A&E recently aired a made for TV remake of the Andromeda Strain that was broadcast over two nights. My wife, who is not a fan of science fiction, really enjoyed the first night of the series - she missed the second night - which is why I decided to pick up this book. I got an old 1969 edition of the book in pretty good condition along with tear out advertising in the middle, anyone want a 20 week subscription to Time magazine for $2.67?
This is a mass market science fiction story with a happy ending. A secret experimental satellite lands in a small town in Arizona and when the town doctor opens up the casing all but two of the town's residents die. The overseers of the program send their team in to find the satellite and the team is also instantaneously killed when they open their van's doors in the town's main street. The leader of the program decides to activate Wildfire, a secret government contingency plan designed to try to deal with extraterrestrial bacteria that are brought back to earth.
The Wildfire team assembles in a secret underground lab and tries to first identify and then cure the bacteria that killed the residents of Piedmont. They go through the usual steps to do this and then they discover that the bacteria first mutates into something that destroys plastic and then mutates into something entirely benign. There are some obvious tense moments in the Wildfire lab with potential breaches of seals letting the disease out through the lab and things like that.
The book has an awesome premise, it is amazingly well researched and Crichton's prose is fluid and easy to follow but it is a mass market story and it epitomizes why I tend to stay away from authors like Crichton: they take an idea that has so much potential and then they dumb it down to the point that it is entertaining but ultimately unsatisfying.
1 comment:
Nail. Head.
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