Michael Crichton Speaks: Let's Stop Scaring Ourselves

Michael Crichton finally lays it on the line, in his own words, courtesy of PARADE Magazine. After the professional global-warming Chickens Little yelled, "FOUL!" over his latest novel, State of Fear, Crichton decided to explain himself.

Crichton's answer is more powerful because he spends the first part of it repenting of all the scare-mongering of which he himself was guilty thirty to forty years ago. I remember many of his novels--like The Andromeda Straing and The Terminal Man. (That last was about a man given a microprocessor-based implant to treat the temporal-lobe epilepsy that made him a violent criminal. As you could predict from reading a Michael Crichton novel, the experiment failed, with results you can guess, I'm sure.) Crichton spent a lot of time talking about fad fears. Now he has changed his mind, and turned his redoubtable pen against those who might once have seen him as an ally. No wonder they're angry.