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“old-time” feel about it, being a 60s jobbie and all, but not just because the technology described is so obviously now out-of-date.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

Slaughterhouse 5 (2003)

By Kurt Vonnegut
I think I’ll find it difficult to say anything meaningful about this book because although it’s written in an amusing style it is about terrible things – the experiences of members of the American army during the fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War. Vonnegut himself was in Dresden at this time, as he says in the first chapter, but writes the story through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain’s assistant who became a successful optometrist after returning from the War but who also became “unstuck in time” – he may be in Dresden during the war one minute, and then 40 years ahead in his life the next, writing letters to the local paper about the planet Tralfamadore and how he was kidnapped by its inhabitants and kept in an intergalactic zoo for over 6 months. It manages to be both light and tragic simultaneously. Hmm I’m not sure what to say next, only that I thought this book was excellent and I will be reading more of Kurt Vonnegut soon. Although it has some science fiction overtones, it is primarily a book about how horrible people are to each other, so I don’t think despisers of science-fiction should worry.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Fahrenheit 451 (2004)

By Ray Bradbury
It was such a relief to read this book after trudging through Ulysses and other books requiring intense concentration. Here’s an author who calls a flame thrower a flame thrower. Guy Montag is a “fireman” who’s job it is to burn books (with flame throwers!!), but who comes to the realisation that maybe there’s something to them after all. It feels a bit lightweight somehow, and even though Bradbury is trying to be all meaningful and so on it reads more like a potboiler - sort of a science fiction Mills and Boon, if that makes sense. (OK it doesn't really). Still, I kind of enjoyed it – I might give Bradbury another go sometime, maybe after I’ve actually finished Ulysses, in order to realign my brain to normalcy.

Rating 6 out of 10