The Andromeda Strain

🪐 the academic feel to the book was very different yet interesting. really enjoyed it!

My favorite of his books.

I found Andromeda Strain to be an interesting book. It read like a real account in the beginning and then slowly became a fictional narration. It was a struggle between suspending disbelief and thinking that what I was reading was an account of real events.

One of my all time favorites. The footnotes alone make this book a fantastic fiction of blurred lines between the imagined and reality. Rereading post pandemic made Chricton more of an oracle.

The most perfect amount of tension.

I would have DNF’d this if it wasn’t assigned reading for my science fiction class. I literally could not have cared less about any of the characters (all middle-aged white military and medical men) and the scientific explanations were almost incomprehensible to the average non-scientist. It was long-winded and boring, no matter how the author tried to make it interesting with graphs and charts and politics. It came across as pretentious. Not a fan.

Book C in my A-Z of authors was The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton. I am a massive fan of his. I own every season of ER and have read quite a few of his books. It always amazes me how each one is so different. I'd seen the film of the book first, and I know that's normally a bad idea but in this case I think it helped. I enjoyed the story. Crichton doesn't dumb it down for his readers. In fact, sometimes it's quite hard work to follow all the science but he explains well the process for each machine. However, sometimes this was boring. There were charts and results printed alongside the text which more often that not meant nothing to me. I would've preferred a character to just tell me the results. I also wish more detail had gone into the description of the dead bodies in Piedmont. This was one of the initial attractions after seeing the film. We're also not told very much about the characters in the book. The only ones we really follow are Stone and Hall but by half way I'd forgotten what their specialities were. Generally it was a good book. Crichton's brain is absolutely brilliant, but sometimes he gets so caught up in the science, he forgets he has to tell a story too.

Une lecture divertissante.

Absolutely love the full novel of The Andromeda Strain, but the abridged audiobook removed (in my opinion) some vital details from the actual story.

Great scientific suspense story. This really was a page turner, which I am quite surprised about given the scientific content. Crichton did a great job here with delivering some high science-tech jargon to your average fiction reader. I didn’t feel lost in any of the explanations, on the contrary I was able follow along quite closely and make small predictions as the story unfolded. My only complaint would be how weak the characterization was. Tough to do in under 300 pages with so many characters. The only character I was excited about was only mentioned and didn’t make into the lab lol. The old man was the most exciting character, everyone else was rather boring.

I'm fairly certain that I gave this four stars because I'm a lab nerd. This book hit all the sweet spots for me! Bacteriology, microbiology... Some if my favorite sections of the lab all in a rather entertaining and obviously well researched book. It was a but short, to me, and I would imagine it might get a bit too much into the science stuff if that's not your thing, but I thoroughly enjoyed it!

** spoiler alert ** 3.5 but you know the drill... It was nice to read again a medical thriller, is that the genre? 🤔 Anyways, always loved these because I find natural sciences fascinating. The ending tho, a bit... simple and easy. Still a nice enjoyable book. :)

I dove straight into this book without reading the "First Published..." etc like I normally do. So, I was a bit confused when he started talking about computer screens you touch with a light pen! This book hasn't aged well in terms of technology, but, if you can get past that and transpose some of the old stuff with new stuff you've seen in holidaywood or newer books, it's a cracking read. [return][return]I did, however, feel that the end was a *little* bit of a let down. I think it was trying for a War of the Worlds twist at the end, but it just didn't seem worth it.[return][return]Read the book as it's a good crack, but don't be surprised if the end creeps up on you quickly and then goes out with a whimper!

This book definitely delivers on the promise of "a hair-raising experience." Crichton is a master of creating suspense and holding secrets until a good way into the book. That said, this was not one of my favorites. While the book started favorably enough, it lost its suspense about 200 pages in. While I thoroughly enjoyed the segues into biological studies, they tended to detract from the main story - so much so that once I was 5/6 through the book, I began to think, "He's running out of room to create a really smash-up ending." The unfortunate result is that I hardly felt any suspense during what should have been a climactic ending. A good (and fast read), but definitely not the late Crichton's best work.

Lots of build up with little to no pay-off; the potential meaning of the ending is very interesting, but that's subjective speculation, and other readers may not derive the same.