He wasn't a denialist. In the afterword he explicitly said he believed in a warming climate, and that the climate would warm by 0.8-ish degrees (somewhat tongue-in-cheek, referencing all the confidence that is espoused by the research). What he objected to was CO2 as the driving force -- his research led him to believe that the urban heat island effect had more impact.

I enjoyed the likes of Jurassic Park, Timeline, The First Great Train Robbery hugely. Found State of Fear too much like hard work.

I think I might be similarly disappointed with Fleming if he had held a well publicised stance about equality and women's rights through his career, and then put out James Bond. Course the Bond movies were very different to the books.

You should definitely read Sphere and Prey if you haven't!

Also avoid the Timeline movie at all costs unless you are trapped on a flight.

I rather liked the timeline book, but it's juvenalia. I liked his reasoned (if entirely hypothetical) comments about the mistakes we make visualising the past as white, because we see whitewashed walls, when they were probably as polychromatic as they could be in the circumstances. And I liked his characterisation of the poor as probably predating everyone they could, not some robin-hood fantasy of nice people waiting for gifts of food. But the whole quantum foam and nasty scientist at home angle was just trashy. Geniuses like this don't rise to the top of corporations. Oh wait.. hang on...

I did like the Timeline book as well, but I read it at around 13.

It did really change a lot of images I had of the period though. One thing that sticks out in my memory was a comment on how much distance the average serf could cover in a day from walking since it was their only mode of transportation.

The movie, though, is just completely middling. It's not bad enough to be fun but not good enough to be exciting. I watched it on a plane, which adds two points to any score I would give a movie, but if I was at home I would have probably turned it off after 45 minutes.

Prey and Timeline are two of my favorite. Micro (which was finished by another author after Crichton's death) is also very good an dissimilar to Prey.

Since I like Timeline so much it made watching the movie so painful.

Scepticism not denialism.

This feels like the get-out clause from heck. He didn't care that his line of argument was destructive, and he had a lawyer-thin "but I didn't mean it" escape hatch. He also had a pulpit, mass-market reach. He turned it into a bit of a bully-pulpit.

But the effect of state of fear was small I think. Reality asserted itself: there was no grant conspiracy, we don't use vibra-belts from failed west coast gyms to try and shake a quake out of PNG islands, the cannibals retreated into the hills and eat each other when dead, not alive, carbon fibre spools are used to short out Iraqi power stations, not to make lightning target campers...