The Andromeda Strain

I consider this one of the original “medical thrillers” and a must-read for any fans of the genre.

Dr. Jeremy Stone is the classic scientist turned hero who must save the world and does so in dramatic fashion. This book taught audiences that science and facts could be entertaining and part of great adventures and helped give birth to a whole new genre. I reread this book every couple of years, and I am never disappointed. 

I read this book as a teenager, and it sparked my fascination with infectious diseases and what can go wrong if they get out of control.

The book combines science with a really tense plotline. It is where I first heard of "interferon," part of the human immune system that fights viruses. This has brought me full circle, my lab researches interferon and viruses, and now I get to write books about it, too! 

A medical thriller that never gets old, Michael Crichton’s classic transported me into a world on the brink of a terrifying pandemic. The U.S. government gets involved, which leads to an urgent, top-secret response aimed at containing the crisis and preventing a global catastrophe.

I found this book fast-paced and chilling, and as a scientist myself, I think it’s at its best when Crichton, a master storyteller whose expertise in science and medicine shows throughout, describes the lab work and science behind the emergency that threatens mankind.

From beginning to end, the book is gripping, and it left me wondering… show more.

‘Write of what you know best’ is a caveat often shared to aspiring writers, but in Andromeda Strain, Mr. Crichton stepped far beyond this by incorporating research and imagination to create an alien villain that challenged human sensibilities. The suspense in the novel is more to do with the emotional vulnerabilities of its characters than the transformation of the alien matter that threatened them.

Michael Crichton is the author that readers most often compare my own novels to, set in the present day or near future, offering high-concept plots, and providing lots of suspense and action. But I don’t claim to reach that standard, because Crichton was a master and this early novel of his blew me away. In coldly understated prose, its account of an instantly deadly unknown pathogen in a small town is terrifying. The bleeding-edge Wildfire laboratory tasked with stopping the organism is geek-heaven. And Crichton ruthlessly cranks up the tension with daunting puzzles, a nuclear threat, and an inexorable timetable… show more.

As an engineer and a writer, I admire Michael Crichton’s ability to reach readers with a technical or science background as well as those practicing or educated in the liberal arts, humanities, or entertainment. The Andromeda Strain was Crichton’s first book published under his own name. I have a copy of the Dell paperback, printed June 1970. The book recounts events that take place over five days, dealing with the discovery and investigation of an extraterrestrial organism brought to Earth by a military satellite designed to collect samples from near space. In this book, I feel Crichton is at his… show more.

An entire town is killed after a satellite crash in a small town. An infectious micro-organism from space is responsible for the death of every single resident except for two people. I couldn’t get enough of the mystery of why a screaming infant and an abuser of alcohol survived the infection. I was enthralled in the facility that the scientists used (called Wildfire) to combat the micro-organism. The suspense in this story built up in front of me in a way most books haven’t and that is why I love this book. Lastly, it should be noted that Michael Crichton… show more.

This novel teaches the doomsday aspects of biological warfare and not nuclear warfare. Great hard science underpinning a very scary story of the government acting in a typical self-serving way to find a better weapon, a project that ends up almost ending life on earth. Crichton leaves open the possibility of a viral apocalypse and teaches us, in his typical science-dense prose, that man should not play God, especially when it comes to germ warfare!

Crichton was very close to my age, and my first effort at writing preceded his, but it was not a success, and when this book came out, I saw what was wrong with mine. It took some time before I returned to writing. The Andromeda Strain cleverly presents a crisis, and it cleverly leads the reader along a red herring path, then it introduces something that probably should have been seen first up. Crichton had an easy style to read, and always followed a logical path.