An Appraisal | Michael Crichton Builder of Realms That Thrillingly Run Amok

Michael Crichton, who died on Tuesday at the age of 66, was like a character in a Michael Crichton novel. He was unusually tall (6 feet 7 inches), strikingly handsome and encyclopedically well informed about everything from dinosaurs to medieval banquet halls to nanotechnology. As a writer he was a kind of cyborg, tirelessly turning out novels that were intricately engineered entertainment systems. No one — except possibly Mr. Crichton himself — ever confused them with great literature, but very few readers who started a Crichton novel ever put it down.

Most of his books relied on a simple formula. Like a scientist in a lab, Mr. Crichton (who had been a medical doctor before turning to fiction) would introduce some worrisome new specter into his fictional universe and then watch it run amok. Sometimes the menace was biological, like the space-borne plague in an early novel, “The Andromeda Strain,” or the genetically engineered dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” and its sequel, “The Lost World.” And sometimes the problem was human beings, like the Japanese businessmen in “Rising Sun” intent on taking over the United States economy, or the rapacious female executive in “Disclosure.” The implicit prophecies embedded in those two books — a world run by sinister, unreadable Asians or castrating female honchos — proved to be wide of the mark, which was perhaps slightly embarrassing to Mr. Crichton, but that did not deter him from speculating, in his 2004 novel, “State of Fear,” that global warming might be a hoax....