The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton: Review
Book: The Andromeda Strain. Date of Publication: September 1, 1969.
Pages: 327. Genre: Science Fiction.
MEDIC: Doctor Crusher? You’d better take a look at this.
CRUSHER: My God.
RIKER: What is it?
CRUSHER: It looks as though your arm has been severed and then reattached.
RIKER: What?
CRUSHER: The skeletal structure in your radius and ulna is offset by point zero two microns. Your arm has been amputated and then surgically reattached.
Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 6, Episode 5. “Schisms”
My favorite genre mashup is sci-fi horror. It is my favorite kind of science fiction and my favorite kind of horror, like how a fried banana and peanut butter sandwich is my favorite way to eat bananas and my favorite way to eat peanut butter. But what makes them such a dynamic duo? In this review I will present “The Elvis” theory of sci-fi horror effectiveness.
Science fiction can be effective in many ways but one of its core features is its imaginativeness that generates a sense of wonder. Likewise horror can be effective in many ways but one of its core features is an understanding that the best way to scare a reader is to give them space to do it themselves. Thus, science fiction poses the most exciting questions and horror answers them in the worst way possible.
Some of my favorite episodes of Star Trek are those with a horror bent. This includes the much maligned “Night Terrors” although even I can acknowledge that its green screen dream sequences are goofy. What makes them special? I’d argue that it’s how they work within the rigid confines of a typical Star Trek story. It is largely an optimistic show about a future with no hunger and poverty where mankind is free to explore the galaxy. This catches you all the more off guard when the cast faces pain, fear, and looming disaster.
Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain leverages both these principles to deliver a nail-biting tale of first contact gone wrong. The novel is framed as a post-incident report of how bureaucracy, confirmation bias, and process failures combined to almost end the world. The U.S. government commissions a series of research probes to collect samples from the upper atmosphere. Publicly this is to further scientific knowledge. Privately the Department of Defense hopes to make advances in the development of biological weapons. Several prominent scientists sound the alarm that the probes risk introducing life forms to Earth that we have no immunity against. Thus, the Wildfire Project is assembled to study and determine containment procedures against extraterrestrial microorganisms.
Of course everyone’s worst fears are realized when a probe lands in a remote Arizona town and causes everyone in it to suffer a terrible and swift death, apart from one old man and a baby. It is then up to the Wildfire scientists to investigate the mechanisms behind the havoc wreaked by the Andromeda strain. One of my favorite scenes is when Drs. Stone and Burton are airlifted to the town to collect samples:
He would receive more than a thousand dollars for this day’s work, and his family would receive an additional ten thousand dollars from the short term life insurance should he not return.
There was a reason for the money: if anything happened to Burton and Stone on the ground, the pilot was ordered to fly directly to the Wildfire installation and hover thirty feet above the ground until such time as the Wildfire group had determined the correct way to incinerate him, and his airplane, in midair.
He was being paid to take a risk. He had volunteered for the job. And he knew that high above, circling at twenty thousand feet, was an Air Force jet with air-to-air missiles. It was the job of the jet to shoot down the helicopter should the pilot suffer a last-minute loss of nerve and fail to go directly to Wildfire.
[Pg. 82–83]
Which perfectly juxtaposes a matter of fact delivery against an unenviable position. Other horrifying inventions include a miracle antibiotic that kills all the microbes in your body with dire consequences. As a whole the novel could have done with a bit more editing, as in the case of a long winded description of how a number written in binary encodes a top secret hotline. My biggest gripe though is that The Andromeda Strain relies heavily on “oh well that’s very convenient” plotting. The worst offender is the novel’s Odd Man Hypothesis. This is the theory that single males are more likely to make the correct decision in a crisis compared to married men or women. This motivates the inclusion on the Wildfire team of a single surgeon whom the others doubt will be useful in any capacity. This goes exactly the way you’d expect.
Unstructured thoughts: when Crichton first describes the probe’s landing site it is as a bunch of dead bodies in the streets and a single figure wandering around in a white nightgown. I thought oh God not another Jesus allegory but luckily it doesn’t go too much further than this.
