Michael Crichton: Father of the Techno-Thriller

John Michael Crichton (October 23, 1942 – November 4, 2008), best known as Michael Crichton, was an American author, producer, director, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels which often have combined aspects of science, technology, and suspense. With this, he has been called “the father of the techno-thriller." Many of his books have been adapted into movies and he is also the creator of the television series, ER.

Michael Crichton was born in Chicago, Illinois to John Henderson Crichton, a journalist, and Zula Miller Crichton. He was raised on Long Island in New York. At a young age, he already showed a keen interest in writing and by the time he is 14, he had a column related to travel published in The New York Times. In 1960, he entered Harvard College to study literature. During his initial undergraduate years, he experimented to catch out a professor whom he believed was giving him abnormally low marks and criticizing his writing style. With the knowledge of another professor about his suspicions, Crichton plagiarized a work by George Orwell and submitted it as his own. The paper was returned by his unwitting professor and got a mark of "B−". This issue led him to switch his course to biological anthropology. He then obtained his A.B. summa cum laude in 1964. Later, he enrolled at Harvard Medical School and graduated in 1969. Then, he undertook a post-doctoral fellowship study at the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

Crichton’s first published book under his own name is The Andromeda Strain. It is a novel about a disastrous virus brought to Earth from outer space. This brought fame to Crichton and became the first of his many works that were brought to the movie screen. Soon, he began a full-time writing career. Many of his novels have medical or scientific foundations which reflect his medical training and science background. Among others, he was the author of Jurassic Park, Congo, Travels, Sphere, Rising Sun, Disclosure, The Lost World, Airframe, Timeline, Prey, State of Fear, Next, Pirate Latitudes, and Micro, a final unfinished techno-thriller to be published on November 2011.

In early 2008, Crichton was diagnosed with lymphoma and undergone a chemotherapy. He died of the disease on November 4, 2008 at the age of 66. With his works, Forbes listed him in tenth place in its list of "Top-Earning Dead Celebrities" of 2009.

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