The Andromeda Strain
Michael Crichton
I came into The Andromeda Strain expecting a fast-past plague thriller, as
advertised by numerous blurbs on and within the book. Finding instead a
science-based explorative story at a much more measured pace, I'm unsure to
what degree my expectations influenced my disappointment. The plot initially shows
much promise with the opening, featuring a mysterious plague, secret government
projects, and a crack team of scientists poised to isolate and fix the threat,
but any sense of impending doom is quickly whisked away as the scientists (and
the readers with them) become isolated in an underground research facility.
Crichton drops several hints that indicate that the book is supposed to be a
fast-paced thriller, but his constant Obvious Hammer remarks that Something Is
Amiss are annoying, misleading, and often dreadfully misplaced, inserting an
overbearing narrator where the story and characters should be driving the
action. Rather than ratcheting up any dramatic tension or exploring the
relationship of the scientists to the world above that depends on them (a fact
that Crichton constantly struggles to make clear), these not-at-all-clever
asides frequently serve as reminders that events at the surface are actively
ignored in favor of long-winded scientific explanations and too many
tantalizing hints dropped and then immediately forgotten. The characters
themselves are described in broad brushstrokes during their introductions and
fail to develop any particularly distinguishing characteristics throughout the
course of the novel; they're simply there, and though some actual
characterization certainly wouldn't hurt the book, they are just sufficient
enough to serve the narrative rather than becoming two-dimensional
distractions.
There are aspects of the book
that are well-done and even exciting; I was as eager as anyone to discover what
the Andromeda Strain was, how it worked on Earthlings' anatomy, and how any and
every delay would spell certain doom for the world. Yet after an entire novel
full of efforts to explain just how foreign, how deadly, and how important the
Andromeda Strain is, the book goes out with an utterly embarrassing whimper.
Sure, I may have been expecting a full-blown plague novel (and that expectation
surely contributed significantly to my feelings toward the book), but Crichton
himself sets the scene for apocalyptic peril numerous times, only to end the
book in the name of capital-s Science. The twist is clever and could work well
in another context, but after repeated ominous warnings throughout the
narrative, itself framed as a report issued after the fact, the reader feels
cheated, not outwitted. The Andromeda
Strain does not frame itself as a novel to playfully engage and mislead readers'
expectations, and its meta-ironic, anticlimactic ending, while not misplaced given
the book's celebration of the science that makes the ending possible, caps a
disappointing experience.
Ultimately, The Andromeda Strain feels one-note and a bit plodding. Crichton
does, however, deserve credit for some of the book's more pleasant aspects.
While the overt narrative involvement often interferes with the plot and,
indeed, the very tension it is no doubt intended to build, the framing device
is effective. The blurbs may lie to the modern reader, but the book itself is
what it is- a book about the powers of science- and rather unapologetically so.
Crichton has written a very believable narrative shell and it is remarkable
that, despite advances in computing that make the disease the book's primary
science fiction element seem outdated (and render its punchcode references obsolete),
there remain a few elements that keep this book firmly in the speculative
domain. The biology-based inquiries hold up after time, and the book is just as
plausible today as it must have been when it was first published. The Andromeda Strain contains a lot of
frustrating asides and missteps, to be sure, and ignores or otherwise brushes
aside the expectations that it and its reviewers establish, but it is nonetheless
an intriguing look at the scientific method and the truly terrifying ability of
unseen molecules to wreak havoc, if only we could have seen them doing so.
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