The Andromeda Strain

I remember in real time, I read the book.

Rare for me to read a book before I see the movie, but I did that for The Andromeda Strain of Michael Crichton before he was famous with Jurassic Park and whatever his doctor show was on TV.

The Andromeda Strain was a sample return from space.

And it was a bug that got out of the capsule, and it didn't bode well for the town where the capsule landed.

Well, watch out for Texas then, because that's where the sample's going.

The boy has an MD.

So he knew what he was doing.

It was a fun, terrifying story, the Andromeda strain.

Back in the 1990s, the US hospital drama ER, initials for Emergency Room, made stars of George Clooney and Noel Wiley, among others.

It was the brainchild of the author Michael Crichton, whose books include The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park.

ER ran for 15 years until 2009.

Now spin forward another 15 or so years and the debut of The Pit.

Michael Crichton was a perfect example of...

Something I envy is that somebody who has an idea – now, the idea is never wholly, like, original in the sense that, like, nobody had ever thought about using – genetic material from trapped in amber to recreate dinosaurs that that had been in disgust i mean i still think from the last time i looked a couple months ago there are still people claiming that they're going to do that but there's still a scientific consensus like no there's not going to be a jurassic park but like he read an idea just like the andromeda strain he read about an idea he read about something in the science and then he did something most of us are unable to do which is he sat down his butt in front of a typewriter, I guess eventually in front of a computer, and he wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote a serviceable novel with a plot and people and yeah, romance and things like that.

And he was famous.

So it was not possible that no matter what, a timeline was no, no Michael Crichton fan, at least online, you know, thinks timeline is the peak of his career.

It's got some great actors in it and actresses, and it's entertaining.

But as an adaptation, I think it falls short of the mark.

So if you want to hear us talking about an adaptation of a Michael Crichton movie or book that's not as compromised in terms of the science, maybe overly scientific, check out when the three of us talked about The Andromeda Strain, which you can find over at weirdingwaymedia.com, where this show and so many other shows are.

can be found, including required viewing, which the professor and I do once a week.

So one of the things Josh Lederberg said was, wow, we're sending men to the moon.

What if we unwittingly took our microbes to the moon with those men to the moon and infected a life form if there is any on the moon? Or conversely, what if there is some kind of microbial life on the moon and those guys bring it back with them, right? So that was the beginning of Michael Crichton's book, Andromeda Strain.

Love the book and the movie.

And that has been a constant question.

Just for those who

didn't know, in the Andromeda Strain, there is a space probe that returns to Earth, but it had been contaminated by a space virus.

And it basically killed everyone in the town where this thing landed.

And it became a major public health issue, how to deal with it, what they're doing, why.

I read Lost World.

I read The Andromeda Strain.

I think I read Sphere.

I think I read Congo.

That means into the, into the, oh, you didn't know? Oh, you've seen Soylent Green? You read his book? Crichton's book, written in the, was it 60s or 70s, more important today than it was written? Not Soylent Green.

The Andromeda Strain.

What am I thinking? Soylent Green's where we're all going.

The Andromeda Strain.

Look up when the Andromeda Strain was written for me.

Wait till I read this article.

You're like, oh, that's alexjoneslime.com. We don't believe that.

The novel ends three pages later.

In Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, the destruct mechanism is disabled on page 319.

The novel ends five pages later.

And our classic writers knew about the short walk away, too.

Today, I have the distinct pleasure of welcoming Cherokee author Daniel H. Wilson back to the show to talk about his new book, Hole in the Sky.

We spoke to him last on episode 45 about his book, The Andromeda Evolution, which was a sequel to Michael Crichton's classic, The Andromeda Strain.

While Daniel always brings his Cherokee perspective into his work, I think it's fair to say that his new book does this more than usual, pushing the techno-thriller genre that he's best known for into unique new territory, which has been described as techno-traditional, though I'm not sure that fully describes what he's doing here.

Hole in the Sky is an alien First Contact story from a culture and history that has already experienced both the strangeness and the horror of First Contact.

And so I kind of had a lot of complicated feelings about it.

And I wanted to explore it in a thriller.

And I should mention, the last book I wrote was a sequel to the Andromeda strain.

So I worked with Crichton's estate to do that.

Yeah, the underground doesn't reach here.

Another person who I feel like was influenced by the, just kind of the way this thing is structured is Michael Crichton in something like The Andromeda Strain.

Just in the fact

that this thing starts out as this kind of small incident.