BACKGROUND INFORMATION - BIOGRAPHY

After graduating from the Harvard Medical School, Michael Crichton embarked on a career as a writer and filmmaker. Called "the father of the techno-thriller," his novels include The Andromeda Strain, Congo, Jurassic Park , and Timeline. He has also written four books of non-fiction, including Five Patients, Travels, and Jasper Johns .

His books have been translated into thirty languages. Twelve have been made into films, including Jurassic Park and most recently, Timeline, now filming. He is also the creator of the television series ER.

Crichton has directed six films, among them Westworld, Coma, and The Great Train Robbery. Always interested in computers, he ran a software company, FilmTrack, which developed computer programs for motion picture production in the 1980s; for this pioneering work he won an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Technical Achievement Award in 1995. His film Westworld was first feature film to employ computer-generated special effects.

Crichton has won an Emmy, a Peabody, and a Writer's Guild of America award for ER. In 2000, a newly-discovered, small armored dinosaur was named for him: Bienosaurus crichtoni. Crichton was named one of the "Fifty Most Beautiful People" by People magazine in 1992, but, he observes, never again. He is divorced and lives in Los Angeles.

LITERARY / HISTORICAL INFORMATION

“I thought THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN was a great title, but for many years I had no book to go with it. I worked on draft after draft, never completing one, obsessing about the project. And all because I was so fond of the title I couldn't abandon it.

The story itself was originally suggested by a footnote in George Gaylord Simpson's scholarly work THE MAJOR FEATURES OF EVOLUTION. Simpson inserted an uncharacteristically lighthearted footnote saying that organisms in the upper atmosphere had never been used by science-fiction writers to make a story.

I set out to do that.

Eventually I finished a whole draft and sent it to my new editor, Bob Gottleib, at Knopf. Bob said he would not even consider publishing it unless I was willing to completely rewrite it from beginning to end. I was twenty-five at the time, and Bob was only in his early thirties, but he had a very large reputation as an editor because he had edited CATCH 22. So I gulped, and said I would rewrite it according to his directions.

Bob said that the novel should read like a New Yorker profile, that it should be absolutely convincing. I wasn't really sure what that meant; I had read New Yorker profiles and found they varied widely. But he started me thinking about what THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN would look like, if the story were true. Where would I have gotten the information? How much I would know? And in what style would I write it, if it were true? I began to look at science non-fiction writing by people like Walter Sullivan, who wrote for the New York Times. And I began to imitate that factual, non-fiction writing style. It yielded a very cold, detached book that was also weirdly convincing.

After I sent Bob Gottlieb the rewritten manuscript, he called up and said I had done very good work, and therefore I only had to write half of it all over again. I gulped, and said I would. And after that, he would just call me every few days: rewrite the beginning of this chapter. Redo this description. This character isn't right; fix it. Add a chapter here. And on, and on. I began to feel persecuted by these demands, which seemed interminable, and increasingly nit-picking. (I did not yet know how rare good editing is.)

When the book was published, lots of people thought it was true. It was pretty interesting. After a while I stopped telling people that I had made it all up, because it turned out that it was true.”

- Michael Crichton

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