The Andromeda Strain

The Andromeda Strain is a science fiction cautionary tale that proved to be a major turning point in Crichton's writing career and a harbinger of things to come. His unique style that seemed to coalesce in this book was unlike anything at the time and set the tone for many of his books to follow.

Perhaps the most significant characteristic of The Andromeda Strain was that it used science fiction to explore issues in the ethics of technology. In this story, a space probe picks up an alien microbe and brings it back to earth suggesting consequences of space exploration that were not being considered at the time. It is a very different life form from anything the scientists had seen before suggesting that if we do find other life in the universe it may not be cute little green men. It is far more likely that it would be a microbial form possibly a life threatening microbial form.

In the story, the government had created a secret laboratory for dealing with such events called Wildfire. Wildfire had all the latest technology but failed to control the microbe. Instead, the microbe just mutated into harmlessness suggesting that nature will go its way and all of our technology is powerless to stop it. These themes of unexpected consequences and the uselessness of our technology for dealing with them will become common themes in later books and brought to a crescendo in his masterpiece Jurassic Park. 

We also see one of Crichton's signature techniques in The Andromeda Strain. He provides ostensibly factual material sprinkled throughout the story to provide greater credibility to the story. This technique works in two ways. First, it serves to make the fantastic scenario in the story more believable. And as we believe the story, we cannot help to see how easily we believe things when they are presented as factual scientific information.

Most readers were first introduced to Crichton in The Andromeda Strain as it was his first best seller book. And it has held up well over time. Although space travel is not the focus that it was in the late 1960's, nothing has happened since then to make this book seem out of date. We still have space probes. We still run the risk of bringing back harmful micro organisms. And we are no more prepared to deal with such an eventuality today than we were in the late 1960's.