The Andromeda Strain - Michael Crichton

One of the most disturbing factors of Michael Crichton’s fiction, as Life Magazine points out, is that it is so close to being fact. This book, one of his first in 1967, illustrates the beginnings of his generic characteristic: to create sublime, highly readable thrillers from broadly scientific subject matter. He’s done it many times since: chaos theory was the ethos behind Jurassic Park, and quantum mechanics the basis for his most ...
...we are fascinated by the science and drama of medicine. In The Andromeda Strain, it’s the ever-popular question: when (not “if”) mankind discovers extraterrestrial life, what form will it take?

The novel opens as an official government document, immediately letting the reader in on what appears to be a closely guarded secret: the matter of the five days following the crash-landing of an American satellite orbiting ... more

One of the most disturbing factors of Michael Crichton’s fiction, as Life Magazine points out, is that it is so close to being fact. This book, one of his first in 1967, illustrates the beginnings of his generic characteristic: to create sublime, highly readable thrillers from broadly scientific subject matter. He’s done it many times since: chaos theory was the ethos behind Jurassic Park, and quantum mechanics the basis for his most recent Timeline. His television series, ER, is so popular because we are fascinated by the science and drama of medicine. In The Andromeda Strain, it’s the ever-popular question: when (not “if”) mankind discovers extraterrestrial life, what form will it take?

The novel opens as an official government document, immediately letting the reader in on what appears to be a closely guarded secret: the matter of the five days following the crash-landing of an American satellite orbiting the earth, collecting samples of the stratosphere. The opening chapter describes a tiny town in the wilderness of Arizona, near where the satellite has crashed to earth.

The town is deserted, save the bodies of the inhabitants, strewn over the ground, their faces frozen in astonishment, their hands clasping their chests. Other members of the town have died in even more disturbing ways: an elderly man has put a bullet through his head, with no sign of any mess, simply a clean, dry hole in his skull. Another man lies crouched face-down in a bath full of water, having held himself beneath the water and drowned. And an elderly woman has doused herself in petrol and set herself alight.

The task before the five Nobel prize-winning scientists called in to determine the cause of the decimation is, for them and for the reader, by turns thrilling and terrifying. Crichton weaves a web of worry, constantly reminding his reader that the story is retrospective: the events described have taken place already. In doing so he comments in his narration upon the actions of the scientists, informing the reader of their mistakes as they make them; but though we are told that a character has made a grave error, we are kept in the dark as to why, and what the consequences will be.

Crichton is the master of scientific explanation. In a manner similar to Arthur C. Clarke or even Richard Feynman, he is able to make the most complex scientific processes and theorems understandable even to an idiot arts student such as myself. It is this that makes his novels so addictive: like being in a science lecture that one is fascinated by, the reader sits absorbing information, sponging up Crichton’s teaching with gusto. You feel you are constantly learning from him, a feeling made all the more intense by the meticulous attention to detail: computer printouts, maps and diagrams are displayed on the page as they would appear in real life, making the novel feel more of a scientific document than a thriller. Crichton makes you believe his stories through the application of his astonishing scientific knowledge: since, for most of us, we have no idea whether he is right or not, we accept that he must be.

It might sound, from the above, as though Crichton’s books are turgid scientific journals with too much information to be readable. I can assure you that should you pick up any of his novels and begin to read it, you will find it extremely difficult to do anything else but read until you have finished. He truly is a master storyteller, a great teacher, and one of the finest novelists of our time.
 

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