Michael Crichton was both wildly brilliant and pretty lousy, and never more so than in his 1990 novel Jurassic Park. As a novelist, screenwriter, and director, he was lame, plodding, and formulaic—ever notice that most if not all his novels have exactly the same structure, in that they take place over a single week? But Crichton, who died in 2008, had a remarkable talent for popularizing new ideas in science and technology while making them seem absolutely terrifying.
It’s rare for a person as scientifically literate as Crichton to embrace his Luddite side, but he really did fear these new frontiers—and fearing them helped make him a brand name in a way matched only by Stephen King in our time. He wrote with stunning clarity about genetic engineering, robotics and sentience, human...