The Andromeda Strain
(On Topic: | A Time For Murder | A Way Back | A Woman To Be Loved | Adaptable Man | American Nomad | Amnesiascope | Among Arabian Sands | An Impossible Woman | Andromeda Strain | Arc D X | Avengers TV Tie-ins | Baltic Emerald | Bimbos Of The Death Sun | Chance Awakening | Color Of Money | Dancing For Joy | Days Between Stations | Dead Ernest | Die Rich Die Happy | Dying Day | Evil Ones | Fall Of Chronopolis | Far From Home | Far Stars And Future Times Novels | Fiesta For Murder | Goodbye Darling | Gravy Train | Here Is A Villain | Hustler | Ilion Like A Mist | Indian Summer | Innocent Bystanders | James Bond Novels | KGB Kill | Leading Lady | Leap Year | Man Who Fell To Earth | Man Who Sold Death | Mockingbird | Money That Money Cant Buy | Novelizations | Our Ecstatic Days | Power | Private Tightrope | Queens Gambit | Rubicon Beach | Sea Came In At Midnight | So Far From Home | Soldier In The Snow | Sometimes You Could Die | Steady Boys Steady | Steps Of The Sun | Summer In Retreat | Tatja Grimms World | Television Crimebusters Omnibus | These Dreams Of You | Tours Of The Black Clock | Winners | Witling | X-Ray | Zeroville | Index )
This book recounts the five-day history of a major American scientific crisis. Like most crises, the events surrounding the Andromeda Strain were a compound of foresight and fool-Ishness, innocence and ignorance. Nearly every-one involved had moments of great brilliance. and moments of unaccountable stupidity
Thus begins this extraordinary novel of the world's first space-age biological emergency.
The Andromeda Strain sets forth with almost documentary verisimilitude the unfolding story of "Project Wildfire" the crash mobilization of the nation's highest scientific and medical resources when an unmanned research satellite returns to earth mysteriously and lethally contaminated.
Four American scientists, chosen in advance for their experimental achievements in the fields of clinical microbiology, epidemiology, pathology, and electrolyte chemistry, are summoned under condi-tions of total news blackout and utmost urgency to Wildfire's secret laboratory five stories beneath the Nevada desert. There-surrounded by banks of the most sophisticated computer-assisted equipment, and sealed off from the outside world except for a telecommunications link with the national security apparatus-they work against the threat of a world-wide epidemic to find an antidote to the unknown microorganism that has inexplicably killed all but two inhabitants (an elderly derelict and an infante) of the tiny Arizona town where the satellite was retrieved. Step by step they begin to unravel the puzzle of the Andromeda Strain, until, terrifyingly, their microbacterial "adversary" ruptures the hyper sterile seal of the laboratory and their already desperate search for a biomedical answer becomes split-second race against an atomic deadline.
With its narrative force, its scientific detail, its suspense-as four brilliant individualists work together under ultimate pressure-this novel makes real for the reader the real world of today's science and medicine at the top-secret levels of the Science Space-Military high command.
This is a great read with Crichton's mix of dramatic plots and scientific method as exposition making it seem very plausable. It's one of the first examples of his trope of the complex systems failing due to human error which he returned to in later works.
Adpated for the big screen in 1971, and TV in 2008
