Michael Crichton, RIP

My whole life, Crichton has been the guy I've compared myself to when I really, really, want to feel like a loser. First article published in the New York Times at 12. Harvard, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, a lecturer in England a year out of college, then paid his way through Harvard Medical School by writing mystery novels. Where he graduated despite the fact he hated the whole thing.

So after that, he becomes a best-selling author, screenwriter and director, penning some of the most successful movies of all time, and creating one of the longest-running TV dramas.

Crichton received a lot of criticism for his wooden characters and his plot-driven narratives. But the guy had big ideas, and he had a talent for making them comprehensible to anyone. And most of the time, there was an essential core of humanity in his work, as he faced down all the massive changes caused by technology, and struggled to find a place for people in them.

My favorite book by Crichton -- one of my favorite books, period -- isn't one of his novels, though. It's a little-known (by his standards) collection of autobiographical pieces called Travels. In it, he relates, in deceptively simple language, what it's like to live inside a brain that big.

Like any other smart guy, Crichton could be very loudly wrong at times -- I couldn't get through State of Fear because of its blogger-level anti-environmental politics. Likewise, that Japanese takeover of the U.S. didn't happen, and gorillas have not yet learned to smash our heads flat with stone paddles.

But his most recent novel, Next, seems to be the most prescient, as it deals with the huge unknowns caused by our newfound ability to manipulate genes. Maybe nothing is as scary as what that could mean for us, but Crichton skipped the obvious monsters in favor of the smaller, and possibly more dangerous ones.

Now he's gone, and there's so much future left. The rest of us are going to have to pick up the slack, because we don't have him to map out tomorrow anymore.