Is there a website where I can find information about Science Fiction Morphed?”
The immediate reaction of readers who learned that Michael Crichton had died on Tuesday was surely one of sadness. They had lost a forward-looking writer whose outsize imagination and ambition, not to mention book sales, were too big for the 25-cent bin of genre fiction. For some fans, however, grief was tempered by disappointment. To them, the author of “State of Fear” and “Next,” Mr. Crichton’s last published novels, was not the unparalleled prognosticator of “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park.” What they expected from Mr. Crichton was his honoring the unspoken understanding that exists between readers and writers of speculative fiction: the reader will suspend disbelief as long as the writer starts with basic scientific fact before weaving his science fiction. With these last two novels, they concluded that Mr. Crichton, in his warnings of perilous futures, had violated the pact. “State of Fear,” in 2004, was a thriller about unlikely allies (including an environmental lawyer
offers up 13 stories, one full novel and one novel excerpt later shot as movies or portions of movies. Authors include names like Bradbury, Campbell, Kuttner, Siodmak and Weinbaum, so it’s hard to go entirely wrong. Since the stories appeared between 1918 and 1963, and half the movies were released in the 50s, you cannot expect the latest in cyberpunk or virtual reality. OK, so the science in some of the stories is ludicrous today, and some of the movies would be prime fare for Mystery Science Theater 3000, but much of this material was written in an age when science fiction had a sense of optimism and wonder that enthralled teenagers and adults alike, when science could solve anything, aliens bent on world domination were thinly veiled communists/fascists, and swashbuckling heroes from Buck Rogers to Captain Video fought for liberty and the American way. Nonetheless, the best literature of this era was able to transcend many of these clichés and limitations and remains entertaining to
