The strain kills people by clotting their blood, either causing them to go crazy because of brain bleeding or causing them to die instantly as the blood clots in their hearts. What they find is what really makes this story bizarre, in my opinion. Once there, they spend run tests on the sample taken from the space probe trying to figure out what the heck this thing is. The doctors and scientists, all men – this was 1969, of course – spend the next few days making their way through the meticulous levels of quarantine to the very bottom level of the Wildfire facility. These doctors travel to the remote location known as Project Wildfire, a state-of-the-art facility built deep into the ground of the desert, the Nevada desert this time. The probe lands in a tiny town in the middle of the Arizona desert and promptly kills off every person in the town with the exception of two – an old man with a failing liver and a six-month-old baby.Īt the discovery of the crash site, the government puts together a team of doctors and scientists to study the organism. The organism in question, the Andromeda Strain (not named so because it came from the Andromeda Galaxy, rather a name produced at random by a computer program) is brought to the Earth’s surface by one of our very own space probes. How would we react? What would happen to us? What would happen to the organism?Ĭrichton’s take on this situation is… bizarre. The novel poses the question of what we as humans would do in the event that an alien organism, in this case, a strain of bacteria, would make its way to the surface of our planet. The Andromeda Strain is one of Crichton’s earliest works, written in 1969, and like the old clichéd “fine wine”, he got better with age. He injects his hard science fiction books with energy and pizazz, tackling the toughest of topics including mental health issues gone amok (Sphere), medical technology overstepping its boundaries (Terminal Man), and the ethical issues behind genetic testing (Jurassic Park… duh). I added this one to my reading list because I’ve enjoyed so many of his other works. If you’ve ever read Jurassic Park, you know how Crichton gets the science fiction award for turning the world around on its head. It pains me to give any book written by the late, great Michael Crichton less than five stars.
THE QUEUE Reading List Rating: 3 out of 5
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