The Andromeda Strain

Fantastic glimpse into a what-if scenario about an alien pandemic that threatens to wipe out civilization if a small team of scientists don't stop it first. Well written examination of the scientific process. How it works, and where it breaks down. It's impressive to imagine that this book was written in the 1960's, but still feels so current. This was a timely read, considering the circumstances in the world (COVID-19), and while I suspect that helped engross me in the story - Crichton does a wonderful job all on his own illustrating an impending sense of urgency and dread.

I found the premise of the book very interesting and wanted to like this, but I simply didn't.

The execution was simply too dry. Considering the stakes in the story, there was no tension for me. I'm sure it was intentional to a degree, considering this was supposed to be an official account of what happened in the situation, but documenting a story in this fashion is a way of telling a story that can be - and has been - done amazingly, so it isn't an excuse.

I just don't understand why anyone would want to reduce an interesting story to it's base elements and strip it off all suspense and personality. All the characters blended into each other and were in no way sympathetic, which translated into me not giving a shit about them or their show more fate. The only interesting characters were the baby and the old man, both of whom were completely wasted in the story.

If this book is indicative of Crichton's overall authorship, I don't really feel compelled to read anything else from him. show less

One reason I love Michael Crichton, despite not being a lover of thrillers in general, is that both his writing and his concepts are a cut above your normal thrillers. However, I found that The Andromeda Strain strained (pun intended) to meet this higher bar. The novel still scores highly as a concept: dangerous space microbes coming to Earth on a crashed satellite is a very clever scenario – even now in 2026, let alone in 1969, pre-Moon Landing – and Crichton's medical background helped provide a lot of verisimilitude and robustness to the concept. But I felt the writing was not up to the same standard.

It's not poor by any means, and there's nothing you could point to and say "there's a glaring flaw". But the characters prove show more mostly interchangeable, lacking individual personality, and Crichton does not do so well in raising the tension or maintaining the pace. The early spookiness and terror of the malady, particularly in that disturbing setting of Piedmont where the infected satellite crash-lands, evaporates completely (again, pun intended) and pretty soon the plot confines itself entirely to a lab, with the stakes neutered and the book becoming less a thriller and more an academic proof-of-concept. I found the ending disappointing, but the book's charms outweigh its limitations and I remind myself that this is one of Crichton's earlier career efforts; while The Andromeda Strain's ending was poor, his own career was just beginning and would bring forth the titles that make me judge him against a high bar in the first place. show less

This book made a massive impact on me when I first read it at the age of twelve or thirteen. It hardly read like fiction, given Crichton's peppering of the book with facsimile documents, renderings of computer displays, and scientifically plausible dialogue (and, truth to tell, info-dumps). And four pages of referenced scientific papers! At the same time, it latched onto the zeitgeist of James Bond and Gerry Anderson's 'Thunderbirds', with secret laboratories concealed under agricultural research stations and talk of nuclear weapons and biowar.

Today, it still reads as well as it ever did, though that does mean it reads a bit like a government report at times. It is also very much a Cold War product, even though it isn't actually about show more the Cold War; but it has the Cold War mindset. Read this and be transported back to the 1960s, that era of great hope alternating with the threat of terrible annihilation. show less

"Certainly the Wildfire team was under severe stress, but they were also prepared to make mistakes. They had even predicted that this would occur. What they did not anticipate was the magnitude, the staggering dimensions of their error. They did not expect that their ultimate error would be a compound of a dozen small clues that were missed, a handful of crucial facts that were dismissed."
-- From Chapter 24, The Andromeda Strain

Michael Crichton's 1969 techno-thriller is in some ways an update of H G Wells' The War of the Worlds, but instead of invading Martians being defeated by a earth-borne microbes (or "putrefactive and disease bacteria" as Wells has it, our "microscopic allies") here it is the extraterrestrial microscopic organisms show more that threaten humankind. Brought back to earth by a Project Scoop satellite, they kill human beings by almost instantly clotting their blood. A top secret team codenamed Wildfire is tasked with retrieving, analysing, assessing and counteracting this virulent invader before it spreads to the general population. Holed up in an underground lab, they have a scant few days to come up with solutions; this being a thriller, things do not go smoothly.

Put thus baldly The Andromeda Strain appears to be a fairly humdrum novel, its premise familiar from scores of dystopic novel plotlines and SFF films and TV series. But, bearing in mind the date of its release -- at the height of a flurry of manned space missions (though just three years from the last Apollo mission to the moon) and on the crest of a wave of optimism in the march of science and technology in the face of Cold War tensions -- its then impact isn't hard to imagine. The nightmare scenario of an invisible killer chimed in with fears of Russian aggression -- remember, the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies had in 1968 invaded Czechoslovakia, a country at the heart of Europe. While the US became more mired in a disastrous Vietnam conflict, despite opposing a technologically poorer nation, on the other hand it had sent a mission around the moon; and computer sciences seemed to be announcing new advances on a daily basis.

In such an extraordinary time of upheaval Crichton's novel comes as little surprise. For this work of speculative fiction he chose to write in what would now be called a creative nonfiction style, buttressing it with much that would not be unexpected in a scientific paper, such as diagrams, computer print-outs and an extensive academic bibliography. Though some of this material, typical of the so-called hard SF genre, has now dated, what to me seems extraordinary is that half a century later much of it is still recognisably current when compared to the less realistic SF offerings then available in popular culture, especially in the visual media (for example TV series such as Lost in Space, Star Trek and Doctor Who).

The Andromeda Strain is largely plot-driven. Few of the characters, though mostly distinctive, remain truly memorable: bacteriologist Jeremy Stone is team leader and near enough infallible; Mark Hall, a surgeon, is accorded almost the only chance to play action hero; because of equipment failure pathologist Charles Burton seems a real goner at one stage; and microbiologist Peter Leavitt's unwillingness to face a personal truth nearly puts the whole enterprise -- and the world's human population -- at risk. Otherwise their roles seem to be to, stage by stage, elucidate for us readers the team's findings and tentative conclusions. That is, until the next crisis develops.

These crises take various forms. First there are the purely mechanical and -- to a lesser extent -- system failures, which the team have to respond to on an ad hoc basis. Then there are the human errors, not least the release of the deadly bug in the first place. Some of these human errors are procedural, from not following protocols to the letter, while others are due to human failings, pure and simple, the result of fatigue and stress compounded by the urgency of the situation. Unless I have missed something, there doesn't appear to be a crisis engineered from sheer malice -- a relief to this reader, wary of the habitual insertion of a villainous adversary in much of the more populist examples of this genre.

In short, because of the clues presented right from the start we are aware that a crisis of global magnitude is averted, so that the jeopardy premised by the novel is ultimately averted. What Crichton only alludes to without revisiting it later on (leaving it to ferment in the reader's mind) are the habitual risks taken by governments in sending objects into space: the dangers of inadvertent contamination, the foolhardiness in deliberately searching for and possibly retrieving microscopic alien organisms (for what ulterior purpose?) and, most worrying, the potential disasters waiting from the steady and unceasing accumulation of space junk in orbit around the earth.

The catastrophic risks from these scenarios (particularly the last) have increased, not diminished, in the five decades since the author published his fictional account; in this respect The Andromeda Strain -- while undoubtedly entertaining -- in the final analysis takes on the role of a modern Cassandra. Let's hope it's not too late. show less

Ohmigosh!!! That was one of the sickest(as in coolest, not in terms of illness) Crichton books yet!

At first, I assumed it was gonna be good, considering I had already read quite a few other books by [a:Michael Crichton|5194|Michael Crichton|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1189723729p2/5194.jpg] {Jurassic Park, Prey, Next, Timeline, Pirate Latitudes & Rising Sun}. Jurassic Park was by far the best. I've loved the movie since I was about 5 and decided to read the book last year when I found it at a local Friends of The Library store. I automatically found a new favorite author. I picked up [b:The Lost World|8650|The Lost World|Michael Crichton|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1210660231s/8650.jpg|1212784] and whenever I found others show more at a good price, I would get them too. I was always thrilled by his books.

On June 27th, I found 3 more books. The Andromeda Strain, [b:The Terminal Man|7679|The Terminal Man|Michael Crichton|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266449516s/7679.jpg|2651704] & [b:The Great Train Robbery|7682|The Great Train Robbery|Michael Crichton|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21Y2XFJKQ0L._SL75_.jpg|3377947]. So far, I've only been able to start The Andromeda Strain. Even so, this book was surprisingly addicting.

Each turn of the page gave me more great information and clues to putting the whole mystery & investigation at an end. It may have seemed slow overall with little action, but the discoveries and theories of the scientists kept me glued as if there had been an impressive car chase!

To me, Chapter 20 felt like the point where all the suspense started. "At Wildfire, they were prepared for that eventuality. But if it did not happen, and the odds were it would not, then they could work safely here for an indefinite period. There was no problem, no problem at all. & there it is, the point where you know everything is going to start going wrong.

Even in Chapter 21, when they try to prepare even further, you know things will go wrong. "'We're going at this too hard,' he said. 'We don't need to work around the clock, and we shouldn't do so. Tired men will make mistakes, mistakes in thinking and mistakes in action. We'll start to drop things, to screw things up, to work sloppily. And we'll make wrong assumptions, draw incorrect inferences. That mustn't happen.'" Stone had a good theory, but it was inevitable...their inferences were still incorrect and so were their assumptions..even with all the precautions.

Throughout the book, Crichton tells us that things are going to go wrong--and he says so in the most obvious ways!(Not necessarily a bad thing in my book...it really just keeps me going to see how far these things will go in the wrong direction and the extent of the consequences) At the end of Chapter 23, Crichton specifically says: "It would be hours before he realized Burton had given him the answer to the puzzle--but an answer that was worthless." Why is it worthless? What changes its worth? These are the things I found myself asking as I read along, and it kept me going.

Very frequently, I found myself wanting to scream at the Wildfire Team to go check certain things, because apparently they were missing a LOT. Chapter 24 states: "This was a most unfortunate decision, for had they examined the media, they would have seen that their thinking had already gone astray, and that they were on the wrong track."

And finally in Chapter 26..the real fun begins. "Hall could guess the problem--somehow the seals had been broken, and contamination had occurred." Yes!! I had been anticipating this moment for a long time. Crichton foreshadows the main event throughout the entire book and when it finally came down to it happening, I was so ready and pumped to go all the way. This book kept me on my toes and my mind was continually processing all the biology material provided. I found it all even more cool, considering we had been going over the main topics mentioned in the book in my AP Bio class. Viruses, bacteria, body systems, feedback mechanisms, cell systems....when put into this book, everything CLICKED!! I had understood the concepts in class, but now everything in completely clear. I love how this book contributes to my education. =) Never a dull moment in Crichton's books! show less

When a deadly contagion wipes out the small city of Piedmont, Arizona following the crash of a US satellite, it sets into motion Project Wildfire. Comprised of five scientists, Wildfire is dedicated to dealing with pathogens that may arrive from an extraterrestrial origin. Of the original Piedmont population, only two survived- an old man and a colicky infant. Codenamed Andromeda, the organism kills on exposure, and appears to be airborne. It is unlike anything ever seen before, and contains no proteins. It shouldn't be 'alive,', but it is. It shouldn't be able to kill, but it does. Quite efficiently. Then it evolves.

I first read The Andromeda Strain many many moons ago, after I'd read Jurassic Park in ninth grade and fallen in love show more with Crichton's writing. At the time, I wasn't as enamoured of Andromeda as some of his other works. It's coming up on three decades, and I have a greater appreciation for this speculative science tale. It did start out kinda slow. It *is* one of Crichton's earlier works, and as a comparison point, it's fascinating to see the growth of a writer from early works to becoming well-established. As a writer, and a more seasoned reader, I can appreciate this more!

The majority of the story takes place in one locale- the underground Wildfire complex. This is a completely isolated, underground biohazard complex, with each successive level having stronger safeguards. For Stone, Leavitt, Hall, and the other scientists, about 90% of that time is spent on the deepest level. Like an abyssal descent, reaching the lower labs takes hours. Personally, I'd go nuts. Also, its final failsafe is nuclear detonation. Nope.

There's a great deal of science behind this story, and it's clear Crichton did his research. I loved the exploration of Andromeda, and the organism itself. Pretty much the only thing I didn't care for was Leavitt's storyline. The allusions to his condition, and the fact he had it at all, seemed contrived and rang false. I understand it was leading up to one critical moment, but I think said moment could have been better achieved in a different manner. Still, overall I loved my reread and I'm looking forward to reading The Andromeda Evolution.

***This book was read and reviewed for my own enjoyment. show less