291 pages
English language
Published May 15, 1970 by Dell.
The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere.
Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the outer fringes of space to collect organisms and dust for study. One of them falls to earth, landing in a desolate area of Arizona.
Twelve miles from the landing site, in the town of Piedmont, a shocking discovery is made: the streets are littered with the dead bodies of the town's inhabitants, as if they dropped dead in their tracks.
Despite this book being written in the late 1960's it feels really modern and not to mention topical.
A must read for protocol geeks!
Good:
It reads more like a science thought experiment than a novel
Simultaneously fulfills the fantasy of meticulous disaster planning & everything falling apart
Makes scientific theories & data gripping
Bad:
Ending doesn't live up to the foreshadowing that lead up to it
300 pages of info dump is not for everyone
All the planning, preparation & procedures feel naive in 2020
Really great start, then slowly declined in quality to a quite bad ending
One of the author's earlier books (he's better known for Jurassic Park) it was a great, detailed look at the potential for space travel to bring back foreign infectious agents, and how the government might deal with it.
When a small town is the site of an unmanned probe landing and within hours it's discovered that everyone in it is dead, an emergency team of eminent scientists us assembled in an isolated underground base to identify and if possible find a vaccine or cure for the infection. Needless to say, a few things go wrong along the way.
Enjoyed the story, but it's definitely pretty dated in parts as it was first published in 1969. References to things like printer heads getting stuck, for example! Also not a single female character outside of background scenery. The ending also felt a bit forced and anticlimactic.
Meh. It was okay. I had unrealistic expectations of where this story was going... It went somewhere I wasn't all that interested in investigating. Oh well. It's not a bad book, just kind of, how do you say?... Boring.
This book definitely delivers on the promise of "a hair-raising experience." Crichton is a master of creating suspense and holding secrets until a good way into the book.
That said, this was not one of my favorites. While the book started favorably enough, it lost its suspense about 200 pages in. While I thoroughly enjoyed the segues into biological studies, they tended to detract from the main story - so much so that once I was 5/6 through the book, I began to think, "He's running out of room to create a really smash-up ending." The unfortunate result is that I hardly felt any suspense during what should have been a climactic ending.
A good (and fast read), but definitely not the late Crichton's best work.
Andromeda Strain addresses a "worst case" scenario, where an unknown bacteria has the potential to wreak havoc on society, and a secret government agency has to deal with it before it gets completely loose.
The construction of the events and the execution feels very real - rather than an elite team of geniuses who use super spy powers to do whatever they want, you get a feel for the bureaucracy created by a government organization made to address an unknown threat, and the hodge-podge nature of a team of fallible humans. While I'm not up to snuff on my biochemistry, I'm willing to bet the analysis methods presented in the book (in extreme detail) would probably hold up to scrutiny.
While logically I understand the sequence of events that lead up to the ending and it does make sense, it still felt like a cop-out to me. As I was …
Andromeda Strain addresses a "worst case" scenario, where an unknown bacteria has the potential to wreak havoc on society, and a secret government agency has to deal with it before it gets completely loose.
The construction of the events and the execution feels very real - rather than an elite team of geniuses who use super spy powers to do whatever they want, you get a feel for the bureaucracy created by a government organization made to address an unknown threat, and the hodge-podge nature of a team of fallible humans. While I'm not up to snuff on my biochemistry, I'm willing to bet the analysis methods presented in the book (in extreme detail) would probably hold up to scrutiny.
While logically I understand the sequence of events that lead up to the ending and it does make sense, it still felt like a cop-out to me. As I was approaching fewer and fewer pages left in the book, I kept wondering, "How is he going to wrap this up in a satisfying way with so few pages left?" Well, he didn't.
