<p>While he wasn't my favorite author, he was consistently entertaining -- he really knew how to take an interesting concept and turn it into a book that you simply could *not* put down until you'd finished it. And because his books were so accessible to the mainstream, he helped get the general public more interested in a lot of science topics. Sure, the science in "Jurassic Park" (for instance) isn't totally plausible, but how many books have a *statistician* be a major action hero? That was pretty cool. And as ALP said, he was good at capturing the human condition. No story is interesting if the people in it are boring or unrealistic. You have to care about them. And Crichton was very good at making you care about the characters.</p><p>66.... How many more books did he still have in him, I wonder? We'll never know. </p> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em> -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>