I’ve been think­ing a lot recently about Obama win­ning the elec­tion, about my writ­ing, why I washed out of NaNoW­riMo this year (more on that later), and the pass­ing of one of my favorite authors last week, Michael Crich­ton. I’m also reread­ing Juras­sic Park, my favorite Crich­ton novel. And in so doing, I’ve come to real­ize some­thing. My whole life, I’ve served two mas­ters. Worse, two seem­ingly mutu­ally exclu­sive masters.

On the one hand, I’ve always been a skep­tic, a ques­tioner. While I under­stand the his­toric sig­nif­i­cance of the United States elect­ing an African-​American pres­i­dent, I’m still baf­fled at the racism that, yes, still exists in the south where I grew up. To me, racism never made sense. I learned at an early age that the amount of melanin in one’s skin is a sim­ple genetic trait, not more sig­nif­i­cant to the organ­ism over­all than eye color or hand­ed­ness. Dis­crim­i­nat­ing against peo­ple for skin color was just as ludi­crous to me as say­ing that blue-​eyed peo­ple were nat­u­rally supe­rior, or than left-​handed peo­ple were pos­sessed by demons. It was only years later that I found out the lat­ter two asser­tions had also had their turn, and resulted in mil­lions of deaths. I still think it’s stupid.

I’ve always wanted to know why. Why any­thing. “Because we’ve always done it this way” is never a good rea­son to do any­thing as far as I’m con­cerned. I’ve always had a scientist’s nat­ural curios­ity and deter­mi­na­tion to find a ratio­nal expla­na­tion for things, even things that, like racism, aren’t ratio­nal. This was, I think, what drew me to Crichton’s books. Look­ing back over his col­lected works, includ­ing those I fun­da­men­tally dis­agree with like State of Fear, the con­stant thread that unites nearly every­thing Crich­ton pro­duced is a healthy mis­trust of sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy. Not from a lud­dite per­spec­tive, but an aware­ness that with the won­ders of new dis­cov­ery and tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment we must always keep a care­ful eye out to make sure it’s not acci­den­tally or even delib­er­ately mis­used. Most of Crichton’s books are about sci­ence gone wrong, about mod­ern day Daedaluses and Prometheuses reach­ing too far or play­ing with things they didn’t truly under­stand. I think this is an impor­tant theme, espe­cially as our tech­no­log­i­cal pace con­tin­ues to increase, and I hope some­one (even me) picks up where Crich­ton left off.

But the other rea­son I was such a big fan of Crichton’s work is that his books also reached out to the edge of sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy, push­ing the bound­aries of what we con­sid­ered pos­si­ble. and while part of me is a skep­tic, the other side of me deeply wants to believe. While I have a scientist’s thirst for ratio­nal expla­na­tions, I also have a storyteller’s sense of won­der and magic. And so I’m will­ing to give some things the ben­e­fit of the doubt.

Keep­ing in mind Crichton’s con­stant warn­ing that we never know as much as we think we do about the nat­ural world, I note that until one cen­tury ago, 1908, the gorilla was con­sid­ered a myth­i­cal crea­ture. So is the exis­tence of a fifth species of great ape, one more closely related to humans and fully bipedal, but which avoids us and sticks to the most remote parts of the world so hard to find pos­si­ble, if not plau­si­ble? Tales of rare encoun­ters with these shy crea­tures are so wide­spread and con­sis­tent that there must be more to them than myth. And, if they are descended from the so-​called “miss­ing link” they could fill in an impor­tant gap in pri­mate evo­lu­tion. So with all this mind, I’m inclined to believe these crea­tures exist more than not, whether you call them Big­foot, Sasquatch or Yeti.

For sim­i­lar lines of rea­son­ing, I’m also open to the exis­tence or con­tin­ued sur­vival of Mokèlé-​mbèmbé (what sounds like an apatosaur deep in the Congo rain­for­est where no human but pyg­mies has ever gone), mega­lodon (a 60 – 100 foot ances­tor of the great white shark that I think might be no more extinct than the coela­canth) and other things that “ratio­nal” peo­ple dis­miss as imag­i­nary. Because we don’t know. We can never know everything.

So as I bid farewell to Michael Crich­ton, I’m going to keep both the sense of dis­cov­ery and won­der he brought me over the years, and the warn­ing skep­ti­cism behind his books. And I thank him for help­ing to shape the reader, writer and thinker I am today.