The Andromeda Strain

By Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton must be a rich man. This book was written in 1969, and was followed fairly quickly by a a film version (involving lots of white lab coats, I’m told), and it seems barely a year has gone past since without some other Michael Crichton blockbuster on our screens or bookshelves.

Well, I’m pleased to report that The Andromeda Strain is a bit of a page-turner. A space probe returns to earth and is found by some unsuspecting civilians. It seems that the probe contains some kind of alien life form, because shortly after the unsuspecting civilians find the probe, they are all dead – so quickly they probably didn’t even have time to think something like “By Gad, that probe must have contained some alien life form!”. (It’s only a small town of about 50 or so, though; in a modern film version I imagine they’d up the body count). The government agents sent to retrieve the probe also die mysteriously, although not particularly gruesomely (the bug causes blood to clot almost instantly, so there are no bloody external hemorrhages from orifices or anything). This puts in motion the “Wildfire Protocol”, in which five specialists are called in to deal with the situation.

However, those smartypants at mission control who thought they’d thought of everything had missed a few tricks. They’d obviously never had to put together a Disaster Plan because one of the critical specialists was ill (busted appendix or something) and they had no back-up!! Maybe things work differently in top-secret government circles. Several other things went wrong during the response; the book is kind of written like a after-the-fact review of what went wrong with the plan - what us Disaster Planners like to call a “debriefing”, because it makes us feel important.

The Andromeda Strain has a kind of “old-time” feel about it, being a 60s jobbie and all, but not just because the technology described is so obviously now out-of-date. The old-time feel is also due to the pacing and the focus – like how even that gem of an action film, Die Hard, seems awfully slow to get going by today’s standards. By today’s standards, the Andromeda Strain didn’t feature nearly enough gruesome deaths, and the inevitable containment-field-broken-will-they-stop-the-self-destruct-bomb cliffhanger sequence was over remarkably quickly. Crichton spends a lot of time talking about the science of it all – how they set up Wildfire (hidden in a cornfield, no less! Were all those episodes of the X-files merely an homage to Andromeda??), why they set up the area, the design of Wildfire, the decontamination processes, what happens exactly when such and such occurs…it all lends to the aura of plausibility, but after a while I did wish for a bit less scientific justification of the plot and a few more acts of unsubstantiated derring-do. After all, these days all you have to do is have someone say something like “By Gad, Captain, some alien force has constructed a web of crippling anomalies!” and we don’t bat an eyelid. Those tricky crippling anomalies – they’ll get you every time!

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

The War of the Worlds (2005)

The War of the Worlds
By HG Wells

I grew up listening to the 1975 rock opera of “The War of the Worlds”, co-written by someone from The Moody Blues and featuring the voice of Richard Burton as hero-voiceover man. It was one of my favourite pieces of music in the whole world, along with “Carmina Burana” by Karl Orff. (Yes, my mother was worried). So, which is better – the book, or the 1970s rock opera?? The rock opera. No wait a minute, of course I didn’t mean that…the book, the book is better, of course, it’s the book. But the rock opera will always hold a special place in my heart…

Still it was peculiar reading the book knowing the words to the rock opera nearly off by heart – bits of sentences would lapse into Richard Burton voiceover and synthesisers in my head and then lapse back into my imaginary 1890s voiceover, which made it a bit of a disjointed reading experience. The rock opera was quite clever at pulling out Wells’ really striking sentences though. I will have to go and see the film now and find out if they used any of the original text – I hope not, because I really don’t want to have Tom Cruise voiceover in my head as well.

Interesting to compare the differences between 1895 and 1975 though – in the book the main character is married (i.e. does not have a girlfriend called Carrie living in London with her Dad), there is no “Beth” who is the pastor’s female companion (I think they must have decided they needed at least one chick in the rock opera so they made her up), the whole section with the Parson is much more “Lord of the Flies” than I expected, and the aliens do not run around going “Ooohhhlaaaaaa!” (spelt “Ulla”) like they do in the rock opera. (There are a few Ullas at the end of the book when the Martians are feeling a bit poorly). The aliens still get killed by “minute, invisible bacteria” though – oh dang, I just gave away the ending!

It was also interesting reading this book in today’s climate of terrorist attacks and live media coverage. Back in 1895, when the book was written, Martians could attack Woking and it would take a few days for the news to reach London, all communication was by telegram, and even then no one really believed it. (MARTIANS LANDED STOP SEND REINFORCEMENTS STOP). The hero and his wife escape on a horse and cart. People learn all their news from the papers. (Golly the hero reads a lot of papers – including the St James’ Gazette!). Not being from 1895 and therefore unable to check matters of accuracy, the book seemed a surprisingly realistic account of how an alien invasion may have progressed at the time, and I’m not surprised it fooled some people when it was broadcast as a radio show a few decades later.

Still, I’m very glad to find out that Wells was not responsible for the line (on discovering one of the Martian attack machines has headed off to London) “London! I hadn’t dreamed there could be danger to Carrie and her father so many miles away!” which struck me as a stupid thing to say even when I was 10 because after all they’ve already made it from Mars.

The 1890s make themselves felt in other ways, as demonstrated by the following excerpt: And before we judge them [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought…upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. I’m not sure which was the more startling assertion – that the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were “like” humans, or that a war of extermination was waged – it’s not often you hear of that part of our history actually called a war, or even that there was a conscious effort to kill the Aboriginals, and it is particularly unexpected in a nineteenth-century text.

Rating: 8 out of 10
A book to read because it is interesting, rather than because it is emotionally involving.

The Mezzanine (2005)

By Nicholson Baker
This is a book about the little things in life – the truly, truly small and seemingly insignificant things that we think about every day. Essentially the story of one man’s lunch hour (he works on the mezzanine floor of a large building) and the intellectual history behind his thoughts of this hour, this book celebrates shoelaces, straws and finer points of office interaction.

There is bound to be one topic in this book that makes you think, “By golly he’s right!”. For me, it was the bit about vending machines. (I love vending machines! I wish everything was sold in vending machines. Except maybe fresh meat). More particularly, how the flap at the bottom of chocolate bar dispensing machines is too stiff to open properly with one hand. I have often thought this, struggling to retrieve my Twix bar from the bottom of the machine while trying to minimise contact with said flap, to avoid germs. Okay I know we should all have some germs otherwise we’ll develop asthma and allergies to chocolate bars, but really, if we ever get TB back in this country I’m wearing disposable gloves when I retrieve my goodies. How many germs could there possibly be on a vending machine flap, I hear you ask? Well I don’t know – that might make a good thesis for someone. What I resent is the extreme contact which your hand is forced to make with that damned bit of lead-enforced plastic, or whatever they make it out of, and the way it wants to snap back on your fingers and chop them off. Mind you, if I was a vending machine I wouldn’t want to let any Twix bars out of my little pouch either.

Now that little rant is probably a good example of what the book is like, except it’s better. (The book, not my rant, that would be a bit show-offy of me to say, wouldn’t it?). It is always a pleasure to see in print the expression of things you have privately thought but not thought worth the trouble of expressing to anyone else. One thing, though – the lengthy footnotes did annoy me. They are a clever tool in this book and I wouldn’t argue for their removal, it’s just that they make you lose track of the narrative and you are forced to place thumbs and fingers in between different pages so you can flip back and forth between text and footnote…

Rating: 6.5 out of 10
A book that will make you respect the inventors of elevators, perforated paper and above all, vending machines.