Michael Crichton barely dead, the ever-classy New York Times takes the opportunity to publicly kick his corpse for the alleged sin of combining Science Fiction with politics! Say it isn't so, Virginia!

When Science Fiction Morphed Into Politics

.... For some fans, however, grief was tempered by disappointment. To them, the author of “State of Fear” and “Next,” Mr. Crichton’s last published novels, was not the unparalleled prognosticator of “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park.”

Stop a moment.

Look, I'm a Crichton fan too, but "Andromeda Strain" predicted we'd be attacked by alien diseases from outer space. (They'd travel from the laughably distant Andromeda galaxy to infect us!) And "Jurassic Park" implied we'd be able to rebuild T Rex using frog DNA. Neither of these things have happened yet, or are likely to ever happen. While I enjoyed these stories immensely, I wouldn't exactly call them "unparalleled prognostication."

And Crichton would have undoubtedly agreed, as he many times pointed out that we weren't in eminent dangers from the dinosaurs or "grey goo" depicted in his novels. That was entertainment, folks. But apparently not to this guy!

What they expected from Mr. Crichton was his honoring the unspoken understanding that exists between readers and writers of speculative fiction: the reader will suspend disbelief as long as the writer starts with basic scientific fact before weaving his science fiction. With these last two novels, they concluded that Mr. Crichton, in his warnings of perilous futures, had violated the pact.

“State of Fear,” in 2004, was a thriller about unlikely allies (including an environmental lawyer and a researcher turned undercover agent) who find an ecoterrorism group staging natural disasters to exaggerate the effects of global warming. But it was also a platform for Mr. Crichton to dismiss scientific concerns about climate change.

The crie de cour (cry of the heart) here is: We'd mourn Crichton's death a lot more if he hadn't disagreed with our political programs. But he did, we'll take this opportunity to jump upon his grave, and give a nasty little speech to demonstrate how we treat those who "betray" us.

Of course, besides being tacky (rabid partisanship is seldom decorous), that also sounds vain and petty — so we need to juice up our argument by claiming Crichton failed to engage "basic scientific fact". Like anthropogenic global warming! Which we learn, from this critique, is both "basic" (rather than being built on many untested (and sometimes untestable) assumptions, highly complex and unproven computer models, and difficult-to-obtain measurements) and "fact" (rather than being controversial, with scientists taking various positions).

And we must write in the third person, musn't we? Instead of saying, honestly: "I was disappointed", we say: "he violated his pact with those readers." Pact? He owed you something (political conformity, natch) because he put pen to paper? And "those readers" being, of course, the article's author, himself.

Who reads this condescending tripe?

(It's even funnier to note that this author usually writes in the first person in his columns. Compare: "As someone whose subway rides tend to resemble scenes from an 'Evil Dead' movie, in which I am Bruce Campbell dodging zombies..." [1]; "I have always from my earliest youth had an awe and love of Neal Stephenson..." [2] The folksy tone disappears, of course, when the judge dons his robes to pass sentence.)

What troubled some about “State of Fear” and “Next” was not Mr. Crichton’s politics, but his tactics.

A columnist at the Times complaining about tactics? Do tell me more...

For readers who trusted his intellect and reputation, there was no way to know what he had omitted from the record. He seemed to convey certainty about facts that were in dispute.

For a guy who seems to make his living reviewing science fiction, Itzkoff doesn't seem to remember much about the genre's history!

Isaac Asimov wrote about sentient robots — he seemed (oh dear!) "certain" that machine sentience was possible, was desirable, and was no different than human intelligence, even though the question is still in dispute today — much less several decades ago when he wrote his now-classics. And how about Star Trek, which was certain the universe would be brimming with sentient life, and that faster-that-light travel was not only possible, but right around the corner? (Invented by Zefram Cochrane in 2053, in Bozeman Montana!) And what of Arthur Clarke's general belief that human beings needed to outgrow religion, which is false? They all seemed rather "certain" of facts that were in dispute (and still are), no?

(The author also writes volumes about himself in that first sentence: He doesn't do basic research. Even though he admits Crichton's works were heavily footnoted — really an unusual length to go for a work of fiction — he claims there is "no way" to know if he'd been fair? Instead of trying to figure it out for himself, he admits he "trusts" authors based on "intellect and reputation"! How unfair for one such author to have betrayed him! After predicting dinosaur parks, even!)

To be sure, Mr. Crichton took on some deeply divisive issues knowing that he’d alienate many readers. In doing so, he also took the risk that events not far in the future would diverge from his visions — not drastically, but enough to show readers the difference between augury and advocacy.

By far, the most clueless aspect of this editorial is the repeated insistence that its inappropriate to mix politics and science fiction. To the contrary, most historical SF included (or was even centered upon) political themes, or a political agenda. Heinlein believed citizenship should be earned, and said so. Star Trek portrayed a socialist future as not only workable, but mandatory. The Time Machine validated, and extended, Marx's doctrines about class warfare. Silent Running and countless other novels preached environmentalist sermons, predicting global destruction or (Soylent Green) mass starvation within a generation, unless something drastic was done -- soon.

No, Crichton's real crime here wasn't how Crichton argued against global warming (what approach would he have respected?), but that he did so — lapsing desperately into revisionist assertions about the tradition of SF. Indeed, the whole point of SF was frequently to undermine or question widely-held beliefs (even widely accepted scientific ones, such as the Einsteinian impossibility of faster-than-light travel) — to ask "What if?" and see what resulted. Had this same stifling political orthodoxy applied to Heinlein, Asimov, or Clarke many SF classics would never have been written.