Episode Details

Jesse, Paul Weimer, and Cora Buhlert talk about Binary by Michael Crichton

Talked about on today’s show:
1972, John Lange, hardcovers vs. paperback originals, a slim volume, 4 hours 26 minutes, the kind of paperback novel that made Jesse love novels, modern novel form is very big, as Michael Crichton’s career went on his books got bigger and bigger, market concerns, the price of paper, trilogies, sequels, the 70s, 50s, 60s, between 5 and 3 hours, Drug Of Choice, the Hard Case Crime reprints, this book really cooked, 19th century, 20th century, 21st century, beat beat beat beat and we’re done, a technothriller, a ticking time bomb, Tom Clancy, to pad it out, technical details, operation manuals for submarines, obvious mistakes, technobabble, a teaser for another book, 220 pages, The Hunt For Red October, the most iconic of technothrillers, German teachers in high school, a hardcore communist who loved The Hunt For Red October, leftist radicals, Stephen King-shaming, a terrible person, Amercian far-right conservative, published by Mabel Institute Press, not aimed to be a popular success, not suited to be a popular success, this little book from this naval press, the Harpoon board game, computer game strategy, Harpoon the novel, very much interested in the power of the Soviet Union, high-tech tech, appreciate the Soviet space program, similarly: Dune, famously not published in a mainstream press, Chilton, car repair manuals, a fixup, Gideon Marcus, nobody wanted to do Dune, the format, a 70s crime book, Donald E. Westlake, the Westlake in here, 1957, Russian translators, world communism, Russia and China, Graves worked for two years in the Army, the state department, 1959, on Senator Westlake’s staff, tuckerized, the movie, Crichton didn’t write the script, his first film (a TV movie), the dialogue is straight out of the book, a train in the book a truck in the film, for cost reasons, Ben Gazara isn’t the man of action, Steve Graves, John Wright, John Gray, John Lange, in a novel you can handle that, it could be confusing, doing that on purpose, right in the title, they are mirrors to each other, misunderstanding, diluting the binary aspect, adaptations are interpretations, the entirety of the original plot, being forced reconcile the entire thing, a ticking clock, minus 16 hours, plus 16 hours, a very Michael Crichton move, a great film director as well as a great writer, the ex-travel agency scene, Phelps and the John, one of those guys gets a name: Stark, Crichton knows who his daddy is, Peter Graves, Phelps, Mission: Impossible, a visual reader, 1966, the reboot in the 1980s, the Tom Cruise movies, a team thing, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Star Trek, tech genius, almost no descriptions, how stripped down this is, very simple, seeing the end sequence set piece, a more modern take on this, Speed (1994), 3 (or 4) action sequences, taking the room from outside, the counter-agent, matter-of-factly, all a sham (sort of), not be blown up, not be gassed, the container is combustible, very simple and slick, Crichton’s writing is flawless, the psychological stuff, I’ve got this idea of a binary relationship, the bomb, the characters, the antidote, so many little things, two canisters, 75 and 76,