The Andromeda Strain is Out of This Galaxy

        Well I (Shreyas) am actually not sure since I'm only part of the way through the book, so I don't know whether the pathogen actually came from somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy or not. What I do know however is that I will not stop reading until I finish. There are many things that make The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton and published in 1969 very interesting and fun to read for anyone.

        The book has a unique plot, one which I have not seen in other science fiction movies. In the story, humans are visited by aliens. The aliens aren't the classic short big headed humanoids, but are microscopic pathogens from a different planet. The book opens with a lieutenant that is investigating the small city of Piedmont, Arizona. He arrives at a grisly scene, nearly all 48 of the town's members dead, shortly before dying himself. Extremely detailed thermal satellite images show the same scene. Then the author describes each member in a team of scientists assigned to find out what happened there. All this time the reader is left hanging, wondering what could be the cause of such an event. A few pages later we find out U.S. Government and NASA sent various missions to near-earth space looking for any signs of alien life. Several attempts either crashed or didn't find anything out of the ordinary. The seventh probe however, landed in Arizona, causing the reader to make the connection that it probably was something that came from space to Earth on the probe that is to blame. They examine the town's residents, finding extremely peculiar conditions of the members suggesting this disease is completely different from anything we have encountered on Earth. Only two survivors are found. The author's style of presenting scenes that make us wonder "what's happening?" and slowly introducing new characters and events keeps me ready to read another page.

        Another unique part of this book is that the author included many visuals aside from the regular blocks of text that you see in any book. These help readers visualize what's happening and what the characters are interpreting with their own eyes. An example of this is the author's use of different fonts for different situation. When an officer is getting a formal message from someone else in the government or an automated message, the author uses blockier fonts with plain letters to illustrate the straightforwardness of the messages. In another scene where a major is cracking a telephone number by converting a 87 in base-10 number to a sequence of 0s and 1s, they describe him pulling out a piece of paper and performing calculations. Instead of the author just telling us this, the page includes a list of powers of two in ascending order, and another list where some of those numbers are circled. These powers are the unique subset of all integer powers of two that add up to 87, using this he listed ones next to each circled number and 0s next to each uncircled one. This gave him the telephone number he needed to contact (note that this is not the same as converting to binary, which would entail reversing this sequence so the higher place values are first). This gives clear explanations of each step he used in an easily readable way.

        Overall, Andromeda Strain has been one of my favorite science fiction books, telling about an extraterrestrial bug that has the potential to cause global catastrophe (much worse than COVID). I would highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in science fiction books. If you're not, read it anyway and you will become interested in science fiction.

Citations: Crichton, Michael. The Andromeda Strain. Knopf, May 12, 1969.