Michael Crichton
THE
ANDROMEDA STRAIN
BOOK REVIEW

		Review by E.C. McMullen Jr.
THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN 1974 MOVIE REVIEW THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN - 1969 by Michael Crichton USA Release: May 12, 1969 Alfred A. Knopf (HC), Bantam Book (PB)

Found footage... novels?

Movies, sure, but books? How can that possibly work?

If you're an H.P. Lovecraft fan, you're already saying, "Well, duh!", as you've read The Shuttered Room, Dreams In The Witch House, and Call Of The Cthulhu.

Some of Lovecraft's most popular stories involves inheriting a demand from a relative who was struck down before they could do the job themselves, passing the task onto the next generation. Perhaps finding a lost diary or other book (Necronomicon, anyone?) that chronicles a past event, relating to the misfortune of its writer.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly's best selling work, is told through missives and testimony or narratives, starting with Captain Walton's letter to his beloved sister and the surprise discovery of a nearly dead Dr. Frankenstein in the Arctic. This puzzle piece fits into Viktor Frankenstein's life and life's work. Even the creature, through an eyewitness who was forced to hear the tale, tells his side of the story. These three humans, natural born or artificially created, speak of a era in 18th Century history, discovered and told in Mary's 19th Century tale.

While 27 year-old author, Michael Crichton, was busy getting his M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School, he wiled away his free time by writing what would become his first best selling novel under his name (he often published under psuedonyms to avoid trouble from his instructors, who were writers struggling to be publised, themselves), THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN.

I first saw the movie on TV when I was a kid. Much later I had the chance to see it on the screen at an Art House theater (which I regularly haunted throughout my late teens and on into my early 30s.). In between seeing the movie on TV and in the theater I read Michael's novel a few times, finding it remarkably close to the movie. Closer in fact than nearly any movie based on a novel I've seen before or since.

Like all Found Footage Horror, we start with the finding. Somehow we have in our posession a file classified Top Secret.

Right after that is the novel's Acknowledgement page. Readers know that this is where the author thanks those who helped with making this work become a reality. Plentiful Thanks are poured out to those who fact-checked. Those who provided access to materials. Access to resources. Access to agents or publishers. As well as family, friends, and spouses who lent moral support.

Except for Michael.

Michael lists fictional people in various positions of power who got him all the material he needed to have this Top Secret information revealed to the public.

You are now part of this story, the end part where the world discovers one of the most terrifying days in earth's history that's been kept hidden away.

In quick straight to the point text so terse it can tear the pages you're turning, Michael quickly explains how, through the centuries, Science studied the sky, physics, and chemistry, leaving biology to the messy village doctors and pharmacists. That is, until the 20th Century.

The blooming of biology and so bacteriology as sciences moving to the forefront of research is knowledge needed to understand why the Government spent a fortune on one of the most powerful, secret, research laboratories in the world, buried deep and hidden away in a desolate area of the U.S.A.

It was there in case something unlikely ever happened.

Elsewhere in science and research was Project Scoop. Another Top Secret program, this one involving taking atmosphere samples from the outermost layers of our atmosphere. It was highly unlikely that life existed there, but by 1964 scientists had discovered Extremophiles. Bacteria that lived in the inhospitable pressures of the deepest areas of ocean, feeding off of the poisons belching from undersea thermal vents and volcanoes.

This sparked scientists to look elsewhere, like the boiling acid beds in Yellowstone National Park.

Everywhere we looked where life as we know it should not, can't possibly exist, we found life.

How far up in our atmosphere could life exist? That's what Project Scoop would find out.

Rockets were secretly launched from Vandenberg Airforce base in California, far from the multitude of hundreds of thousands of eye witnesses surounding Cape Kennedy, Florida.

Their payload, a small unmanned capsule, would make it up to the level set for it, and take samples until it was supposed to return.

Over and over this happened, almost always on schedule, which was a feat in itself in the early days of space aeronautics.

The Americans and Soviets may have had ICBMs at that time, but that didn't mean they were anywhere near perfect. It was because duds and misfires were taken into account that the Nuclear superpowers felt they needed so many missiles.

A nuke may not arm itself when commanded to. It may hit the ground and break-up instead of exploding. Or it may explode when hitting the ground instead of high in the air where it could do more damage over a wider range.

The basic computers back then may sit, deep in their underground silos, confused by the launch command, or might arm itself and blow up in its silo.

These things happen and, in 1967, Project Scoop 7 crashed in the desert near the small town of Piedmont, Arizona.

The Army sent out two men, Lieutenant Roger Shawn and Electronics Tech Private Lewis Crane. Together at night they do the slow task of single-unit Triangulation in order to target the signal Scoop 7 is giving out. Its not where it originally was, which means someone else found it and moved it. Whoever that person or persons were, they moved it to Piedmont.

Shawn and Lewis, tracking the capsule after ten at night, slowly drove their Ford Econoline van, stuffed to the brim with the latest military tracking equipment, into Piedmont. There they discovered to their horror, fresh corpses all over the street.

Soon they too would become corpses, though not before they saw one single old man in a white robe walking among the dead, toward them.

This is how Crichton's novel, eventually niched as a Techno-Thriller, begins.

Despite the hard-core Science of this Science Fiction tale, everything about it is a creepy Horror novel.

Mary Shelly Wollstonecraft would be so proud.

When Mary was adapting her popular Frankenstein newspaper serial into a novel, she had the audacity to contact the most popular and controversial scientist of her time (himself son of a popular scientist in that era), Charles Darwin, to be her Science Advisor.

The world's first Horror novel was also the world's first Science Fiction novel and the author had her own Science advisor to guide her. What is it with these authors in their teens and twenties writing classic works of English literature?!?

Instead of ancient Laboratory, we get a brand new and ultra squeeky clean research facility buried deep underground. The ghost, per se, is the automated computer which assists in every way to expedite the experiments. It also speaks when it needs to.

In addition to an unknown number of mostly nameless cypher assistants, there are five doctors, each tops in their slice of micro-biology and medicine. Scoop 7 found its microscopic life form and, it having existed in the upper atmosphere for no one knows how long, has no known predators on the surface. Humanity, having never been near it, has developed no immunity to it, and the life form is a deadly contagion.

This is the unlikely emergency that the underground base, security dubbed Project Wildfire, was built for. The team that enters Wildfire, must find a way to stop the contagion or perhaps die trying. Wildfire also has a failsafe device. Should all of their security and protocols become compromised. Should contamination become a live risk, a small atomic bomb, just large enough to burn all life within the base and bury it, will automatically go off.

Though the team are all experts in their fields, they are also all leaders in their fields. They've developed no ability to work with people at their own high level, but the pressure and limited time of the situation forces them to do their best as they handle an emergency they've never trained for.

This is the first test of the Wildfire Project, could easily be its last, and the fate of all mammal life may hang in the balance.

You would think that a novel that delves so deeply into the minutia of science, to the point of nearly becoming a textbook in some places, even uses, as part of its narrative form, whole pages of 20th century computer printouts written in military and computer program-speak, would be tedious.

Yet Michael never wrote more than he had to to get the point across and always tied it to the action of the moment. What killed these people = Brief Science text. How did they die - Brief Science text. Why did that car crash? That fighter jet crash? What does a light flashing 3 times per second do to some people? And so on.

Attention grabbing, horrific and believable even after 50 years, Michael Crichton's THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN may, like Mary's masterpiece, endure for centuries.

Five Bookwyrms.

This review copyright 2024 E.C.McMullen Jr.

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