Michael Crichton was a wildly successful novelist–The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, just to name two of his many books. But one of those books, Prey, suggests to me that he never came to terms with his own religious impulses.
Try as he might, Crichton could not let go of the notion that human beings are destined to control their environment (“Ye shall be as gods”). We have no need of God: we will eventually learn how to iron out the rough spots.
But it was those rough spots that Crichton wrote about; and he never shook off the observable truth that people–even scientists!–make very inadequate gods. The promised utopia never gets past the breaking-the-eggs stage.
Prey made me pity Crichton. The man had too much integrity to set up phony-baloney fictional utopias. Reality kept crashing in.
He had the courage to face it, but not the wit to answer it.
