Works by
Michael Crichton
(AKA Jeffrey Hudson, John Michael Crichton, John Lange, Michael Douglas)
(Writer)
[October 23, 1942 – November 4, 2008]

Writing as Jeffrey Hudson

• A Case of Need (1968) -- Winner 1969 Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award, Best Novel
  From the bestselling author of Jurassic Park and Rising Sun, this national bestseller combines breathtaking suspense with a penetrating examination of America's medical establishment. When a woman bleeds to death on the operating table, her physician is accused of murder--and another physician searches for the horrible truth.

Writing as John Lange

• Binary (1972)

• Drug of Choice (1970)
  One of Crichton's most obscure novels written under this pseudonym.

• Grave Descend (1970)
  Diver James McGregor is used to being hired to explore sunken ships. But there's something strange about the wreck of the luxury yacht Grave Descend. No one who was aboard tells quite the same story about what happened. Then there's the matter of the mysterious cargo they were carrying...
  
  In one of the most beautiful places on Earth, a sinister plot is about to unfold. And if McGregor's not careful, he may find himself in over his head.
  
  A stunning thriller by the author of Binary, Zero Cool, and The Venom Business.

• The Venom Business (1969)

• Zero Cool (1969)
  The heat is on.

• Easy Go (1968)

• Scratch One (1967)
  An innocent tourist ... trapped in a cruel game between a private death-squad and the CIA!

• Odds On (1966)

Writing as Michael Crichton

Fiction

• Technothriller (In Progress, future posthumous release)

• Pirate Latitudes (November 24, 2009 release, posthumous)
  From one of the best-loved authors of all time comes an irresistible adventure of swashbuckling pirates in the New World, a classic story of treasure and betrayal.
  
  The Caribbean, 1665. A remote colony of the English Crown, the island of Jamaica holds out against the vast supremacy of the Spanish empire. Port Royal, its capital, is a cutthroat town of taverns, grog shops, and bawdy houses.
  
  In this steamy climate there's a living to be made, a living that can end swiftly by disease—or by dagger. For Captain Charles Hunter, gold in Spanish hands is gold for the taking, and the law of the land rests with those ruthless enough to make it.
  
  Word in port is that the galleon El Trinidad, fresh from New Spain, is awaiting repairs in a nearby harbor. Heavily fortified, the impregnable harbor is guarded by the bloodthirsty Cazalla, a favorite commander of the Spanish king himself. With backing from a powerful ally, Hunter assembles a crew of ruffians to infiltrate the enemy outpost and commandeer El Trinidad, along with its fortune in Spanish gold. The raid is as perilous as the bloodiest tales of island legend, and Hunter will lose more than one man before he even sets foot on foreign shores, where dense jungle and the firepower of Spanish infantry stand between him and the treasure. . .
  
  Pirate Latitudes is Michael Crichton at his best: a rollicking adventure tale pulsing with relentless action, crackling atmosphere, and heart-pounding suspense.

• Next (2006)
  Is a loved one missing some body parts? Are blondes becoming extinct? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species? Humans and chimpanzees differ in only 400 genes; is that why a chimp fetus resembles a human being? And should that worry us? There's a new genetic cure for drug addiction—is it worse than the disease?
  
  We live in a time of momentous scientific leaps, a time when it's possible to sell our eggs and sperm online for thousands of dollars and to test our spouses for genetic maladies.
  
  We live in a time when one fifth of all our genes are owned by someone else, and an unsuspecting person and his family can be pursued cross-country because they happen to have certain valuable genes within their chromosomes . . .
  
  Devilishly clever, Next blends fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where nothing is what it seems and a set of new possibilities can open at every turn.
  
  Next challenges our sense of reality and notions of morality. Balancing the comic and the bizarre with the genuinely frightening and disturbing, Next shatters our assumptions and reveals shocking new choices where we least expect.
  
  The future is closer than you think.

• State of Fear (2004)
  In Tokyo, in Los Angeles, in Antarctica, in the Solomon Islands . . . an intelligence agent races to put all the pieces together to prevent a global catastrophe.

• Prey: A Novel (2002)
  In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles—micro-robots—has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive.
  
  It has been programmed as a predator. It is evolving swiftly, becoming more deadly with each passing hour.
  
  Every attempt to destroy it has failed.
  
  And we are the prey.

• Timeline (1999)
  In an Arizona desert a man wanders in a daze, speaking words that make no sense. Within twenty-four hours he is dead, his body swiftly cremated by his only known associates. Halfway around the world archaeologists make a shocking discovery at a medieval site. Suddenly they are swept off to the headquarters of a secretive multinational corporation that has developed an astounding technology. Now this group is about to get a chance not to study the past but to enter it. And with history opened to the present, the dead awakened to the living, these men and women will soon find themselves fighting for their very survival–six hundred years ago . . .

• Airframe (1996)
  Three passengers are dead. Fifty-six are injured. The interior cabin virtually destroyed. But the pilot manages to land the plane. . . .
  
  At a moment when the issue of safety and death in the skies is paramount in the public mind, a lethal midair disaster aboard a commercial twin-jet airliner bound from Hong Kong to Denver triggers a pressured and frantic investigation.
  
  Airframe is nonstop reading: the extraordinary mixture of super suspense and authentic information on a subject of compelling interest that has been a Crichton landmark since The Andromeda Strain.

• The Lost World (1995)

• Disclosure (1994)
  Tom Sanders is an up-and-coming executive at the computer firm DigiCom. When his new boss turns out to be a woman who is both his former lover and a business rival, Sanders determines to be professional. But after a closed-door meeting, the woman accuses him of sexual harassment. It's her word against his, and suddenly Sanders finds himself caught in a nightmarish web of deceit in which he is branded as the villian. As he scrambles to save his career and his reputation, Sanders uncovers an electronic trail into DigiCom's secrets . . . and the cynical scheme devised to bring him down.

• Rising Sun (1992)
  During the grand opening celebration of the new American headquarters of an immense Japanese conglomerate, the dead body of a beautiful woman is found. The investigation begins, and immediately becomes a headlong chase through a twisting maze of industrial intrigue and a violent business battle that takes no prisoners.

• Jurassic Park (1990)
  An astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA has been discovered. Creatures once extinct now roam Jurassic Park, soon-to-be opened as a theme park. Until something goes wrong...and science proves a dangerous toy....

• Sphere (1987)
  In the middle of the South Pacific, 1,000 feet below the surface, a huge spaceship is discovered resting on the ocean floor. It is a craft of phenomenal dimensions, it seems undamaged by its fall from the sky, and it appears to be at least three hundred years old. Rushed to the scene is a group of American scientists who investigate this astonishing discovery. What they find defies imaginations and mocks their attempts at logical explanation.

• Congo (1980)
  Deep in the African rain forest, near the legendary ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, an expedition of eight American geologists are mysteriously and brutally killed in a matter of minutes.
  
  Ten thousand miles away, Karen Ross, the Congo Project Supervisor, watches a gruesome video transmission of the aftermath: a camp destroyed, tents crushed and torn, equipment scattered in the mud alongside dead bodies—all motionless except for one moving image—a grainy, dark, man-shaped blur.
  
  In San Francisco, primatologist Peter Elliot works with Amy, a gorilla with an extraordinary vocabulary of 620 "signs," the most ever learned by a primate, and she likes to finger paint. But recently her behavior has been erratic and her drawings match, with stunning accuracy, the brittle pages of a Portuguese print dating back to 1642 . . . a drawing of an ancient lost city. A new expedition—along with Amy—is sent into the Congo, where they enter a secret world, and the only way out may be through a horrifying death . . .

• Eaters Of The Dead (1976)
  The year is A.D. 922. A refined Arab courtier, representative of the powerful Caliph of Baghdad, encounters a party of Viking warriors who are journeying to the barbaric North. He is appalled by their Viking customs—the wanton sexuality of their pale, angular women, their disregard for cleanliness . . . their cold-blooded human sacrifices. But it is not until they reach the depths of the Northland that the courtier learns the horrifying and inescapable truth: He has been enlisted by these savage, inscrutable warriors to help combat a terror that plagues them—a monstrosity that emerges under cover of night to slaughter the Vikings and devour their flesh . . .

• The Great Train Robbery (1975)
  In teeming Victorian London, where lavish wealth and appalling poverty live side by side, Edward Pierce charms the most prominent of the well-to-do as he cunningly orchestrates the crime of the century. Who would suspect that a gentleman of breeding could mastermind the daring theft of a fortune in gold? Who could predict the consequences of making the extraordinary robbery aboard the pride of England's industrial era, the mighty steam locomotive? Based on fact, as lively as legend, and studded with all the suspense and style of a modern fiction master, here is a classic caper novel set a decade before the age of dynamite--yet nonetheless explosive....

• The Terminal Man (1972)
  Harry Benson is prone to violent, uncontrollable seizures and is under police guard after attacking two people. Dr. Roger McPherson, head of the prestigious Neuropsychiatric Research Unit at University Hospital in Los Angeles, is convinced he can cure Benson through a procedure called Stage Three. During this highly specialized experimental surgery, electrodes will be placed in the patient's brain, sending monitored, soothing pulses to its pleasure canyons. But though the operation is a success, there is an unforeseen development. Benson learns how to control the pulses and is increasing their frequency. He escapes—a homicidal maniac loose in the city—and nothing will stop his murderous rampages or impede his deadly agenda . . .

• The Andromeda Strain (1969)
  The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere.
  
  Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the outer fringes of space to "collect organisms and dust for study." One of them falls to earth, landing in a desolate area of Arizona.
  
  Twelve miles from the landing site, in the town of Piedmont, a shocking discovery is made: the streets are littered with the dead bodies of the town's inhabitants, as if they dropped dead in their tracks.
  
  The terror has begun . . .

Non-fiction

• Travels (1988)
  Fueled by a powerful curiosity--and by a need to see and feel and hear, firsthand and close-up--Michael Crichton's travels have carried him into worlds diverse and compelling. This is a record of those travels--an exhilarating quest across the familiar and exotic frontiers of the outer world, a determined odyssey into the unfathomable, spiritual depths of the inner world. It is an adventure of risk and rejuvenation, terror and wonder, as exciting as Michael Crichton's many masterful and widely heralded works of fiction.

• Electronic Life: Or How We Think About Computers (1983)

• Jasper Johns (1977)
  Jasper Johns's recent pieces, with their puns, optical illusions and embedded images have attracted considerable critical attention. Crichton, who knows Johns and has collected his work for over 20 years, here offers intimate glimpses of the artist's potent and seemingly contradictory aspects.

• Five Patients (1970)
  Michael Crichton takes a look at venerable Massachusetts General, giving firsthand accounts of five true and poignant cases which reveal the near-miraculous proficiency--and sometimes alarming inefficiency--of a major city hospital. A dramatic, behind-the-scenes tale from the author of Sphere.

• Dealing: or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1970) with Douglas Crichton (Michael's brother)
  A Harvard graduate transports a load of marijuana from Boston to Berkeley, California.

See also:

• The Science of Michael Crichton: An Unauthorized Exploration into the Real Science behind the Fictional Worlds of Michael Crichton (2008), Kevin R. Grazier, ed.

• Biography - Michael Crichton (2007)
  An article from: Contemporary Authors Online by Gale Reference Team, Digital - HTML

• Readings on Michael Crichton (2004), Robert Hayhurst, ed.

• Michael Crichton (2002) by Nathan Aaseng

• Michael Crichton: A Critical Companion (1996) by Elizabeth A. Trembley (1996)