Michael Crichton, one of my favorite authors during my teenage years whose work I examined in my college thesis, has passed away after a private battle with cancer.

I wrote part of my thesis on the book Eaters of the Dead, which was inspired by the real-life historical account of an Arab nobleman, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who encountered a tribe of Vikings in the tenth century. Crichton took ibn Fadlan’s account and expanded it into a fictional story intended to serve as a possible historical basis for the events of the epic poem Beowulf.

At one point, as I paged through a very old book containing one of the few translations of ibn Fadlan’s historical account, I realized that is was quite likely I was touching the very same pages Crichton had when he’d first read the story as an undergraduate.

While I may not have agreed with all of Crichton’s ideas (particularly in regards to environmental issues), I remain an ardent fan of many of his novels, including Eaters of the Dead, The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, The Lost World (which contains one of the intriguing discussions of the perils of the Internet I’ve ever read) and Sphere. He will be missed.