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 Travels by Michael Crichton
reviewed by Underview
Original appearance: Albedo one issue ??, 19XX
An SF name which is well known to a wider audience is Michael Crichton, author of the book on which Stephen Spielberg's cinematic blockbuster JURASSIC PARK was based. He is also well known as writer, director or both of films such as COMA, WESTWORLD and THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN. His latest paperback offering which, significantly, was published in hardback way back in 1988 and in paperback in 1989, is a mixture of biography and travel writing called TRAVELS.
With their usual alarming subtlety the publishers have quite clearly signposted the reason for its re-release at this particular moment in time. Directly beneath his name on the cover you will find the legend BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF JURASSIC PARK. I wonder how many of you out there could possibly have stumbled across this book when it first appeared and how many of the targeted readership this time around would have cast it a glance six years ago.
It's sad really that it takes second-hand hype off the back of a Spielberg movie to bring what is really quite a fine book to the notice of the general public. I know that Michael Crichton doesn't need the money but his writing does deserve the audience, on its own merits.
TRAVELS is episodic, presented almost as a series of discrete articles. Situated at the very start and finish of Travels, like bookends, is the biographical stuff. At the beginning he tells about his time as medical student and the reasons why he left that profession: chief among them being his dislike of blood and the fact that he was already a successful writer having sold a successful screenplay to Hollywood. In the middle are the travel stories including one entitled simply Ireland which covers his time here as director of the film THE FIRST GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY which starred Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland. At the end is a piece about investigating the claims of psychics which could have been much better if it had been a little less studious and leaned more towards entertainment which is where the rest of the book scores highly.
Throughout, Crichton is relaxed, likeable and chatty. There is nothing earthshattering about the tales he has to tell but he tells them well and you want to like them as much as you like the voice of the man who is telling them.
 The Lost World by Michael Crichton
reviewed by XXXXX
Original appearance: Albedo one issue ??, date?
Reading a book is a voyage of discovery. I set out on my journey to The Lost World beset by preconceptions. Some of them I had absorbed from elsewhere: Crichton is not a good writer. Some are merely on-going prejudices: Sequels are inevitably an inferior cash-in. Some were sheer prejudice against the follow-up to a highly successful product: The Lost World will turn out to have been written as a template for a film script rather than as a genuine novel.
Not all of my preconceptions were wrong, but the overall effect of reading the novel was to disarm my prejudices and confound many of the criticisms inherent in them. Yes, it definitely appears to be a template for a film, but that is not necessarily an entirely bad thing. A lot of the padding which seems to be a requirement for modern novels - perhaps so that they can be touted as a member of that most exclusive, elusive and extraordinarily marketable sub-genre, the blockbuster - can be dispensed with. As a sequel to Jurassic Park, a pre-novelisation of the film, The Lost World, and the latest offering from the pen of the mighty Michael Crichton, it will already command a market no matter how many, or how few, pages it takes to tell the story.
But as a film template, and the basis for the sequel to a highly successful Hollywood movie, it must necessary follow certain guidelines dictated by the studios rather than the dramatic and narrative requirements of the novel. Why else would two children be imposed upon a plot which just won't make room for them. One must wonder, given the way they seem to be shoe-horned in there, that they were an afterthought. If they were not, then perhaps Crichton is not as good a novelist as he and his publishers would like to think.
But if you can suspend your disbelief, as you must in science fiction, and ignore the plot holes and lack of motivation for the appearance of the children - they stow away like a couple of refugees from Enid Blyton - and the necessary stupidity of the highly intelligent and specialised team which allows their presence, then everything is hunky dory. Unfortunately Crichton does not make it easy. Still, as I say, if you can....
The characters need, and are given, little introduction. Although the cast has changed -and in the spirit of my previous Hollywood preconceptions I must wonder how much this was due to the possible unavailability of the stars of the previous epic - in the main the new bunch are merely replacements for the old. Some time is spent on the kids because the old ones would have grown up so we need a new batch. The rest are just ciphers, there only to move the action forward.
Given all that I have said so far, you would imagine I did not enjoy The Lost World. Wrong. It was a good, fast-paced read and a thoroughly enjoyable piece of entertainment. Like most of the commercial product which comes out of Hollywood, it is totally disposable. It will hold your interest while you read it and repay the time invested with a commensurate portion of enjoyment. But once you put it down it will be wiped clean from your brain - rather like the tape that self destructs in that other blockbuster - Mission Impossible. Though it may take slightly longer than five seconds.
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