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Title: The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton ISBN: 0060092572 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 05 November, 2002 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.61
Rating: 5
Summary: Entering The Terminal Man Discussion
Comment: I would like to respond in a friendly way to Barbara Serini's November 3, 2003 review of The Terminal Man. Thank you, Barbara, for recognizing that my June 18, 2003 review was mostly positive. Yours too was positive, pleasant, and very thought provoking. First, I should say that Michael Crichton's The Terminal Man is one of my favorite novels. Ironically, however, there are many other Crichton novels that seem better researched and better crafted (for example, Crichton spent some 20 years combing over a good ending for Sphere, and Jurassic Park went through several early drafts before arriving at an "adult" 3rd person objective perspective from which to tell the story).
To me, The Terminal Man is an early Crichton novel, and it is a sci-fi novel of the kind a person growing up in the 40s and 50s might have seen in the old Ace-Double sci-fi series or magazines like Analog and Astounding Science Fiction. These were great pulp-style science fiction magazines, and the stories represented there reflected that "pulp" mentality where the emphasis most often was on plot rather than fact or accuracy. I, for one, love those kinds of stories, and wish there were more of them (check out my website for publication news on my The Colorado Sequence, a novel very much informed by that Invasion of the Body Snatchers/Who Goes There?/40s&50s-pulp style sience fiction mentality).
I think that's the class that The Terminal Man belongs to; novels where the emphasis is on fun rather than fact. And an entire generation of writers and moviemakers (from Michael Crichton, to George Lucas, to Stephen King, to Speilberg's Jaws-Close Encounters-Indiana Jones era) was informed by that kind of 40s and 50s style pulp science fiction. While the ideas in Crichton's The Terminal Man do have some degree of believability I think his later novels (Rising Sun, Jurassic Park, on up to Prey) exhibit a better balance of factual believability alongside great storytelling plots.
Thanks for the insight and for making me think, Barbara.
Yours,
Stacey Cochran
Rating: 5
Summary: The Terminal Man - Good Book
Comment: The Terminal Man. Written in 1972 by Michael Crichton, the famous writer who also wrote the book Jurassic Park. Harry Benson suffers from seizures in which he beats people severely. He has a form of neurosurgery preformed on his brain to correct the unbalanced. After the operation, he escapes from the hospital, running to the people and places he knows, usually ending up in deaths. His body adapts to the flush of happiness he gets that stop the seizure from happening and purposely has seizures as much as possible to get that happiness, until it becomes suffocating to him. Then he goes into kill randomly mode. The hospital staff and police try desperately to find him. He ends up dead in big gun fight with the police after hurting several people he knows. His psychiatrist ends up shooting him.
The review I'm responding to is the one posted by Stacey Cochran, on June 18, 2003, on Amazon.com. Stacey's review of the Terminal Man was mostly positive. She mostly gave good remarks about the book being entertaining, and a good read. Her comment on the believability of the book was "Yeah, if you believe Chewbacca and Han Solo really exist maybe." But she also said that "The Terminal Man is an entertaining novel, and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes entertaining fiction." She commented a lot on Crichton's writing and how critics respond to the question "Is it believable or unbelievable?" Overall, the review on the book was good.
One of the two comments Stacey wrote, that I would like to focus on is how she stated that the book was not very believable. I strongly disagree. The book is very possible. I think it would be much different if she had made this posting in 1972, but she posted in 2003. Neurosurgery is very, very real and has been preformed before. I personally believe it will have much to do with future war. Recently, scientists preformed this type of surgery on a monkey, allowing him to control a mechanical arm by thought. They plan to make the whole system wireless. If that is possible, think about what else you could control with your mind? MSNBC had it on the front page of their web site previously, and I'm sure you could still read about it somewhere. That is why I disagree with that statement. Before the book starts Crichton also talks about the fact that this type of thing (neurosurgery) has actually been around for quite a while.
The other comment I chose to focus on is "That is not to say, it isn't entertaining - entertaining is all it is". This quote I would have to agree with. While this may not have been a Jurassic Park (also written by Crichton), it definitely was a good book; a book I would read in my spare time. Entertaining - meaning action packed and interesting. When Benson was attacking Morris, or when Benson was chasing Ross throughout her house, those were certainly times where I would not set the book down for anything. The book was definitely entertaining.
I would have to say that this book is a book I would recommend to anyone who is into the science fiction/mystery thrillers. I personally enjoyed the book. I might suggest it to the age groups of twelve and older due to a bit of obscene language (but also very necessary, to show the intensity of the situation). Overall, it is a good book to read in your spare time. While quite short at only two hundred and sixty eight pages, it is something you might want to put on your to do list.
Rating: 3
Summary: Pretty Decent for an out of Date book on old Technology
Comment: The biggest problem I had with this was the ending. It reminded me of the ending of "An American Werewolf in London." You know, Boom with gun" falls, the end. I would have liked a little more closure...more on what had happened to the characters and stuff.
Other than the out of date technology it was pretty good for the short book it is. Pretty good idea. His Timeline and Eaters of the Dead are still his best.\ though.
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Title: The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton ISBN: 0345378482 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 20 September, 1992 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Sphere by Michael Crichton ISBN: 0345353145 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: January, 1990 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Rising Sun by Michael Crichton ISBN: 0345380371 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 23 November, 1992 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Airframe by Michael Crichton ISBN: 0345402871 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: November, 1997 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Timeline by Michael Crichton ISBN: 0345417623 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 24 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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