I got completely turned off to Crichton after his book Airframe, which was touted as the "shocking truth about what airframers don't know about metal fatigue" Since I was an airframe maker, and we had known about (and designed around) airframe fatigue issues since before Crichton first put pen to paper, being lectured to by a no-better-than-second-rate novelist was highly offensive. Maybe I should have lectured him about plot.