Walled gardens

I recently picked up the March / April issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. I really need to resubscribe to it: this was the magazine that I tore through when I was discovering science fiction, and some of those stories still really resonate with me. This one has a killer lineup of authors: Paul McAuley, Ray Nayler, Sam J. Miller, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Greg Egan, and more.

I just started reading it, but what caught my eye in this issue after that TOC was James Patrick Kelley's column, in which he talked a bit about Michael Crichton, which opened with "I wonder why Michael Crichton never got proper credit for his influence on science fiction. I suppose one reason is that, despite his impact on our genre, he was an outsider – never one of our community... Crichton probably did more than any ingle member of SFWA to thrust science fiction into the popular culture of the last century."