Feminist and decolonial historians of science have learned to ask “who gets to be a reliable knower of technical knowledge?” In this paper, I ask who gets to be a reliable knower and practitioner of science studies. I focus on the fiction of Michael Crichton who came of age as undergraduate and medical student at Harvard in the late 1960s. Today, his name is a metonym for the literary genre known as the “techno-thriller.” What is less often recognized is his early career as a medical reformer and sustained engagement with the history and sociology of science. In our present age of “alternative facts,” there is much to be gained by recognizing Crichton himself as an apt pupil of our own discipline—especially for those of us who do not identify with the vision of science his work popularizes. I take Crichton’s published fiction and nonfiction as my archive, including also the way his work has been engaged by historians of science. In doing so, I am able to bring new considerations to the history of the “Science Wars,” and its ramifying legacies in the present. Crichton, I conclude, demonstrates how science studies’ critique of facticity has been ironically repurposed to defend an ideal of science without politics.
