The Crichton Strain

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE TERMINAL MAN by MICHAEL CRICHTON 247 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

BINARY by JOHN LANGE 224 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Michael Crichton, 29-year-old dropout physician and author of the bestselling novel The Andromeda Strain, is unleashing an entertainment epidemic. It is being spread through books and movies, only some of which bear his real name. Regardless of byline and credit, however, the Crichton strain is unmistakable.

Both The Terminal Man and Binary --written under the author's old Harvard Medical School paperback pen name, John Lange--share their author's distinctive touch. Crichton creations thrive on a scientific esoterica that owes more to fact than to fiction. Crichton people tend to be value-neutral technicians who, like sorcerer's apprentices, meddle with forces they cannot control. Above all, there is Crichton's almost compulsive awareness of time and his skill at explaining the complex without losing the reader's interest.

In Binary, which Crichton has just finished directing as an ABC-TV movie, a brilliant millionaire fanatic named Wright plots to destroy Richard Nixon. Wright believes that the President sold out the nation by breaking egg rolls with the Red Chinese. The Republican Party and the population of San Diego will have to go too, because Wright plans to saturate the city with nerve gas during the forthcoming national convention.

The whole novel is compressed into twelve hours, time enough for Wright to outwit a Defense Department intelligence agent, hijack several tanks of nerve-gas components, and rig a devilish device to dispense them. With two gases and two competitive adversaries about to mix lethally, the novel's title, Binary, and its suspense are readily understandable. Crichton also manages to turn the book into something of an early warning device. An epilogue in the form of think-tank recommendations to the Government suggests specific changes in existing procedures to prevent the theft of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Crichton's bureaucrats halfheartedly promise to review the report "in the near future."

In Terminal Man, the near future is practically upon us. The theme is mind control through psychosurgery, today hardly in the realm of science fiction (TIME, April 3). Crichton's surgeons plant 40 minuscule electrodes in the brain of Harry Benson, a psycho-motor epileptic whose fits turn him into a homicidal maniac. The electrodes, powered by a tiny nuclear battery implanted in Harry's shoulder, deliver small electrical impulses which check the epileptic fit at its onset.

Crichton maintains credibility with a fine array of documentary props, including a page of real brain X rays. Ironically, the plot turns on a physiological mechanism that is somewhat fanciful. Harry becomes addicted to the shocks, which give him a pleasant electrical high. His brain, therefore, contrives to have more frequent fits in order to receive more titillating shocks. Eventually the psychomotor epilepsy overrides the blocking capacity of the electrodes and Harry becomes a computerized monster. By this time he has escaped from the hospital and is well into murder and mayhem, with assorted police and medical practitioners in confused pursuit.

But is it a man hunt or a machine hunt? Is Harry Benson only the tragic victim of scientific arrogance or, as he says shortly after the operation, "a fallen man," precursor of a generation that may have no memory of what it was to have been human? Crichton does not indulge in such speculation. He is a scrupulous genre writer who is content to dress up old tales with new gadgetry. Andromeda Strain, for example, was in some sense a rewrite of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. The Terminal Man is an update of Frankenstein. Can Dracula, or Wolfman in sheep's clothing, be far behind?

With his rosy, unlined face, he looks like a 15-year-old boy standing on a chair. But then Michael Crichton, M.D., ducks his 6 ft. 9 in. under the lintel of his office door and casually maneuvers a lovely young actress back into the Los Angeles sunshine. Just as casually he diagnoses the actress's problems. "She can't play a tough_ _ _ _. " The prescription? "I'll have to rewrite her part."

Dr. Crichton is learning the movie business. Right down to those hard-boiled comments as familiar on film sets as in the operating room. Not that he ever spent much time in surgery. At Harvard, Crichton used a pen more often than a scalpel. Before graduating he had published half a dozen paperback thrillers under the name of John Lange. He also researched Five Patients, his documentary about the workings of a large medical center. In 1968 A Case of Need won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award. For that book --a swiftly plotted story biased in favor of abortion--Crichton used the name Jeffry Hudson, who was a dwarf in the court of Charles I.

A Case of Need, turned into a movie, is currently touring as The Carey Treatment. So is another Crichton novel, the recently released Dealing, a tale of the collegiate marijuana trade. The original novel, by "Michael Douglas," was actually a hasty collaboration between Crichton and his younger brother Douglas.

Novels, film scripts, and now directing, have naturally proved more profitable than medical practice. The film rights alone for The Terminal Man have brought Crichton $350,000 so far. Success steered him into psychoanalysis and broke up his five-year marriage. Although he walks with the slight stoop of a man concerned with not bumping his head, he seems to like towering over everyone else. On the L.A. party circuit, only the Lakers' Wilt Chamberlain could challenge this distinction. Crichton's tastes run to the sound and costly. He has a Mercedes-Benz sedan to replace a Porsche, which he found too cramping, and recently purchased a house designed by Richard Neutra.

Clearly, Crichton is an ambitious man. But then he came of a very achievement-oriented family. His father was the busy executive editor of Advertising Age. Growing up in Roslyn, N.Y., Crichton recalls that he and his brother and two sisters had to take music lessons whether they liked them or not. By the time Crichton was 14, he was already 6 ft. 7 in. tall. Before long, the high school basketball coach was whipping star performances out of this less-than-natural athlete. Crichton worked hard, because, as he says facetiously, "I wanted to be kissed by the cheerleaders." He continues to work hard, and those cheerleaders have now been replaced by starlets. Yet Crichton seems happiest when he is trying something entirely new. Directing Binary, his first film, was, he says, "like a drug high that went on for twelve days. I was just zinging along for miles."

Crichton's success is in many respects conventional, but one should not count on his doing the normal thing. Even if he does, he will undoubtedly do more of it than anyone else.

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