My friends and I have a drinking game: start watching Jurassic Park with the sound turned off, and any time someone says a line perfectly along with a character on screen, everyone but that person must drink. We're very picky on accuracy, and most times we don't even make it to the dinosaurs.

The point is, I love Jurassic Park. It was the Star Wars of my childhood, and while it does have inferior sequels of its own, they haven't tainted the original's legacy in nearly the same way. It's an action-adventure classic, and a truly inspiring piece of science fiction. But let's be honest: nobody should be surprised to see that Jurassic World is shaping up to be a brain-dead action flick. Jurassic Park was a brain-dead action flick, and contained the exact same stupid, anti-science message too.

Crichton was an interesting guy, in that he was a trained doctor who seemed not to like science very much. Leaving aside his early medical novels (which are his best books, and take place in hospitals he clearly knew well), they all seem to boil down to the same easy, overly simplistic moral: do science, and you'll pay big. His training in scientific language let him give this questionable thought a veneer of sophistication, but from dino-cloning to cyborg implants, it really all came down to fear.