http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2008/11/05/crichton-michael.html

I will miss him in particular. His books always entertained me, regardless of what the snooty half of my brain might think.

The mainstream writer that science fiction writers loved to hate (because he got away with making science fiction mainstream when most of them couldn't seem to manage it). His passing is a loss to everyone who has been or might have been introduced to science fictional ideas in a way they could access them.

I read Jurassic Park as a graduate student in molecular biology. I typed his dinosaur DNA sequences into the very new GenBank -- the research database for DNA sequences -- and found, along with I'm sure every other graduate student at that time, that he used a sequence that was commonly used as a cloning vector in most labs: pBR322. It was that little bit of realism that turned that book into one of my all time favorite. What was even more amazing is that that little bit of realism was written up as a note in Science magazine, a very scholarly journal. So it wasn't just me.

The take-home message for me from his work, is to make it real.

Then, later on, it seemed more that he was one who avoided the genre discrimination that goes with writing and publishing science fiction. Despite this, he used, well, what we sometimes call the "tropes" of science fiction, right to the end---technological advance, alien life forms, robots, nanotechnology---things we find speculation about elsewhere in our chosen genre, but less so on the bestseller lists where Crichton's work was found.