Tell me one thing, do you remember the first story you ever yelled at someone not to disturb you over? I do, it came one evening maybe ten to fifteen years ago, rain cutting veins across the sliding glass door in the back of our skeleton house. Dad was cooking up a masterpiece on the stove somewhere in the house and one of my siblings yelled something trying to pull me away from Alan Grant’s realization that there were Dinosaurs walking in front of him. I don’t exactly remember what I yelled back, but I did end up not eating that night and had a sore bottom to boot. I didn’t care, I was able to finish one of my first favorite books, Jurassic Park.

In the following weeks, the subsequent reading of the rest of Micheal Chrichton’s works was a tireless pursuit. From The Andromeda Strain up to Sphere, the steady stream of thrillers were breathtaking to a pre-teen story glutton and for me at the time brought the delivery of stories to a whole new level.

Micheal Crichton I bid you farewell, your stories and my memories will exist between Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October and the Odyssey, and in time making others stay up way past their bedtime.