Foxwine is Reading
The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

I thought I'd start off at a walking pace rather than running, so for my first book in my planned 'Foxwine is Reading' series I've chosen The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton. This is mostly because Crichton's books are pretty easy reads for me, and I haven't read this particular book before nor watched the movie based on it.

I'll be going through the book chapter-by-chapter, speculating, nit-picking, and commentating as I go. So all the posts on the book except this one will be tagged #andromeda strain spoilers just in case.

Today I'm covering the book blurb and introduction in this post with chapter one in the next, and there will be a new chapter post each Thursday until I run out of book.


So, The Andromeda Strain. This is what the blurb on my edition says:

The United States government is given a warning by the preeminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere.

Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the outer fringes of space to 'collect organisms and dust for study.' One of them falls to earth, landing in a desolate area of Arizona.

Twelve miles from the landing site, in the town of Piedmont, a shocking discovery is made: the streets are littered with the dead bodies of the town's inhabitants, as if they dropped dead in their tracks.

The terror has begun...

Okay, so a lot of people are going to die, and it's because a satellite sent to collect organisms (and dust) isn't fully decontaminated. Admittedly, the blurb says nothing about whether the people who sent the collector out cared if the material - if it contains any organisms at all, rather than being just space dust - is still alive or not once it comes back for study.

It's also unclear about whether the people are going to die because the outside of the satellite was contaminated, or whether they were exposed to the collected sample. That makes a great deal of difference, so hopefully the plot will make it clear. I suspect from the setup of the first paragraph that it's the outside that had the passenger, even though it would make more sense if the collected sample is the source of contamination, since it would have been much more protected from the heat of re-entry.

We are certainly starting out well.

The introduction, which can't entirely decide whether it's an author's note or part of the story and is also doing double-duty as the book's acknowledgements section indicates that the plot will be covering a five-day period in which a great 'scientific crisis' occurs. I believe this seats Andromeda Strain firmly in the Speculative Fiction genre rather than in full-on Science Fiction, so I'll be tagging it that way.

Michael Crighton also took the time to apologize in advance for any "struggle through an arid passage of technical detail".

Oh yes, this is starting out very well indeed.