Word: andromeda
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...based on a script of Crichton's that had been moldering around Hollywood for 22 years, is just the latest evidence that Crichton hits more passes than anyone else at the high roller's table, even with old dice. From his best-selling The Andromeda Strain (the first novel he wrote under his own name), which became a hit movie in 1971, through Jurassic Park, with a worldwide box-office take of $912 million the most popular movie of recorded history, he is a giant even among those other pop novelists--John Grisham, Stephen King, Tom Clancy--whom Hollywood...
...from principal, not from interest, but just from words he thought up himself. His remuneration casts a consequential shadow, but the author isn't comfortable talking about it. He would sooner cogitate on those literary niggles--the charges that his characters have no depth. Back as far as The Andromeda Strain, Crichton concedes, he wasn't much for delving into character ("It didn't matter who the people were"). Still, he's human: criticism stings. "You know, I'm not very well read," he says, with characteristic self-effacement. "I was reading a book Cocteau wrote called The Difficulty...
...editor of most of his early novels, Robert Gottlieb, confirms that. "What interested Michael was the scientific process and the excitement of the suspense," he says. "He had very dutifully filled in characters [in The Andromeda Strain]. I felt that the characters were getting in the way and that it should be stripped down even further toward being documentary in tone. When I told him this, it was already what he was thinking. We saw eye to eye from the start...
...money, earned by writing a shelf full of novels before he left college. Eight were paperback adventure novels written under the name John Lange, one was an Edgar Award-winning medical-detective paperback under the name Jeffrey Hudson, and another was the hardcover breakthrough under his own name, The Andromeda Strain, which was published as he worked out a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He says he produced 10,000 words a day during those years, and no one who knows his work habits disputes...
Steele's wisecrack raises a serious question. Might some of these microorganisms be dangerous -- an ancient Andromeda Strain like the killer germ in another Crichton novel? Absolutely not, argues Steele, who stresses that Ambergene is very selective in the microbes it chooses to cultivate, carefully checking their genetic and ecological profiles to exclude possible pathogens. In addition, she notes, most of Ambergene's microbes are related to modern-day organisms of known habits. Still, experience with rabbits in Australia and kudzu in the Southern U.S. shows that seemingly innocuous plants and animals can misbehave when taken out of their original...