MEET MISTER WIZARD

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With typical scientific precision, Crichton tries to get to the bottom of this literary obsession with the inner lives of characters. "I've become very interested in where this inner life came from--as defined by Henry James, I guess. You don't see it at the very beginning. You don't see it in Defoe or Fielding. Was it Jane Austen? George Eliot? J.B.S. Haldane [the English scientist and writer] concluded after some period of introspection he didn't know why he did anything. I'm a lot more interested in religion and spirituality, interests you share with age, and"--he laughs--"the inevitable interest in the future. I don't really know why I am the way I am. To me the value of introspection is to have some insight into your ongoing behavior. My goal is to see myself in the room-looking from a corner."

All right, let's take a look from this corner. The tallest overachiever outside the N.B.A. was born in Chicago, the oldest of four children. His father was a journalist who saw there was more money to be made in advertising and adjusted his career forthrightly, moving his family to Roslyn, New York. His mother once characterized her strategy for rearing Michael as, "I just get out of his way." He wrote a travel story for the New York Times at age 14 and went to Harvard in 1960 intending to be a writer. But the English department rubbed a blister on his soul (it was "not the place for an aspiring writer," he said; "it was the place for an aspiring English professor"), so he switched to anthropology, graduated summa cum laude and, after a yearlong fellowship overseas at Cambridge University, returned to Harvard Medical School. He plowed through with plenty of pocket money, earned by writing a shelf full of novels before he left college. Eight were paperback adventure novels written under the name John Lange, one was an Edgar Award-winning medical-detective paperback under the name Jeffrey Hudson, and another was the hardcover breakthrough under his own name, The Andromeda Strain, which was published as he worked out a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He says he produced 10,000 words a day during those years, and no one who knows his work habits disputes it.

Medicine, he discovered, was too unimaginative to hold him. "To quit medicine to become a writer," he once wrote, "struck most people like quitting the Supreme Court to become a bail bondsman." Yet the medical-school years gave him "a fund of experience and a sense of pace. Things happen fast. I still think it's true that any sense of narrative pacing on my part comes out of the emergency room." Indeed, in 1974 he wrote a movie script about his emergency-room experiences but got no takers in Hollywood. Years later, Steven Spielberg took a shine to it, and eventually shepherded it onto TV. The result was ER, the biggest hit of the 1994-95 season and, with 30 million viewers, now the most popular show on television.