“Recent theoretical considerations suggest that sterilization procedures of returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee sterile reentry to this planet's atmosphere. The consequence of this is the potential introduction of virulent organisms into the present terrestrial ecologic framework.”

That quote represents the basic concept of The Andromeda Strain quite well. A more sensational - and rather crude - short description may be “Bacteria from outer space”, but this makes it seems like a low-brow alien invasion sort of story when, in fact, this book is not strictly sci-fi. It was first published in 1969 and set around the time of writing (late ‘60s). This is the book that puts Crichton on the path of blockbusting bestsellerdom.

1971 movie poster

The Andromeda Strain is a medical/techno/thriller though it is also sci-fi in the sense that it involves an organism from outer space, not to mention various gadgets that seem to be ahead of their time. The plot is straightforward. A satellite falls near a small town called Piedmont in Arizona, most of the townsfolk immediately die of mysterious causes, and the ones that do not die immediately soon commit suicide in bizarre manners; except an old man and a baby who are strangely unaffected. A secret government’s team of scientists and doctors called “Wild Fire”, assembled for such a contingency, is activated to investigate and prevent any more deaths. The Wild Fire lab is located deep underground with four levels, the deeper the level the more stringent the level of security and sterilization, including an anal probe by robots and such. As you would expect in a thriller, things eventually go south. Will this be the end of the human race? No..

As mentioned earlier, this is the book that put  Michael Crichton on the map, by the time he published  Jurassic Park he is practically his own continent. The Andromeda Strain is very tautly written, thrilling and even educational! Crichton is very good at explaining scientific details without dumping the info in huge, incomprehensible blocks. If you are looking for lyricism and deep character development you had better look elsewhere. For the general reader, this is an immensely readable and gripping little novel.

Quotes:
“These considerations lead me to believe that the first human interaction with extraterrestrial life will consist of contact with organisms similar to, if not identical to, earth bacteria or viruses. The consequences of such contact are disturbing when one recalls that 3 per cent of all earth bacteria are capable of exerting some deleterious effect upon man.”

“Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical. Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. Even in the time of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon and other heavenly bodies than they did about their own.”

“According to Lewis Bornheim, a crisis is a situation in which a previously tolerable set of circumstances is suddenly, by the addition of another factor, rendered wholly intolerable. Whether the additional factor is political, economic, or scientific hardly matters: the death of a national hero, the instability of prices, or a technological discovery can all set events in motion. In this sense, Gladstone was right: all crises are the same.”

Unpopular 2008 TV series adaptation

Couldn't help not to liken this to a Dan Brown novel, well documented, but ultimately a very commercial book.

Also, I found it interesting how two works read so close seem to have a common idea: The Messenger Theory in Andromeda Strain reminded me heavily of the Hypotheticals from the Spin/Axis/Vortex Trilogy – the same idea that a self-replicating organism that can survive in very extreme conditions is created, thus spreading through space to gather data and carry messages.

Michael Crichton’s “The Andromeda Strain” - which was first published in 1969, and effectively established Crichton as the godfather of the “techno-thriller” genre - is a novel that hits in a markedly different way post-2020 than it did pre. The fact that so many of the specific fears that he's deliberately stoking in “Strain” – paranoia; distrust of one’s fellow man; existential dread; and so on – hit as hard as they do here (both now AND upon its initial publication) is a testament to both his substantial storytelling gifts and what was a truly genius-level prescience.

There’s a reason why “The Andromeda Strain” is considered to be one of the great medical thrillers of all time…and 50 years later, its power is somehow only more irrefutable.

I read The Andromeda Strain back in my youth and had fond memories of it. So, I recently grabbed an eBook version to revisit it. I'm not exactly sure from where the fond memories came. It's not that great a book. On the positive side, there are few female characters so Crichton's misogynistic streak is mostly absent, but that's about it.

Dialogue is sparse and flat. Characters aren't much better. Crichton seems more intent on showing off his research than about telling a compelling story. The whole thing is written as a report, which gives it an air of authenticity. Unfortunately, this also makes it like reading a report. In other words, it's somewhat dry and boring. I still found it readable, but I actually kinda like dry and boring. Still, this was too dry and boring, even for me.

The story doesn't have the usual climax. The important thing is the journey, not the destination. But, again, the journey itself isn't exactly gripping.

This was a fascinating read. You have to get past the scientific jargon, which I did and mostly skimmed, but I really enjoyed this one.

It's really interesting to read this now that a) I'm older, and b) I've read some of Crichton's later works. The Andromeda Strain is an extremely tight, plot-focused thriller, with almost no concerns about character or human emotion. It was also an interesting choice on Crichton's part to write the novel in the form of an after-the-fact events report, as if what happens in the novel actually happened. This sort of hyper-realism is only added to by the intense focus on scientific detail. Instead of titillating us by waving around images of the super-fantastic and out of this world, he creates a fictional world so like our own that instead of thinking, wow, glad this could never happen, we find ourselves thinking, HOLY SHIT, THIS COULD BE HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

Even if this approach seems kind of obvious to us now forty years later, this was revelatory stuff back in 1969, for a sci-fi writer to mine our own world for its terrifying possibilities, rather than to look elsewhere. Of course, later in his career, Crichton would hone the ability of mixing the fantastical with the mundane to an art form. Man, that guy had a brain on him.

[First read July 1999]

Well this is the first Michael Crichton book that I did not give a 4/5 star review for. Andromeda Strain may have been one of his first books, it was published in 1969. It shows in that book does not read as smoothly and quickly as his later works. He relies on a lot of heavily technical jargon to seemingly fill up pages and that really is not something he needs to do.

A satellite crashes into Piedmont, Az. There is something on board that killed 48 people by driving them insane or instant death. The Army team sent to recover the satellite also perishes. Project Wild Fire is initiated. Top scientists from all over the country are brought in to deal with this outbreak. The follow on team finds two survivors- one infant and one 68 yr old man with an ulcer who drinks sterno. The rest of the book is about the procedures Wild Fire goes through to catalog, study and figure out what exactly the Andromeda Strain is. The ending is a surprise and I didn't see it coming. It's probably what saved this book from a 2 star review.

There is a lot of technical (medical) jargon used. As I said this might have been one of his first novels- and his overuse of certain charts (thanks for providing an example BUT we did not need two pages of indecipherable numbers regarding dicarboxylic amino acids, aspartic acid, glutamic acid and whatever else. Since I didn't go to Med school a 0.9 versus a 0.12 means nothing to be if visually represented. He'd have been better off summarizing the results versus showing us the actual numbers, since they meant nothing and just took up space. The characters are wooden and have none of the personality of later Crichton characters.

It is not a bad book, even one of MC's "bad" books is better than what most people write. But judged against many of his other stellar works this one just does not do justice to his ability to meld high end science and a good story into a taut tale. In Andromeda Strain you being to see the writer who would go on to write multiple best sellers. He's just not there yet with this initial offering. If you are a huge Crichton fan you might enjoy this and I did- in the end I thought this deserving of three stars, but primarily due to the twist. I appreciated it. It saved this otherwise 2 star tale.

Учени се борят с убийствена зараза: https://knigolandia.info/shtamut-andr...

Накратко, защото все пак е добре позната книга, издадена преди половин век. Разказван от бъдеща гледна точка, така че имаме очакване, че нещата все пак ще се подредят, сюжетът описва катастрофичен сценарий, при който военна сонда доная нещо от външните слоеве на атмосферата. Сондата се разбива до малко градче, а жителите му правят грешката да я приберат, което ги обрича на гибел – всички без едно бебе и сприхав старец, причудлива комбинация, в която учените трябва да открият най-малкото общо кратно. Именно учените са във фокуса на разказа на Крайтън – той се опитва хладнокръвно и пестеливо да опише какъв предварително подготвен протокол се задейства при подобна ситуация.

Издателска къща БАРД
https://knigolandia.info/shtamut-andr...

Estos días he leído La peste de Albert Camus, una lectura densa y filosófica en tiempos de plagas. Pero un ejemplo más ligero de Pandemia lit es este best-seller escrito por Michael Crichton en 1969, una de sus primeras obras.

Un satélite americano cae cerca de un pequeño pueblo del desierto de Arizona y todos sus habitantes resultan infectados por un virus mortal procedente del espacio, que se extiende con gran rapidez. El gobierno pone en marcha el Proyecto Wildfire, que había sido diseñado para una contingencia semejante y un grupo de eminentes científicos se encierra en unas instalaciones subterráneas del desierto tratando de hallar un antídoto para el virus.

Como ocurre con muchas de las obras de Michael Crichton, es una CF que nos parece posible, incluso demasiado real, y las explicaciones científicas que nos da son claras y plausibles. Es una lectura amena que nos conecta-desconecta de la realidad.

Fue adaptada al cine en 1971 por Robert Wise y también hay una interesante miniserie de 2008.
3,5*

Para una reseña más completa:
http://universodecienciaficcion.blogs...

Interesting and exciting sci-fi thriller! A manmade capsule crashed from space with extraterrestrial organism on it. Unfortunately, the germ is a harmful type that wiped the whole Arizona town but two people made out alive, an old man and an infant. This book is techno-thriller/hard science kind and most of the science, biology and medicine matters were way over my head but I somehow find it a very enjoyable read.

I was always fascinated with this story and later the movie. Considering it was the author's first attempt at a novel- written while he was in medical school- is pretty impressive.

It doesn't pass muster when you consider the state of current medical knowledge, but it did back when it was written. Overall a scary idea that stuff from space could cause serious problems on our planet. It got me thinking about the microbes that hitch a ride on every space launch we make and the possibility that we are infecting places like the moon and Mars with bacteria and viri harmless (to us) whenever we go out into the cosmos. Remember how these simple creatures stopped the alien invasion in H.G. Well's "War of the World's" novel?

Such an expertly written book. You can tell Crichton has a background in medicine from some of the terminology he uses, the knowledge of biology is uncanny! Definitely makes the book unique in context to any others I have read. The cover and use of the galaxy name Andromeda in the book draws Sci-fi readers towards it definitely. I know this for a fact because I wouldn't of even gotten the book if it didn't have the cool cover of the earth and numbers matrix style and the space title.

The plot of the book is fascinating. The idea of an extraterrestrial organism that can kill off humans in a matter of seconds is not only terrifying but pretty exciting. The books also has you wondering about what secret government organizations are really spending all their time and effort on, even if it is based on fiction. Imagining if some project of theirs like this ever did leak, how they would explain it to us.. just thoughts to ponder.

The terms and made up hypothesis in this book really give it a genuine feel. I was definitely confused until I did further research as to whether or not the book was actually real. It unfourtunately has no real fact in it, other than some characters who were named after real people, which is still a nice little touch.

The references and hypothetical way of looking at the organism though I found were very relatable to science today. For instance, when Leavitt was thinking about ways to look at the organism he thought of a man and a house. One man means almost nothing to the world, but being a part of a bigger picture, a city, he means alot more. He thought maybe the part of the organism they were looking at, was part of a much bigger picture. That maybe it worked as a big city, instead of just a singular cell like in our bodies. I found the moments where thinking like this came through as very interesting and very appliable if you will to studies of foreign organisms today.

This book is a very good representation of exactly how things can go wrong in what looks like to be such neat and controlled situation. You have this state of the art labratory, with all 7 of it's levels, and still, this seemingly tiny foreign object has penetrated every inpenetrable area of it. The explanation of the labratory is extremely detailed, to give you a feel of just how much money and effort was put into this top secret experiment going on. Then, it all crumbles down in a matter of days. The organism thrives in what they thought was the only thing that could destroy it, a nuclear detonation. Not only does it thrive inside of the only thing known to man to kill off every living thing known to us, it disintegrates rubber, which seals all the rooms and controls contamination passing between them. It goes to show how utterly fragile and helpless we really are. We convince ourselves we can protect ourselves against anything; when really the exact opposite it true. We are but a spec in the universe and foolish to think otherwise. We could be wiped out at any moment, extinct just like the dinosaurs. This book, I feel, is a reminder of that.