The high spirits I felt at the election of Barack Obama were tempered upon hearing of the death of Michael Crichton, one of my all-time favorite authors.

Though Crichton is best known for Jurassic Park and the television show ER, I personally enjoyed Travels, his nonfiction memoirs, more than any of his fiction. What a life he led. The best chapter was “The Girl Who Seduced Everybody”, which left me laughing out loud, something none of his novels—as good as they were— ever did.

There are three things about Crichton’s writings that have always fascinated me:

First, no one researched their subject matter more thoroughly than Crichton. In fact, he was one of the few novelists whose novels routinely included academic-style research citations on the back pages. After reading a Crichton novel you feel like an expert on the subject. It’s interesting that such material would be so popular.

Second, despite the fact that nearly all of his novels had a storyline that was firmly science fiction, Crichton never suffered the professional misfortune of being labeled a science fiction author. The commercial success of his books meant they were considered “suspense thrillers that contained science fiction elements.” I’ve always found that mildly preposterous given his storylines included aliens (Sphere), time travel (Timeline), sentient robots (Prey), talking apes who live in ancient lost cities (Congo) and, most famous of all, genetically engineered dinosaurs (Jurassic Park). He obviously had a smart agent.

Some critics have argued that because so many of Crichton’s early books were made into movies, his later works became more like film scripts than novels. I have to say I mostly agree with this criticism, especially in the case of Timeline (which I loved anyway). More precisely my opinion is that many of his later works were undeniably written in a manner that made them amenable to screen adaptations. But hey, when you sell the movie rights to your books before you even write them (as Crichton did with every book after Jurassic Park), that tends to happen. The same criticism can be made of Tom Clancy and John Grisham.

Crichton, a medical doctor with multiple Harvard degrees, was enormously intelligent. Though he generally didn’t base characters on himself, all of his books except Disclosure featured a character that was extraordinarily knowledgeable. And that brings me to the third thing I admire about Crichton: Unlike other New York Times chart-toppers, he wrote novels for the thinking person.

His talent will be missed.

First the Easy Rawlins Series ends, now Michael Crichton is gone. The life of my mind has two gaping voids.