Travels

This autobiographical book not only tells the story of Crichton's self-discovery travels in the 1980s, but also how he traveled from being a medical student to a best selling author and filmmaker.

Computing and Programming

In the early 1980s Michael Crichton expressed his views and concerns about computing and programming in contributions and interviews to magazines like Creative Computing and Compute!. At this time he was creating a computer game and writing extensively about this both fiction and non-fiction

In 1983 he had published a non-fiction book called Electronic Life.

It is interesting that his views included considering the programming of computers and artificial intelligence as part and parcel of human evolution, an idea fully developed later by many authors like the Wachowski Brothers in The Matrix (1999) and its sequels. Movies like Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and Michael Crichton's own "Runaway" (1984) could be considered the first steps in this direction.

Jasper Johns - more than just a catalog

First published in 1977 and with a second revised and expaned edition in 1994, this is Michael Crichton's incursion into the world of art, but, as he explained, not providing art interpretation but information about the artist and the background of his works. He'd leave the interpreation to the audience...

        1977 and 1994 editions of Michael Crichton's Jasper Johns

In 2010, works from Michael Crichton's collection of Jasper Johns's art were auctioned at Christie's in New York. A beautiful catalog and a documentary were published for the event.

                               

Five Patients

Based on his experience as a medical intern at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, this non-fiction account of hospital work already shows Crichton's concern with the overreliance on technology, as represented by the artwork on the first edition of 1970 (below left). Later editions dropped the subtitle "The Hospital Explained" (below right).

 

 

Ballantine Books editions after 1994 (such as the one depicted to the right above) contain a new author's note commenting on the book 25 years after it was first published.

Fast forwarding 25 more years, Michael Crichton was no longer alive, but Tyler Barrett wrote an article about the state of healthcare 50 years after "Five Patients".