[efournie]

I have trouble taking Michael Crichton's stories seriously partly because of his odd obsession with theme parks.

In Westworld, androids indistinguishable from humans are used for an amusement park. In Jurassic Park, it's engineering of fossil DNA to recreate dinosaurs that is used for a theme park and in Timeline, if I recall correctly, the first idea of a billionaire who manages to develop time-travelling technology is to use it to open a medieval theme park.

Given any of those technology, I think this kind of use would lie pretty low on the list of either interesting or profitable things to do...

[atombender]

Among his 25+ fiction books plus screenplays, Crichton wrote just two books (Jurassic Park, The Lost World) and one screenplay (Westworld) about theme parks. Not sure how that's an obsession, especially he had to be talked into writing The Lost World by Steven Spielberg, who wanted source material for a sequel movie.

[darkpuma]

I don't recall enough about Timeline to recall that plot element, though I remember thinking it was a weak novel in general. But I consider Sphere and Andromeda Strain his best novels and neither are about parks.