Scion of Frankenstein: Michael Crichton, novelist and policy provocateur.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald

MICHAEL CRICHTON supplied Hollywood with a series of hits, and he created the hospital drama E.R., one of the most successful TV shows of the last two decades. But the pop novelist, medical doctor, and sometime public-policy provocateur, who died of cancer in November at age 66, was best known for a prolific stream of techno-thriller novels that incited public policy debates while selling more than 150 million copies worldwide.

Most of Crichton's books exploited the well-worn formula pioneered by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein: Scientific hubris leads to disaster. In The Andromeda Strain (1969), Army scientists in search of biological warfare agents endanger humanity by bringing back a space virus that infects a town. In The Terminal Man (1972), the epileptic protagonist goes on a murderous rampage under the influence of computerized mind control. The Frankenstein/reanimation theme is even more explicit in Jurassic Park (1990), in which a paleontologist uses biotechnology to bring dinosaurs back to life, with disastrous results. In Crichton's anti-nanotech tale Prey (2002), a greedy corporation inadvertently releases swarms of flesh-eating nanoparticles.

Crichton's villains were often corporations whose minions killed for profit. His anti-Japanese mystery Rising Sun (1992) stoked xenophobic fears of a new Yellow Peril buying up all of America. Such nativist anxieties melted away shortly afterward, with the bursting of the Japanese asset price bubble.

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In recent years, Crichton turned his attention more explicitly toward public policy. In particular, he became highly skeptical of archly ideological environmentalism. His 2005 book State of Fear was, in effect, a novelization of a speech he delivered at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club in 2003. The lecture argued that environmentalism is essentially a religion: a belief system based on faith, not fact. State of Fear not only became a bestseller but propelled its author into think-tank circles. Crichton was now invited to make speeches around the country on science policy. In 2005 he even testified in front of a U.S. Senate committee about the politicization of climate change science.

In his follow-up, the biogenetic tale Next (2006), Crichton presented a wicked corporation engaging, as usual, in all manner of skullduggery. But he turned his customary Frankenstein formula on its head by ending the novel with a vision of a happy trans-species blended family, including a...