A suitable case for treatment

He thrives on anxiety. Now he's making a killing out of hospitals. Hele n Birch dissects Michael Crichton

What if a killer virus came to Earth from outer space? What if a theme-park Wild West villain went gun-crazy? What if the rich paid doctors to steal the organs of healthy patients to give them everlasting life? What if the Japanese took over the U S economy? What if a mad scientist found a way to clone dinosaurs and the creatures broke loose? What if women started sexually harrassing men and getting away with it? What if doctor, novelist, screenwriter, director, producer and multi-millionaire Mich ael Crichton took over the studios and the networks and swamped us with his fantasies 24 hours a day?

Scenarios like these, taken, respectively, from The Andromeda Strain (1969), Westworld (1973), Coma (1978), Rising Sun (1992), Jurassic Park (1991) and Disclosure (1993), have made Michael Crichton the most successful anxiety merchant of all time. In thepast two years alone his nightmares of the chaotic forces threatening civilisation - Rising Sun, Jurassic Park and Disclosure - have dominated bestseller lists and dinner party conversations in Britain and the US while netting him more than $6m in film rights. Now he's turned his attention to television, borrowed the fast-cut, jumbled storylines of NYPD Blue, grafted them on to a staple genre, the medical drama, got Spielberg to direct and made one of the top five most successful prime-time TV series in America. Whether Emergency Room (ER) will make the grade here remains to be seen, but with Casualty slipping down the ratings as NYPD Blue rides high, it seems he can't fail.

No doubt about it, Crichton is a phenomenon. After qualifying as a doctor and scribbling thrillers and science fiction to pay the bills, in 1969 he made debts a distant memory with the ultimate space age scare story, The Andromeda Strain, which was filmed in 1971. The novel, in which a group of bio-physicists must save mankind from an alien virus, tapped into the paranoid subtext of the "boldly go where no man has gone before" era; if we want to go moonwalking and star-trekking, Crichton seemed to say, we'd better watch where we tread. With the acclaim came credit for inventing a new genre - the techno thriller.

But Crichton was playing a double game. He gave us dystopian sci-fi, the ultimate fear of an unknowable future, while reassuring us with jargon-laden dialogue and pages of text typeset as computer printouts that science - which would increasingly shape your future and mine - could be readily understood.

He repeats the trick in Jurassic Park and again in ER, in which doctors and nurses bark obscure medical instructions at each other as they rush breathlessly, but without a hair out of place, from treatment room to operating theatre. Even in these days ofe-mail and the Internet there's nothing like judiciously placed terminology and hieroglyphics to make most of us feel humbled, as Len Deighton (to whom Crichton pays tribute) and Ed McBain (to whom he does not) had discovered several years before. Crichton impresses us with his technical know-how, authenticates it with little lectures, flatters us that we might share it, then scares the hell out of us with his vision of what could be done with it and how little we actually do know.

Polemics, paranoia and plausibility. Nature, culture and science made textbook simple, with a controversial tailspin to give it topicality. It's a formula that has rarely failed him and one that he has put to a variety of uses. Rising Sun: sermons from John Connor on the mysterious, inscrutable ways of the Japanese, while in real life debate raged about Crichton's representation of the Japanese as greedy, conniving imperialists bent on destroying the US economy at a time when the Japanese had appropriated vast tracts of its industry; Disclosure: a mouthpiece female lawyer telling us everything we needed to know (and quite a lot we didn't) on sexual harrasment, while feminists went crazy about its claims to realism just as the date rape controversy reached fever pitch. And now he weighs in with ER, blinding us with jargon while we watch harried, underpaid doctors taking hair-raising risks at a time when concern among the American public about the state of the nation's health services has never been greater.

Crichton. Rhymes with frighten. That's one clue to his success. He knows that we feel less able to control our lives, more and more distant from the seats of power. And he's the nerd (the 6ft 9in nerd with steel-framed glasses) who can hack into what's going on. A nerd with a staggering grasp of technology who seems to have developed an uncanny ability to anticipate our worst fears and developed the commercial clout to stun us with them at just the right moment. Crichton excels at making us feel like weare part of the media loop his success has made him instrumental in creating. If Rising Sun and Disclosure had been penned by less well connected mortals, would they have had quite the hype? How many people had heard of Thomas Harris before Jonathan Demme, Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster went ambulance-chasing after the Serial Killer?

Crichton's vision of hell on earth is at once opportunistic and mythical, or cliched, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it's a commercially fearsome combination. Both Coma (his second outing as director, based on the novel by Robin Cook) and Jurassic Park take their blueprint from Frankenstein - the mad scientist creating monsters. In Disclosure, the monster is one created by feminism, the woman who defies nature, who wants power and money and sex and doesn't care how she gets it. His books and films abound with metaphors of nature twisted out of shape - ironic for a writer who so singularly fails to breathe life into his own characters.

What Crichton excels at is ideas, situations, futuristic interrogatives. What he can't do is make us care about them. Because of this, he'll never be more than a faddish, pulpy writer, who churns out plodding, flatly written books. But it may also be what has made him such a formidable cultural figure. His schematism, the very lack of empathy his characters inspire, make his books curiously open-ended; empty vessels into which we can pour our own prejudices. Hey, we can all have an opinion about that! Is Crichton depicting an idea or courting it? Is he a conservative, recoiling against technological advances, or a democrat, warning us that ultimate power resides in too few hands? Is Rising Sun, for example, really a racist tract reflecting American paranoia about its trade war with Japan, or is it a critique of it? His even-handedness on most subjects makes his fictions the perfect mirror of the American liberal dream. Everyone has their say, and we listen; everyone can have a piece of the cake, but, God forbid, don't try to change the recipe.

But there's one thing that obviously does scare this 6ft 9in nerd. Women. As his work moves further from science fiction and deeper into naturalism, he's found a theme that combines his fascination with nature, culture and science, and about which he canbe unashamedly didactic. A female dinosaur colony that finds a way to breed without males and that turns predator on its (male) captors. A predatory female executive who undergoes plastic surgery to advance her career, who represents a future in which aman won't dare be alone with a woman for fear of a legal suit. A sermon disguised as a novel. And a film which snuffs drama and even its Fatal Attraction-style bloodlust for the solemnity of its message. It's a long way from the defiant, bolshy female protagonist of Coma, but then that was the Seventies, when a recipe was something most women cooked up for their menfolk.

There's an image at the end of Jurassic Park, where the female raptors line up on the shore of the island, waiting to migrate. Crichton is currently working on a sequel. What if they escaped and destroyed civilisation as we know it? Not a hope. If there's one thing we can be sure of, it's that Crichton has found his cause and no that matter how mad the scientist, or how hungry the females, the natural order will prevail, and men will bring order and even-handedness back to the world.

n ER starts tonight 9pm, C4