Jurassic Park had just come out, but I hadn’t seen it yet. I had five minutes at the airport book store before the plane left for Moscow, and all they had were rows of Michael Crichton.
Dinosaurs? Another day. I picked up Terminal Man.
Terminal Man is a snicker-out-loud book, which isn’t a good thing because it’s supposed to be a thriller, and any laughter is at instead of with. Crichton is not a funny author, but the intelligence he exhibited in this artificial intelligence fantasy is purely superficial.
On the way back, the Moscow airport didn’t even have choices. I talked to a flight attendant, though, and found that the in-flight entertainment would consist solely of a Rock Hudson movie dubbed into Russian and shown twice, so I ended up reading Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park is a better book, in the way that a fifteen-year-old rust-eaten Ford Taurus is better than the same car with two flat tires.
The movie was much better.
In Crichton’s defense… I’ve seen three complete episodes of E.R., and I liked them.
