Ah, crap.

[drcuriosity]

Michael Crichton just died of cancer, aged 66.
He wrote some good books, and inspired and directed some good films.
Bugger.

Comments

Bugger

[angryangeltoo.livejournal.com]

He got me into genetic engineering :(

[basal-surge.livejournal.com]

Actually, so far as I'm concerned, he was an unrepentant plagiarist who consistently used really bad research for his plot lines, so meh.

[drcuriosity]

Oh? What did he plagiarise?
I must admit, I did only read his stuff occasionally as light something-to-read fare, so I was largely going on hearsay.

[basal-surge.livejournal.com]

Eaters of the Dead, the one that was used as the basis for the abysmal '13th Warrior'. The story itself is a paraphrase of Beowulf, with neanderthals inserted as Grendel/The bad guys, but he ripped off without attribution about four or five pages of Ibn Fadln's account of trading with the Kievan Rus, written in the 9th century. Its almost verbatim, not even paraphrased. I'm pissed about it because viking stuff is one of my research areas, and even thousand years dead out of copyright authors should be referenced, even if only as 'hey, I borrowed this dudes stuff as a cool intro for this potboiler'

And, all his other science based stuff, is generally crap, particularly if you're a paleontologist...

[aleph-naught.livejournal.com]

He also gave the impression of being fairly rabidly right-wing and was a vocal climate change denier.

Still, I liked Jurassic Park, so I'm gonna go with the 'an at least somewhat-talented author has died, tis sad' line rather than the 'ding dong the witch is dead' line, which would be kinda mean.

[basal-surge.livejournal.com]

I'm just too much of a rock and fossil geek to enjoy JP and sequels. Sure, some of the animations are cool, but the plots are crap, even in the more expanded versions in the book. . Besides, if you're ressurrecting dinosaurs from from fragmental dna, and you need to splice in missing bits, _amphibian_ dna as used in the film, _isn't_ what you use. What you use is _dinosaur_ DNA, from those well known modern dinosaurs, you know, _Birds_

[aleph-naught.livejournal.com]

Aww, but amphibians are AWESOME.

[norectangulars.livejournal.com]

Something like a tuatara might also work.
In any case, we don't actually know enough to know what to splice in (although we know how).

[basal-surge.livejournal.com]

Probably not. Tuataras are sphenodonts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuatara), a lineage that split off rather a long time ago, and only distantly related to dinosaurs. They've got more in common with things like Dimetrodon and Moschops and some of the mammal-like reptiles of the Permo-triassic than they have with the dinosaurs, which are closer to birds (they reckon from the T-rex collagen they've recovered, that 'tastes like chicken' would be an adequate description, as it makes antibodies that react to chicken proteins become active.)

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

_amphibian_ dna as used in the film, _isn't_ what you use

... she turned me into a newt?

[norectangulars.livejournal.com]

I liked the Andromeda Strain, at least the 1st half. Then they found a cure and the action moved away from the town and focussed more on the scientist with epilepsy. The first half was well-written and genuinelly chilling.
I dare say if I read it again, having done a BSc, bits of it would ring false. I tend to avoid forensic science and medical dramas for the same reason...