Michael Crichton died in Los Angeles today.
The sci-fi writer who brought us geeky joy with novels such as Eaters of the Dead, Jurassic Park, and Congo passed away after a long battle with cancer. He was 66 years old.
While I was never a fan of the movie adaptations, I really enjoyed his books. I first read Jurassic Park on a beach in Key West while on vacation with my parents. When mom handed it to me, all I knew was that it had dinosaurs (I was going through my “I want to be a paleontologist!” phase”), but it was the science that took me in. I read the whole thing in a day and a half and, even though I’d brought three other books with me, when I got to the last page, I immediately flipped back to page one and read it again.
Crichton appealed to my geek in a big way. He’ll be missed.
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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
He was never my favorite writer, but I loved the books of his that I read and I really respected his ability to continually write novels that appealed to a wide range of readers. They might have all basically been considered “science fiction” but each novel was so different then the others and so in tune with popular culture at the time. That was an amazing feat, and I think the literary world will really miss him.
I loved his rabble-rousing speeches. There’s a lot of blather about SF being a “Thinking Person’s Medium” but really most of it just recycles what we already know or are told. I love that his speeches called in to question the most basic assumptions of politics, science, the environment, and stuff like that.
He was my favorite writer, I really love his novel ” A case of Need”.