheim. Here's his note about that:

While I was in Salem, Don Wollheim's first issue of Stirring Science Stories appeared, with my story in it. The printers had changed "Brittle People" to "Little People" in the first sentence, rendering the story unintelligible, but I was proud of it anyway.

Soon after, he moved to New York. He describes part of his initiation into the Futurians (These guys were not hard-nosed anything [except maybe Judy Merril]; they were all in their late teens or early 20s, had no money, and Kornbluth and Wollheim still lived mostly with their parents, spending their weekends in whichever apartment the group could collectively afford):

I adopted all the Futurians' attitudes. They looked down on fannish activity, and so did I. They said they were Communists; I said I was a Communist. They expressed contempt for Campbell and his stable of writers; I lost interest in Astounding and stopped reading it. They were nearly all native New Yorkers who would have died rather than get on a sight-seeing bus; I lived in Manhattan for ten years and never went to the Statue of Liberty, or the Cloisters, or took a boat trip around the island.

Again, from Damon:

We were a gallery of grotesques, but we were all talented to one degree or another, and we counted on that to save us. We were anything but a close-knit group, and yet we stood together against the outside world. A Futurian crest, designed by Kornbluth, had a large flat-headed screw with the legend "Omnes qui non Futurianes sunt."

(The Latin quote, translated as, "Not all that wander are lost" being ripped from Tolkein, and with the wry insertion of "Futurians.")

Damon's relationship with Judith Merril was forged from steel, with a few cracks. They were both in their mid-twenties, when they met. She and her husband at that time, were Trotkyists.

In Damon's words:

Judy in a political argument was a juggernaut. Danny [her husband] was in the navy, serving aboard a submarine, and Judy struck up a friendship with Johnny Michel. This displeased Wollheim, and presently Judy came to tell us that Wollheim had forbidden Johnny to have anything more to do with her (because she was a Trotskyist) or Jim Blish (because he was thought to be a fascist). Our indignation was acute, and we sat up half the night composing a document in which we read Wollheim, Elsie, and Michel out of the Futurian Society. We mimeographed and mailed this out to a fanzine mailing list. Wollheim then filed suit for libel in the state supreme court, naming the seven of us who had signed the document: Judy, Blish, Lowndes, Virginia, Chet, Larry, and me. The suit was thrown out of court, with costs charged to Wollheim; but it cost us a hundred dollars apiece in legal fees.

Bill Rogers: Also, what were Knight's politics and what effect, if any, did they have on his writing?

Damon was apolitical. He rarely brought up anything that emanated from Washington, D.C., much less his own local government. Although he experimented with various beliefs as a youth, his involvement in anything political was transient and faddish. A little later in life, he would begin to look down his nose at anyone trying to sell him on one movement or the other. Plus, as a writer, he could fully inhabit any particular belief he desired, anywhere in the universe.

In Damon's words:

Everything I saw around me led me to the belief that the world was badly organized: politics, religion, and education were incomprehensibly absurd, social relationships only a little less so, and all the young people were under the thumbs of the old. Even science fiction, to which I had fled as a refuge, eventually began to seem unbearably conventional. I never became a Marxist or revolutionary, being too skeptical of dogma of any kind, but in my own fiction, over and over, I blew the established system apart as thoroughly as I could. "Not with a Bang," "To Serve Man," Hell's Pavement, A for Anything, and many others were expressions of this urge, and I am still at it in the series of near-future novels that begins with CV.

I don't believe this counts as political as much as bohemian, but a friend of Kate and Damon stole a street banner, while in Rome, during an election cycle. It was heavy canvas about 25 feet long, three feet high, with a blue field and the words in yellow read: VOTA COMUNISTA printed across its length and large hammer and sickle logos on each end. It was quite something, and my friends were amazed by it. Appreciative of the gift, Damon climbed a ladder and nailed the banner to the wall just below the living room ceiling (our living room in the “Anchorage,” our house in Milford, was about 35 feet long with an 18-foot-high ceiling). As he was attaching it, he fell about 14 feet to the floor, breaking his wrist. Kate and I were witnesses. (Bonus story: Damon was working on his Charles Fort book at the time, and he had to build a rope and pulley system in his office to help him hold his cast-covered arm up in the air so he could type.)

Dave Hook: I love a lot of his fiction, and I respect his work in editing. I am not as familiar with his work as a critic. I do wonder how he felt about those different areas of his career?

Damon's move to New York exciting; a revelatory change from the depression he’d felt living in the provincial Oregon towns he’d fled. Kornbluth, Lowndes, Wollheim, Merril (Zissman, at the time) and others each offered him their numerous contacts in the New York publishing world. He settled into editing, writing, and criticism as opportunities arose. Although he worked in several office settings during his time in New York and California, he preferred the independence of his own space.    

In Damon's words:

In the forties nearly every science-fiction magazine had a book-review department, but these were mostly of what I later called the shopping-guide type; the reviews were about an inch long and always ended, "A must for every science fiction fan." Besides the Worlds Beyond reviews, I had already written one long critical essay (about the works of A. E. van Vogt), which Larry Shaw had published in one of his amateur magazines, Destiny's Child. When Lester [del Rey] started two new magazines, Space Science Fiction and Science Fiction Adventures, I was able to talk him into letting me do the book department in one. He paid me, if I remember, fifteen dollars a column.

After a year or so Lowndes also offered to run any reviews I sent him, no matter what the length, and to pay his usual rates, i.e., half a cent a word. At various times I also published reviews in Harlan Ellison's huge sloppy fanzine Dimensions (where my column was called "Gardyloo," a call formerly used when throwing the contents of chamber pots out of windows), in Walt Willis's Hyphen, in Infinity, and finally in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. When I quit, in a dispute over a review F&SF refused to print as written, I had been reviewing books for nine years.

Dave Hook: I'd also like to know if he preferred short fiction or novels, both in terms of writing and reading?

I don't know that Damon had a preference between writing one or the other. He was a master of short fiction; they were tight, focused, and sold well to magazines. Plus, he loved adding little hooks, where he could. "To Serve Man" is a great example. But he also liked the relative freedom of writing novels with their structure allowing for more expansive storytelling.

SFBC Member: I speak English as a second language, and I remember Mr. Knight's stories as amazing. I'd like to know if there are recompilations of his stories as there are for other writers of his time (Simak, Zelazny, Sturgeon) I would love to have and reread them.

We recently started a partnership with Reanimus Press to release ebook editions of Damon's backlist. We don't have all of them out, yet, but many are now available at reanimus.com.

SFBC Member: How accurate is his take on himself (and other writers) in this intro to his book?

“Psychologists have found out a little bit about the personalities of writers. They are individualists, skeptics, taboo-breakers, mockers, loners; they are undependable, likely to be behind on their rent; they keep irregular hours and have strange friends. Professional writers, like criminals, really live outside society: they have no regular jobs, they come and go as they please, they live by their wits.”

— Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight

                Lots of tongue-in-cheek stuff here, but mostly accurate.

SFBC Member: What did he think of the adaptation of his short story "To Serve Man" for "The Twilight Zone" series?

We watched the Twilight Zone production as a family when it first aired. Damon was delighted that Rod Serling had bought the story and produced the show. But Damon always thought the aliens—the Kanamit—were much too pretty in the TV version. He had envisioned them this way:

 

The Kanamit were short and very hairy -- thick, bristly brown-gray hair all over their abominably plump bodies. Their noses were snoutlike and their eyes small, and they had thick hands of three fingers each. They wore green leather harnesses and green shorts, but I think the shorts were a concession to our notions of public decency. The garments were quite modishly cut, with slash pockets and half-belts in the back. The Kanamit had a sense of humor, anyhow.

 

Unfortunately, our publishing company, InfinityBox Press, is unable to honor requests from producers seeking rights to adapt the story for TV or film. After more than 60 years, CBS still owns the TV/Film rights to the story and won't consider reverting those back to Damon's heirs.

 

Jeff Pfeiffer: What are some of your favorite stories of his and why?

Sorry, it's difficult to single out any of his stories as favorites.

Philip Bonner: I would like to know more about the Orbit anthologies. As someone who is reading through them all at present (I just finished Orbit 9,) I am curious about Knight’s motivations in editing them.

                There were many factors that led Damon to begin the Orbit series, the most significant of which was working as an editor and reviewer/critic in New York.

From Damon:

In 1964 I had the itch to edit something again. I realized that if I could do a series of original anthologies in hardcover, paperback, and book club, it would certainly pay its way. I wrote a proposal and sent it to Dardis [Thomas A. Dardis, of Berkley Books]. I called the series Orbit, expecting some discussion, but there wasn't any. Orbit 1 appeared in 1966, and twenty others followed.

In the beginning I was able to look brilliant because I was buying all the great stories that other editors were too dumb to buy. Later the supply ran out and was not renewed, and the series went downhill, the way every series and every magazine does. The only known solution to this is to replace the editor, and even that doesn't always work.

I’m constantly flabbergasted by how wildly experimental and diverse these books are. In a way it is analogous to an American New Worlds. They go beyond Dangerous Visions. I think of him as a writer who is from a generation previous to the New Wave, so how did he become a curator for voices even younger and more adventurous than those surrounding Ellison, Dick, Delany, etc.?

Damon tapped into a new generation of writers with some help from his Futurians cohort and by reading many hundreds of manuscripts as an editor/critic. Initially, Orbit was his statement that science fiction didn't have to be stale stories with poorly-crafted writing. The stories didn't even really have to be strictly nuts-and-bolts science fiction and could venture down new avenues of discovery like speculative and psychological fiction. He knew that he was helping to drive a seismic change in science fiction—he would liken it to something just shy of a K-T extinction event—and did all he could to encourage its success.

Also, are there any interviews with or essays by Knight where he talks about the Orbit project at length in his own words?

There may be something out there on tape but I'm not aware of it. He would often write short essays or comments in the Orbit series books with insights regarding the authors, stories, or context. Here's the introduction from Orbit 21, his last:

A series of original anthologies, like Fred Pohl's Star Science Fiction, if it had hardcover, paperback, and book-club editions, could easily pay its way. I made up a proposal, called it Orbit more or less at random, and my agent sent it around ...

Thomas A. Dardis, then editor-in-chief of Berkley, bought it, and we worked out the details. For a while Doubleday was interested in doing a hardcover edition, but that fell through; then Berkley was acquired by Putnam, and there was our hardcover edition ...

What I wanted to do in Orbit was to bring about a revolution in science fiction, like Campbell's in the early forties, Gold's and Boucher/McComas's in the fifties. My thesis was that there was no inherent reason why science fiction could not meet ordinary literary standards, but that the pulp tradition of forty years has encouraged ideas at the expense of writing skill. It seemed to me that the only way to cure this was to set high standards at the beginning, even if it meant publishing a lot of fantasy and marginal material because most hard-core sf could not make the grade. Later, cocky with success, I followed this trail too far.

 

SFBC Member/John Grayshaw: His van Vogt quip, "no giant, a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter" is one that would make Nabokov blush. Did Knight’s criticisms ever go too far?

Damon was a tough critic. His voracious reading habit fed his need to question everything and "call it like it is," when in his official capacity as critic. He believed he could help move science fiction out of the pulp era and into a more literary one. His tool was brutal honesty, which was not universally appreciated... but it was effective, and he realized his dream.

In his own words he describes one encounter:

I kept running into incomprehensible responses in other people around me, as when I criticized the new comic strip Flash Gordon because the natives of Mongo spoke English, and a friend of mine said, "What else would they talk?"

If he can criticize Flash Gordon, well...

Damon saved nearly everything he had ever written, including correspondence with authors submitting stories for the Orbit series. He would often offer a paragraph or two of valuable notes to the authors whose stories he didn't think were up to snuff. But not always. I don't remember which Orbit edition it was, but one group of rejection letters Damon sent to four individual submitters grabbed my attention. They went something like this:

First letter: Thanks for submitting your story for inclusion in Orbit. I didn't feel this story set the right tone for the series. Sorry. Please send something else.

Second letter: Thanks for submitting your story. It needs work, and I'd have to rewrite it from the start. Try again. Good luck.

Third letter: This story does not rise to the level of something I would ever publish.

Fourth letter: Good Christ!

I believe that, for some people, the harshness of his criticism abruptly halted their writing ambitions. Who's to say if that was too harsh.

Alan Kovski: What were his favorite SF stories and authors and why? Given his willingness to be such a demanding critic, I can imagine his tastes in fiction were subject to quite a bit of judicious evaluation.

Damon's tastes were ecumenical, to say the least, and everything was open to evaluation. Walls and towers of books stood next to his favorite Morris chair: his ever-present, ancient Webster’s dictionary, fifteen or twenty books of various genres which would cycle in and out, a bird identification guide, cookbooks, even a Bible. (Damon was not a religious man but appreciated the Bible as a good anthology).

In his words:

[As a youth] I attacked the Hood River [Oregon] library in various ways, by authors—all of Dickens, all of Dumas—then by subject—all the pirate books—and finally at random. One of my pleasant memories is of some illness when the librarian sent me out a pile of books, all by authors new to me. I read children's books and fairy tales, but I also read romantic novels and novels of manners that I only half understood.

Damon's critic hat was always on. He would add margin comments in many of the things he read. He believed that using a soft lead pencil—he favored 2Bs—he could ease his guilt marking up a book and that someone could always erase his notes without leaving indented traces. But, when "editing" newspapers and magazines, he would use to his ever-present Papermate Flair black felt tip pen for emphasis.

A direct answer to this question is: He favored Kate Wilhelm, of course.

 

 

 

Alan Kovski: Damon Knight saw a lot of evolution of SF and helped bring some of that evolution about. Did his critical judgments similarly evolve in the 1970s-80s-90s? Late in his career, did he offer judgments that were different in various ways--wiser, crankier, more introspective, more knowledgeable? Did he wish SF evolved differently?

Damon's evolution as a critic grew with experience and age as one might expect, but his goal from the start was to put science fiction on the literary shelf. He accomplished that, along with others whom he influenced and was influenced by. He was completely hooked on science fiction by the early forties and from the beginning, recognized a sameness in the stories being published. And he set out to change that.

His astute work as an editor, starting at some of the larger houses in New York, then on his own, gave credence to his critical analysis of a story. And, though authors didn't exactly flock to him for critical readings—owing much to his scathing review of A.E. van Vogt's works and politics—they recognized that if they did have their work critiqued by Damon, it would likely be the most comprehensive—for better or worse—they were likely to receive. And that was the case through his career. The van Vogt critique was published originally in Larry Shaw's Destiny's Child magazine and later in Damon's book of critical essays, In Search of Wonder, for which he was presented with the Hugo award.

John Grayshaw: What made Knight write novels? Was he a storyteller at heart?

Damon started his career writing short stories. Novels came later, when he noticed some of his contemporaries were selling their novels for considerably more money and were enjoying all the accolades that follow. Plus, he had stories to tell that simply didn't fit within the short story format. Damon was a master short story author, but he enjoyed the depths he could reach in a longer story. Here's a note about his first attempt at writing a novel:

I had asked Ryerson Johnson [creator of Doc Savage] how he could manage to write anything as long as a novel. Well, he said, you get used to it in stages: first write some short stories, then two or three novelettes of ten thousand words, then some longer novelettes and then you're ready for a novel.

I had been writing longer and longer things, and I thought I was due for a novel, but I still shrank from the idea of doing all that work from scratch. Instead, I thought of a sequel to a story of mine called "The Analogues." The sequel, "Turncoat," was a little over twenty thousand words, and then I had enough to offer, with an outline of the rest, to [Walter] Fultz [of Lion Books]. He gave me a contract, and I finished the book as Hells Pavement. The novel was about the consequences of an invention, and it was more or less legitimate for it to be broken down into a short section (the original story) introducing the invention, then a longer one showing its early development, and a still longer section winding up the plot.

 

 

John Grayshaw: You talked about your mom telling all the kids stories around the fireplace. Did Knight tell stories too?

No one in the family remembers Damon telling them bedtime-style stories. He was more of an anecdotal storyteller and deftly crafted these to be short and poignant.

John Grayshaw: You mentioned in the previous interview that your mom and Knight “tried and failed miserably at collaboration.” Can you elaborate on this story?

They were so good at collaborating while teaching others that they tried once or twice to collaborate in writing. But each had a style and working method that thoroughly frustrated the other. During their early years together, they played chess, but their equally competitive natures put an end this activity. Kate won most of the games (chess and checkers) and Damon quit playing. Kate happily taught the kids to play.

John Grayshaw: You talked about times when you were growing up that writers were there as dinner guests as well as when your parents hosted the Milford Writer’s Conference. I wondered if you had more stories about this?

There were few dull moments around the table or fireplace when guests were present. Damon had a knack for limericks and would involve whoever was available in creating new ones. Here's an example of one he came up with:

There once was a man from Japan

Whose limericks never would scan

        When asked why this was,

        He answered, “Because

I always try to cram as many words into the last line as I can.”

He also collected corny elephant jokes. An example: “Where do elephants go to get their dental work done? Tuscaloosa.” You can see where this is going. And there were dozens. Sometimes he’d break out in some arcane song he had learned somewhere. He was a fan of rounds and would include up to six or seven voices, each coming in at the right moment and continuing until things broke down and into chaos. Occasionally, he would assign bagpipe drone notes to his guests, while he would use his own voice to add the tune's melody. One of his favorite tongue twisters was "the leith police dismisseth us." But he had dozens of these, too, and collected more from anyone who showed up at the house.

Harlan Ellison was a frequent flyer at the conference and had become good friends with Kate and Damon. He was the most competitive person I had ever met and, at roughly five-foot-one, acted like a defensive lineman. One evening, while he and Kate were sitting by the fireplace in the living room of the Anchorage, our big Victorian house in Milford, Kate was a bit peeved about something Harlan had been talking about and decided to distract him and change the subject. The living room was huge and had a grand staircase in the corner with a large landing halfway up, immediately above where the two were seated. Kate, at one key moment, pointed up and told Harlan that she had seen me jump up and grab onto a spindle in the baluster (about eight feet above the floor) with one hand and hoist myself up to the landing using only that one hand. She said later that she enjoyed watching Harlan spend the next hour trying to do the same. At one point, he told her that he had no idea how I did that and would ask me to show him. He never asked, and she never told him that she made it all up.

John Grayshaw: What are some of your fondest memories of Knight and what are some of the funniest memories?

During the hot summer months, Damon would lead any number of people—kids, friends, other writers, whoever might be around—in a procession across the highway, down a farm lane, and through the woods to reach the bank of the Delaware River, where he would be the first in the water, and he would float in the eddy for long periods of time. I envied his ability to float, as I was never able to.

Damon also fancied himself as a cook, alternating days with Kate for dinner prep. Although his culinary repertoire consisted of around a dozen dishes, he was passionate about his skills and wielded his cleaver decisively when making one of his favorite meals. He created his own version of an Asian-influenced chicken and congee dinner. His chicken chopping rattled the house and its occupants, and the meal would typically include many tiny bone fragments we would have to be careful not to swallow. And then there was the congee, which resembled, in both taste and texture, elementary school paste. His go-to line, while cooking, was, "Out of my kitchen!"

John Grayshaw: When did you first read Knight’s writing?

I started reading Damon's stories, when I was about nine or ten. I was not a big science fiction fan as a youth, but I came back to his work as a twenty-something, when I read all of his stories I could find on their shelves. I have reread since then.

John Grayshaw: Did Knight have personal favorites of his own works?

I don't know much about his favorites except one he mentions here:

In 1963 when I was working on a short novel called "The Other Foot" which is still my favorite and was having difficulty with it, I turned for relaxation to another novel which I made up as I went along. I called it The Tree of Time. It was a wild van Vogtian adventure involving an amnesiac superman from the future and a search for a monster which turned out to be the hero in disguise, etc. I enjoyed writing it, especially the sequences that took place in a zero-G satellite of the future (a nasty little scientist I introduced here was modeled partly after J.R. Pierce.) All my friends and well-wishers hated it, but I sold it everywhere—F&SF, Doubleday, book club, paperback. This made me cynical about the sf novel-writing business.

 

 

John Grayshaw: What are some of Knight’s works that you feel should be better known than they are?

It's difficult to point to specific works and say, "That one!" as the title that should be better known. But we're finding there's a resurgence of interest in Damon's work since we started to rerelease his titles, in partnership with Reanimus Press. Time will tell.

John Grayshaw: What can you tell me about how Knight first started the Milford Science Fiction Writer’s Conference.

After marrying and being persuaded to move to Milford, Pennsylvania by Judy Merril and Jim Blish, Damon and Judy hatched a plan to do something each of them had dreamed of—put on a writers’ conference.

Here are a few of Damon's notes:

Judy Merril and I had talked a little about holding a writers' conference in Milford, but it was the way you talk about building a boat in your basement. Then we went to the World Science Fiction Convention in Detroit in 1955, and found ourselves being taken so seriously that we began to think people might actually come to our party. When we got back to Milford, we called in Jim Blish, formed a committee, and issued manifestoes.

The convention the following year was held over the Labor Day weekend in New York. We set our date for the week after that, in hope that people would spill over from New York to Milford. It worked almost too well—we got forty people and crammed them into the living room of a summer cottage on the Delaware. We were too innocent to realize that a "writers' conference" was usually a bunch of paid lecturers talking to an audience of paying would-be writers.

In our second year, 1957, we didn't have the nearby convention to help us, and the Conference hit its low point. We had six writers, not enough to keep a conversation going spontaneously, and not enough, I guess, to reserve the cottage colony we had used before. We held the sessions in Judy's house and mine (Jim was working in New York and could not come) and it just did not work out very well. Ed Emshwiller proposed making a film, and we did one called "The Thing from Back Issues," with a plot borrowed from Heinlein's The Puppet Masters.

In our third year, enrollment rose again; Judy found another cottage colony that would accommodate us, and we settled into the format we used from then on. The Conference lasted eight days, Saturday through Saturday. Every afternoon except the first (when people were still checking in) we had a workshop; that is, we met and discussed each other's manuscripts. Every evening except the last (because of the going-away party) we discussed a set topic—"Religion and Science Fiction" maybe, or "Getting Along with Editors." In between, whenever the Conference was not in formal session, people were talking. My God, how they talked!

Because of this incessant rattle of tongues, and the late hours and the general excitement, Milford was like a week-long party. After a few years of this, we began to notice that the end of one Milford was attaching itself in our memories to the beginning of the next; the series formed a nonstop party that went on for twenty years, or, depending on how you looked at it, for twenty-one weeks. This was very pleasant in a way, but also a little scary.

John Grayshaw: You said your mom first met Knight at the Milford conference, did sparks fly between them right away or was it more gradual?

Damon invited Kate to the Milford Conference in the late 50s. Their affection for each other was gradual, as each was married when they met. A year passed before they decided to explore their relationship. Here's Damon's take on how that evolved:

I also invited a young writer named Kate Wilhelm, from whom I hadn't bought anything but whose stories had caught my eye.

I had visualized Kate Wilhelm as a middle-aged woman with iron gray hair and flat heels; instead, she turned out to be young, slender, and pretty.

Next year at the Conference Katie and I approached each other hesitantly; neither of us knew quite how to begin, but we finally managed. We agreed that Katie would get a divorce, bring her two boys to Milford, and live there for a year; then if all went well, we would be married. She stayed with Judy for a week or two, then rented a little house on the Dingmans Road.

When I told Judy that Kate and I were going to be married, her jaw dropped. I had read about this in fiction, but it was the first time I had ever seen it.

We asked Ted Thomas to perform a ceremony which we devised. Ted was a Conference regular, as were my best man, Avram Davidson, and Kate's matron of honor, Carol Emshwiller. Richard 'Mac' McKenna gave the bride away. Before the ceremony, Clayton Rawson did some magic tricks.

John Grayshaw: Who are some of the authors Knight mentored?

It's a long list. As an editor, critic, author, teacher, lecturer, and through the Milford Conferences and Clarion Workshops, there are thousands of writers that he had direct or indirect influence on.

John Grayshaw: Who are some of the science fiction writers Knight had correspondence/friendships with? Any stories about those relationships?

From the time he lived in Hood River, Oregon, in the late 30s, and throughout his life, Damon enjoyed corresponding with many writers, editors, critics, and fans. The list is very long, and he was not in continuous correspondence with everyone on the list below, but these represent some of the more significant penpals. Here's a sampling (in alphabetical order):

Isaac Asimov, Brian Aldiss, Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Brunner, A.J. Budrys, Ed Bryant, Octavia Butler, John Cambell, Terry Carr, Arthur Clarke, Theodore Cogswell, Avram Davidson, Ellen Datlow, L. Sprague De Camp, Lester del Rey, Samuel Delany, Philip Dick, Gordon Dickson, Tom Disch, Gardner Dozois, George Alec Effinger, Harlan Ellison, Carol Emshwiller, Hugo Gernsbak, David Gerrold, H.L. Gold, Eileen Gunn, James Gunn, Joe Haldeman, Harry Harrison, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Nina Hoffman, R.A. Lafferty, Keith Laumer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Fritz Leiber, Doris Lessing, Robert Lowndes, Anne McCaffrey, John D. MacDonald, Vonda McIntyre, Richard McKenna, Barry Malzberg, George R.R. Martin, Richard Matheson, Judith Merril, Larry Niven, Andre Norton (Alice Mary Norton), Alexei Panshin, Frederik Pohl, Jerry Pournelle, Terry Pratchett, Mack Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, Joanna Russ, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Robert Sheckley, Lucius Shepard, John Shirley, Robert Silverberg, Clifford Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, Theodore Thomas, Mark Tiedemann, A.E. van Vogt, Jack Vance, John Varley, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Williamson, Richard Wilson, Leslie Perri, Gene Wolfe, Donald Wollheim, Roger Zelazny.

I'm sure I've forgotten many others.

John Grayshaw: Any stories about Knight going to conventions or corresponding with fans?

I never accompanied Kate and Damon to conventions, so I don't have personal anecdotes. Although he was a gifted speaker, Damon was not a big fan of conventions and attended as few as possible. If he or Kate or both were Guests of Honor, he would relent and attend.

John Grayshaw: Do you know of any future adaptations of Knight’s works in TV or movies?

There are no plans, currently.

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

Whether it was a hobby or not, Damon was always drawing and doodling. Otherwise, he read, which was his form of relaxation.

John Grayshaw: Did Knight have a writing routine he stuck to?

Damon would work through the day, and sometimes in the evening, but not on a strict schedule. It really depended on the project he was working on.

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

Damon believed he could help breathe new life into what he and others considered the stagnation of science fiction. The pulps were on their way out and something needed to replace them. As editor and critical reader, Damon saw many excellent stories that were being passed over by the industry heavies. Eventually, his anthology series, Orbit, was born, which for 20 years, gave him the free hand to buy and publish cutting-edge stories by well-known and unknown authors. Although Orbit finally came to an end, it greatly influenced the direction science fiction would take.

Through his writing, teaching, editing, and criticism, along with his work starting the Milford Writers Conference and Clarion Workshops, he was instrumental in raising the recognition of science fiction as an accepted, even celebrated literary art form. Damon considered this to be his greatest professional achievement.

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.