Michael Crichton

Crichton finished medical school and never used the degree on a patient. He took an MD from Harvard in 1969, was already publishing novels under a pseudonym while training, and then left medicine entirely for a career that ran from 1968 to his death in 2008 and sold more than 200 million books.

The formula was his own and nobody has really matched it. Take a technology that exists, extrapolate it one step past where it currently sits, staff the result with competent professionals rather than heroes, then show the system failing in a way that is nobody's fault and everybody's. Jurassic Park is the famous one. The Andromeda Strain, Congo, Sphere, Timeline, Prey and Next run the same engine on different hardware: genetics, deep-sea isolation, nanotech, biotech. He wrote the science with enough surface plausibility that arguing about the details became part of the experience, and he built the books like machines, which is why they film so well.

He also directed. Westworld in 1973, then Coma, The First Great Train Robbery, Looker and Runaway, films sharing his preoccupations on considerably less money than the adaptations of his novels later commanded. He created ER, the most convincing hospital on television. His awards shelf holds an Emmy, a Hugo and a technical Academy Award.

The late books turned polemical, State of Fear most conspicuously, and readers still argue about that period. The middle stretch is where the craft is unarguable.