Bookshelf

Richard Preston ’76, Michael Crichton and the making of “Micro”

February 19, 2012 by John B. Saul Comments Off

Richard Preston’s friendship with Michael Crichton is a strange one—mostly because the two writers never met.

It developed as Preston ’76 finished writing Crichton’s 17th novel, a thriller that finds seven grad students lured to Hawaii for a research project that turns out to be run by a sociopath scientist. The students are plunged into the insect world of Oahu and must struggle to survive.

“At first I thought I would be intimidated,” says Preston, “but I became entranced by Michael’s materials. It became an act of friendship, and I developed a feeling of affection for Michael even though I had never met him.”

Crichton (The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park) died of cancer in 2008 at the age of 66. He left behind an unfinished manuscript and the Michael Crichton Trust, which went looking for someone to complete the novel. Lynn Nesbit, Crichton’s literary agent, called Preston in 2009 to let him know about the search. Preston, author of several best sellers himself, was at work on a novel, but the Crichton project sounded “extremely tempting,”and he let Nesbit know he was interested.

He was given the manuscript of the third of the book that Crichton had completed. “There was a poignancy in it. Crichton was working at high speed as if he didn’t know if he had time left to finish it,” Preston says.

Preston (The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event) wrote a proposal of what he thought Crichton’s plan was for the book and supplied an ending (Crichton had not) and a working title: Micro World, a technical term from biology basically referring to organisms the size of insects.

He got word that Sherri, Crichton’s widow, wanted to meet him, and he traveled to Santa Monica, Calif., where he met with her and Bonnie Jordan, Crichton’s longtime personal assistant, in Crichton’s writing space, a nondescript home where Crichton worked in a spare, upstairs bedroom.

“Sherri was so taken that I had come so close to predicting the secret title of the book—Micro—that she thought I should see these notes, and she brought out notebooks and jottings on hotel notepads and told me no one had seen these, not even Nesbit.”

Preston started an outline for the book, which became a 25,000 word “story bible.” The three of them—Preston, Sherri and Jordan—all worked on the book with the two women making suggestions based on their knowledge of Crichton and his discussions with them about the book.

“Michael was obsessed with the literary trope of shrunken humans and watched movies like Fantastic Voyage with Sherri to get it right.”

Preston began the actual writing in the spring of 2010. August of that year found him in Hawaii, down on his hands and knees with a magnifying glass examining the floor of an Oahu rain forest for detail to use in the book.

According to Preston, Crichton “was concerned that young people today don’t have the chance to experience the wonder of nature. So I tried to take readers on an odyssey through the micro world.”
Preston thought part of the task was to recover the lost voice of the author Michael Crichton. He studied videotapes of Crichton for speech patterns, read all of Crichton’s books and did a technical study of Crichton’s writing—how he went about his narratives, how he developed characters, etc.

“It was definitely a project where you had to check your ego at the door,” says Preston, whose book The Hot Zone has sold more than 2.5 million copies. “At one point, Bonnie handed back some of my work and she had crossed out the word ‘meanwhile.’ She told me that Michael never used the word in any of his books, that his narrative scenes were slam-bam and there was no meanwhile in them.”

Sherri insisted that Preston keep the part that Crichton had written, which meant Preston had to adopt Crichton’s style and tone. (Preston won’t say where the transition is in the book).

In going through Crichton’s notes, Preston came upon the words “to JR” jotted in them. Crichton mostly did not dedicate his books to anyone, but those words looked like a dedication to Preston, and he asked Bonnie who J.R. might be. A friend? Family? And then it came to them: Junior. When Michael died, Sherri had been pregnant with their child.

Preston put a photo of John Michael Crichton, Jr., then 3 years old, above his writing space, a way of remembering “the person I was writing for.”

Micro was published in November, and Preston has resumed his own project, which he describes as a departure from his previous books, which were rooted in contemporary scientific discoveries. The coming book creates an imaginary world with non-human characters but “not aliens; it’s not science fiction.”

He hopes to have a first draft done by April and publication before 2014. About Micro, he says he is happy how it turned out and “I like to think Michael would be, too.”

NPR’s Joe Palca writes about what bugs us

October 18, 2011 by David Roth '00 Comments Off

“A constant struggle against being annoyed all the time may be a phenomenon limited to New Yorkers,” says Joe Palca ’74. The relocated Upper West Sider knows of what he speaks when it comes to irritable straphangers, but he has also established himself as one of the world’s experts on annoyance with Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us, a book that’s about just what you think it’s about, and which the NPR science correspondent co-wrote with NPR multimedia editor Flora Lichtman.

Palca earned his Ph.D. in psychology at UC Santa Cruz after graduating from Pomona, where he got his start on radio at KSPC. “We just brought our record collections to the station and played what we would have listened to anyway,” he says of his radio days in Claremont.

These days, Palca spends his time in Washington, D.C., although he also recently logged six months back in Southern California as the science writer-in-residence at the Huntington Library. The catalytic annoyance that inspired this study of all things annoying arrived—and it’s tempting to write “of course”—on the New York City subway. Palca spoke to PCM about how he came to study annoyingness, the reasons why you—and everyone else, everywhere—hate the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, and his as-yet-unfulfilled quest for the definitive annoying experience.

As a sentient human living in a major American city, you are more or less guaranteed multiple annoyance triggers in a given day. Can you put your finger on a moment when that workaday annoyance started to seem like something worth writing a book about?

The finger-putting moment for the book actually came from my co-author, Flora Lichtman. She was riding on the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and the guy sitting next to her on the train was clipping his nails. She found herself becoming increasingly annoyed as the clipping seemed to continue way longer than necessary for someone with only 10 digits. She asked me if I thought exploring why this experience annoyed her so could make a book, and I said, “Sure.” I pitched her idea to an editor at Wiley, he loved it, and though we ultimately had interest from several publishers, Wiley won a bidding war.

In Annoying, you identify an experience’s unpleasantness as a fundamental aspect of its annoyingness, which seems hard to argue with. There’s no accounting for taste on the question of pleasantness-versus-unpleasantness, but did you find anything that annoyed more or less everyone, everywhere?

I suppose the quintessential universal annoyance is fingernails on a blackboard, although with the disappearance of blackboards that may change. Rubbing Styrofoam boxes together captures some of the same awfulness. Skunk smell also seems to be a nearly universal annoyance. Why? Hard to say for sure. Fingernails on a blackboard has an acoustic signature similar to a human scream or a primate’s warning call. Skunk spray’s smell comes from sulfur, and high sulfur environments tend to be low oxygen environments. Perhaps these things evoke a primal avoidance reaction, which we have modified over evolutionary time to be merely annoying.

No one really likes overhearing half of someone else’s phone conversation, but I was surprised to learn that our brains are actually wired to listen to and attempt to interpret that sort of “halfalogue.” To what extent is being annoyed attributable to unhelpful reflexes like that? And can we do anything to change that?

Annoyances can seem reflexive, but in nearly all cases they are learned. Does that mean we can train ourselves not to be annoyed? Not really. We can try to become calmer people, of course, but once something’s annoying it usually stays annoying. But you can, with practice, learn not to respond. You can’t prevent your leg from twitching when a doctor taps your patellar tendon with a hammer. If you can, you have problems that go way beyond annoyance.
You pin down three main factors that go into making experiences annoying—they’re unpleasant, unpredictable and of an uncertain duration. Excluding three-for-three flukes like getting stuck in traffic with a screaming baby and a car radio inexplicably stuck on a Black Eyed Peas marathon, what would be your ultimate annoying experience?

For me, being stuck in a noisy, hot waiting room for a flight or train that is delayed with no explanation is close to my ultimate annoyance. The absence of information is what pushes me from everyday annoyance into the top echelon. I have to fudge on whether it’s the ultimate annoyance, though. I feel life is full of discoveries, and I hope I have yet to discover my ultimate annoyance.

—Interview by David Roth ’00