In the New Yorker’s book section, actual intelligent discussion of science fiction—and why Michael Crichton’s work isn’t, in a significant sense, SF.

[Crichton is] forever describing things that could change the world—but don’t. The Andromeda strain of space germs mutates into harmlessness and goes away; the lost city of the Congo is wiped from the map by lava; in Sphere, the discoverers of the extraterrestrial artifact of untold power use that power to wish it into retroactive nonexistence. The fact that Crichton has no interest in showing what might have happened is what makes him a writer of suspense fiction, rather than of science fiction. A science-fiction writer would naturally want to see what would happen if the technologies stayed out of control (as most do), and might even want to ask whether the consequences would be all bad (as they often aren’t). Might not free-range dinosaurs make Costa Rica an even more interesting place than it is today? What if nanoswarms offered promise as well as peril? Prey, with its kill-them-all-and-get-out approach, is neither as frightening nor as fascinating as Greg Bear’s novelette of twenty years ago, “Blood Music,” in which the characters, transformed by the nanotechnology within them, become both far more and much less than human.

But then Crichton’s essential conservatism may well be the secret of his success. You get a glimpse of something strange and unsettling, but you don’t have to live with anything worse than the chance it might happen again. His goal is simply to convey a compelling and dangerous idea as quickly and noisily as possible. It’s often said that Crichton’s novels read like movies. In fact, they’re more like trailers, previews of coming destructions.

(Via Gordon Van Gelder. From Oliver Morton’s review of Prey by Michael Crichton, The New Yorker, Dec. 2, 2002, pp. 108-110. Not online, at least so far.) (UPDATE: It’s online now, right here.) [02:23 PM]