Michael Crichton, Jurassic Prick

As if you were going to read Michael Crichton's trash anyway, here's an amusing tale from the literary world. Critic Michael Crowley dared to write about Crichton's dislike for environmentalists and intellectuals who "[hype] climate science to back their cause, as well as the influence he allegedly wields in the White House."

"In his career," Crowley wrote, "Crichton has relentlessly propagandised on behalf of one big idea: that experts - scientists, intellectuals, reporters, and bureaucrats - are spectacularly corrupt and spectacularly wrong.
"The Bush administration has put this critique into action, trampling the opinions of scientists, exorcising economists, muzzling the press, and stifling State Department wonks.
"Crichton, in other words, primed America for the Bush era," he wrote, going on to note that after the release of State of Fear in 2004, Crichton was invited by a presidential aide to meet George Bush and had expounded his anti-intellectual cant to anyone who would listen on Capitol Hill.

Well, Crichton struck back and went below the belt. In his novel Next, a rather superfluous character appears... a "Mick Crowley" who is not well-endowed and then goes on trial for raping his sister's toddler. He takes no pains to even change which college they attended (Yale). Crowley has responded in The New Republic, where he tackles the "small penis rule" and notes that "If someone offers substantive criticism of an author, and the author responds by hitting below the belt, as it were, then he's conceding that the critic has won."