At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

It’s difficult to talk about Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, though not because the novel’s plot and characters are especially complex. They aren’t.

Alan Grant is a paleontologist who is asked to vet a new theme park that has brought dinosaurs back to life. The dinosaurs escape, and Grant, human resourcefulness, and state of the art technology are pitted against the raw power of Jurassic era biology. It’s a simple premise, though it is also undeniably compelling.



Instead, Jurassic Park is difficult to talk about b... Read More

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate speculative elements into their fiction. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

When Michael Crichton wrote The Andromeda Strain, he was not just writing a mediocre novel about extra-terrestrial bacteria. He was founding a (sub) genre of SFF that found a massive mainstream audience.

The techno-thriller has all of the pacing and suspense that we might expect of a John Grisham novel, but it also contains the encyclopedic detail that readers expect to find in “hard science fiction.”

To be honest, I’ve always been skeptical of the “techno-thriller” as a genre. It feels like a marketing gimmick to get skeptics to read SFF. However, while I may be skeptical of “techno-thrillers” as a category of fiction, that hasn’t stopped me from enjoyin... Read More

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Michael Crichton’s Congo (1980) is an adventure story that should recall Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) and Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885).



However, although the formula has been used so many times as to become almost archetypal, the little details have been updated for a contemporary audience. In place of dinosaurs, Crichton offers an unusual breed of gorilla that threatens our band of scientists, and he trades in mines and lost explorers for flawed diamonds that can be used for cutting-edge c... Read More

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

In Sphere, the follow up to Congo, Michael Crichton asks the question: how do you top a techno-thriller that pits a team of parachuting scientists against extremely intelligent apes that protect a remote area of jungle in Congo?

Impossible, right?

Perhaps not. Sphere begins with a premise that, by now, most Crichton fans will recognize very easily. Norman Johnson is a scientist, this time a psychologist, who has done a bit of work for a major organization in the past, this time the United States government. He receives a surprise phone call asking him to pack ... Read More

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

In his introduction to Micro, Michael Crichton explains that children today are “cut off from the experience of nature, and from play in the natural world.” Crichton’s purpose, it would seem, is to take the seemingly mundane world and reveal the wonderful details that don’t make it onto Wikipedia and computer models. Crichton had reportedly finished one third of Micro when he passed away, and the novel has since been finished by Richard Preston.

Peter Jansen and his friends were just regular Cambridge students until Nanigen Mic... Read More