Reply #45: I wouldn't regard Crighton as a "mainstream" SF author. [View All]

[eppur_se_muova]

As little as that term means -- SF authors are like jazz musicians, try to categorize them, or tell them what "is" or "isn't" SF and they'll bite you. Still, Crighton is more of a "Best-seller" author than a real SF author. Try reading more typical SF (oxymoron, acknowledged) and you'll find an awful lot of current SF authors -- many of whom are PRACTICING scientists, unlike Crighton -- take the basis of their stories to be the end result of global warming, or other environmental catastrophe such as ozone depletion, accepted as all-too-real possibilities by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community.

A good antidote to Crighton's book would be Kim Stanley Robinson's "Forty Signs of Rain", given top reviews by the Guardian, Independent and NY Times Review of Books. The President in this novel is described as follows: "It was a pastime in some circles to judge just how much of a dimwit the President was, how much of a performing puppet for the people manipulating him; but facing him in person, Charlie felt instantly confirmed in his minority position that the man had such a huge amount of low cunning that it amounted to a sort of genius." Is KSR a charter member of the reality-based community, or what?

edited to add quote