Crichton, more than any other popular novelist, is a child of the age of film. He describes things cinematicalry, as though he is looking through a camera's eye. This is a familiar point of view for his audience; it permits the use of specific accepted visual and narrative conventions to be combined in interesting, acceptable, and effective ways, and it produces prose that is easily translated to the screen.

The most important element in Crichton's style is a realistic tone, a sense that the events being portrayed actually happened and that the author is merely reporting what took place. "I found," he has said, "you could make something more believable if you pretended not that it might happen or was happening, but that it had happened." Technological details and factual correctness, therefore, assume a paramount position in his approach to his material. As a result, he creates novels...