However constructive the criticism, it's always possible the writer will use the pages of his next book to strike back . . . and in far less subtle strains of the small-penis variety.

This, after all, seems to have been the experience of Michael Crowley, a senior editor at the weekly political magazine The New Republic, who last week claimed he had become the victim of a startlingly puerile "literary hit-and-run" in the pages of Crichton's newest tome, simply called Next.

Crowley's crime was to pen an article for his magazine in March highlighting Crichton's well-known disdain for anti-global warming activists, whom he accuses of hyping climate science to back their cause, as well as the influence he allegedly wields in Washington and the Bush White House.

"In his career, " Crowley wrote then, "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 presidential aide Karl Rove to meet with George Bush and had expounded his antiintellectual cant to anyone who would listen on Capitol Hill.

In Next, Crichton has written a 431-page novel about genetic engineering run amok, filling his pages with modified apes chattering in German and parrots capable of holding conversations. But on page 227, the author strays into paragraphs seemingly included purely for the purpose of retaliation.

He introduces a new figure who is apparently completely superfluous to the wider plot, curiously called Mick Crowley. This Crowley is not depicted in a flattering light. His manhood is unusually small and it has been places it should not have been. The fictional Crowley is a Yale-educated political writer . . .

which describes the real Crowley too.

Crowley's doppelganger in the book is on trial for raping his sister's two-year-old son after "experiencing an overwhelming urge to have anal sex" with him. His attempts to plead innocence are thwarted by the findings of a subsequent hospital examination which found that "Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum".

Elsewhere in the passages, Crichton refers to his Crowley as a spoiled heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, a "dickhead", a "weasel" as well as "that political reporter who likes little boys".

The real Crowley has responded by way of a riposte that will be in the 25 December issue of The New Republic and is already on its website under a link titled 'Michael Crichton, Jurassic Prick'. In it he suggests that the author has tried to employ a doctrine called "the smallpenis rule", whereby it's safe to attack someone by way of a proxy literary figure who is under-endowed, on the grounds that no one will ever publicly acknowledge that a guy in a book is actually them if they have miniature equipment.

But Crowley concludes he is actually "strangely flattered" by the whole episode. "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."