The Andromeda Strain

Hardcover, 295 pages

English language

Published Nov. 11, 1969 by Alfred A. Knopf.

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(3 reviews)

The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent 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.

54 editions

reviewed The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton (Andromeda Strain, #1)

Not as good as Jurassic Park

I loved Jurassic Park so I wanted to read Crichton's OG novel. I liked it but not nearly as much as Jurassic Park. I have a queasy stomach when it comes to descriptions about blood, and there was a lot of that in this book. If you want to read it I would recommend dead tree rather than audiobook. Other editions might be better, but the one I listened to there were minutes and minutes of the narrator painstakingly reading tables that I would have jus skimmed over if I was actually reading it.

It's a 1960s near-future sci-fi thriller. The story comes down to a satellite falling form space onto a small Arizona town, and everyone in the town dying because of some space germs that were on it. The rest of the book goes into trying to figure it out, how to contain it, whether or not to …

Classic sci-fi

Content warning Ending revealed

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rated it

Subjects

  • Arizona -- Fiction