Michael Crichton, Science Studies, and the Technothriller
Crichton honed his literary voice by blending conventions from his own clinical observations, the dialogue-heavy New Journalism that was taking hold via authors like Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, and the gothic fiction of a century prior. He became celebrated for his ability to combine meticulous attention to authenticating detail about the practices and procedures that characterized professional work as well as the middle-class dreams that made that work seem meaningful, with more sensational speculation about how science could go horribly wrong. His first major science fiction publication was the biomedical thriller, The Andromeda Strain (1969), which he wrote while in medical school. Soon after director Robert Wise made the novel into a movie (1971), a combination that proved to be archetypal of the niche Crichton would occupy and exploit in decades to come. |