Legendary Edit

 

New Yorker - "What Michael Crichton Reveals About Big Tech and A.I."

"In 1968, a young Michael Crichton, still a student at Harvard Medical School, sent a manuscript to Robert Gottlieb, who had just taken over as editor-in-chief at Knopf. The document had a compelling title, “The Andromeda Strain,” and it featured a fast-paced plot: a group of scientists gather in an ultra-secret underground laboratory to study a deadly extraterrestrial organism, brought to Earth on a crashed space probe. Crichton later revealed that he had been inspired by a biology-textbook footnote about the possibility of organisms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. He had struggled with the manuscript for years—“every draft was awful”—but finally found inspiration from NASA. “When I finally learned that a complicated quarantine procedure really existed for the U.S. moon program,” he said in a 1969 interview, “it was a considerable psychological boost, and then I knew I could do the book.”

“The Andromeda Strain” had a strong premise, but Gottlieb, who would later become the editor of The New Yorker, thought it needed work. As he recalled in a joint 1994 interview, he told Crichton that if the young author agreed to “completely rewrite it” he would publish the book. “Somehow, it occurred to me that instead of trying to flesh out the characters further and make the novel more conventional,” Gottlieb said, “we ought to strip that stuff out completely and make it a documentary, a fictional one.” He suggested that Crichton treat the book like a magazine article, reporting on the events as if they actually happened instead of developing each character’s subjective world. “The author of a nonfiction account would not have the access to the characters’ innermost thoughts in the way you assume for fiction,” Crichton said. “So I began to take all that stuff out and make the book colder and more impersonal.”

The changes worked. The Detroit Free Press said that the thriller featured “hideously plausible suspense,” and Life called it “chillingly effective.” The book hit the New York Times best-seller list and caught the attention of Universal Pictures, which paid Crichton a quarter-million dollars (more than two million in today’s dollars) for the movie rights. Crichton ended his medical training early and became a writer and director in California. Gottlieb’s advice, which helped launch Crichton’s career, remains surprisingly relevant today. The story of a new technology needs no hero or villain to drive the action forward; the technology itself often becomes the protagonist, and we all live with the consequences."