A few admissions right off the bat. I am NOT a fan of
Michael Crichton. I loved the movie
Jurassic Park, because I was a complete nut about dinosaurs when I was maybe 6, but I tried to read the novel and didn't get very far. "Techno-thrillers," what Crichton was famous for, are not really my thing, although on Zanne's recommendation I did (mostly) read Greg Bear's
Darwin's Radio and was completely sucked in. So when
Pirate Latitudes was discovered on Crichton's hard drive and published posthumously in 2009, it for me was not something to pick up because it was Crichton: I picked it up because it was a massively publicized pirate novel I felt I should give a chance. I finally got around to reading it, and I have to say I enjoyed it. I have a tendency whenever I read fiction to translate it into a movie in my brain. I did it when I read Powers'
On Stranger Tides, although I knew that by the time it became a
Pirates of the Caribbean movie probably little would remain of the source. That turned out to be true. With
Pirate Latitudes, however, the idea of thinking about it as a film was completely obvious: Crichton's ubiquitous adapter, Hollywood behemoth
Steven Spielberg, had the rights almost as soon as the book was in existence. So, here's the query: Will it work, and how?
