Michael Crichton obituaries

Michael Crichton, best-selling novelist and creator of TV series ER, has died at the age of 66. As BBC News recalls:

In the 1990s he simultaneously had America's number one movie (Jurassic Park), its number one bestseller (Disclosure) and its top TV series (ER).

In The New York Times there's an appreciation of his work by Chalres McGrath.

All the Crichton books depend to a certain extent on a little frisson of fear and suspense: that’s what kept you turning the pages. But a deeper source of their appeal was the author’s extravagant care in working out the clockwork mechanics of his experiments — the DNA replication in “Jurassic Park,” the time travel in “Timeline,” the submarine technology in “Sphere.” The novels have embedded in them little lectures or mini-seminars on, say, the Bernoulli principle, voice-recognition software or medieval jousting etiquette.

There are also obituaries in The Guardian, The Times and The Daily Telegraph.