Before I get to Michael Crichton's The Terminal Man, I feel compelled to reprint the little author bio in the copy that I have. (Please keep in mind that this was before Crichton really hit it big with Jurassic Park.)

Still under thirty years of age, Michael Crichton is a man of many trades. Born in Chicago and educated at Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School, he received his MD in 1969. As an author, he made his reputation with The Andromeda Strain, which was both a bestseller and a major motion picture. Since then other books have appeared, pseudonymously and otherwise, notably Five Patients, a work of medical nonfiction. But a good part of his time is now spent on films. Dr. Crichton has written the screenplays for the films of Westworld and The Terminal Man. The original novel (THE TERMINAL MAN), written in California while Andromeda was shooting, went through seven drafts during a two-year period before it satisfied its author. As for its author — who is in fact not only author, physician and moviemaker but also a Post-Doctoral Fellow on leave of absence from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California — he confesses that he has a half dozen other book projects in mind.

Well, I confess that I've never read such a blatantly self-congratulatory blurb. It's disgusting to watch an author kiss his own ass (assuming that Crichton was responsible for this).

But anyway, on to the book, which is not much better. If a novel is a film, The Terminal Man feels like a made-for-TV movie, or--perhaps more accurately--a mediocre episode of some schlocky series like The Outer Limits. Here's the entirety of the plot: A patient named Harold Benson is brought into the hospital because he is prone to violent fits. He gets surgery to implant some computer chip that is meant to govern his emotions. Predictably, he goes berserk. Mayhem ensues. Mayhem ends.

Let's ignore, for the moment, the book's quaint fear of computers. What's really wrong with The Terminal Man is that it has an utterly simplistic plot populated with paper thin characters. From the lengthy bibliography at the end, I can only assume that the book was meant to be just a thought experiment on what could go wrong if we really did implant a chip to control a person's emotions. But I wanted to read a novel, not a hypothetical. No wonder I felt cheated.

The one saving grace of the book is Crichton's sometimes effective writing style, which is plain, spare, and efficient, but never awkward or forced. It's a style that he's put to good use in later, far superior books such as Sphere and Jurassic Park. But there's no trace of his later talent in The Terminal Man.

Copyright © 2005 Steven Wu