The Great Train Robbery
by Michael Crichton · first published 1975
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5HN commenters
2011–2025first – last mentioned
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"England, 1855. The days of Queen Victoria. Once a month a train roars toward the channel laden with a fantastic shipment of gold. The train is guarded. The two safes are invulnerable...Yet Edward Pierce, a handsome, redbearded rogue, will have his way. In his plan he will choose one companion--a beautiful and dangerous woman. He will commit one of the most shocking crimes of the century."
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Has anyone read The Great Train Robbery by Crichton? It talks about all sorts of stuff like this, except in Victorian era England. Great book. http://www.amazon.com/Great-Train-Robbery-Michael-Crichton/d...
on “The lost art of pickpockets” ↗The Andromeda Strait is one of the best Crichton books/movies, along with The Eaters of the Dead (skip the movie) and The Great Train Robbery. I also have a strange fondness for Congo, but by that time Crichton had gone crazypants.
on “Movies you should own: The Andromeda Strain” ↗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,…
on “Michael Crichton, Science Studies, and the Technothriller (2015)” ↗They couldn't find a more apt demnonstration of what an LLM is and does if they tried. An LLM doesn't know more than what's in the training data. In Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery (published in 1975, about events that happened in 1855) the perpetrator, having been caught, explains to a baffled court that he was able to walk on top of a running train "because of the Bernoulli effect",…
on “GPT-5” ↗…spent it all on guitars and amplifiers. 3. When caught, the fraudster/embezzler admits it readily and cooperates with everyone... The reason every one gave was right out of a Michael Chrichton book, "The Great Train Robbery": Judge: Now, on the matter of motive, we ask you: Why did you conceive, plan and execute this dastardly and scandalous crime? Edward Pierce: I wanted the money.
on “Embezzlers Are Nice People (2017)” ↗