The Andromeda Strain

Oh, so he was already well entrenched in Hollywood then.

Well, Andromeda Strain, I think, is sort of the key point where he's decided he's not going to be a regular doctor.

Yeah, I think Andromeda Strain is where the people at med school learned that he was right.

Yeah, that's right.

Right, I remember that.

I want to restore it to the way it looked like such a modern complaint.

It was kind of funny to see it.

Um, so everything about this book is fake, but because he has, uh, he's obviously been on a movie set at this point, right? And I don't know if he was hanging out, you know, shadowing Robert Wise, who's filming the movie that was shot partially in the desert, the Andromeda Strain, right? It was set in a small town, largely.

So what I try to do is to just basically, you know, tell stories about science and not just what we know, but how we know it.

And that's kind of what I've tried to do in this book about what could happen if some people ever decide to leave Earth.

Because looking at the book and looking at the recent giant leaps in what is perhaps possible, it strikes me that science fiction and that whole thing about being Martian, Martian Chronicles, Buzz Aldrin, get your ass to Mars, etc.

It is now becoming in a way that in the 60s, the Gemini, the Mercury, the Apollo program, it suddenly captured the imagination, which kind of... sort of went quite after Skylab and obviously the space shuttles.

But it's front and centre of all our dreams and desires.

I agree.

I think the psychological aspects of deep space exploration are super important.

And I have a whole chapter in the book where I talk about that and some of the really fascinating work that people are doing now on Earth to try to prepare for that, to understand what goes into the mindset of a space explorer, of a space settler.

It's Outbreak.

It's Andromeda Strain.

And if you take any one of the books that Michael Crichton has written-

[laughs]

Jurassic Park was a massive success.

And don't people talk about how scientifically precise and good and clinical and like tension there was in the Andromeda strain? He wrote that too, right? Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

work out that way.

Let's see here.

So he did the Jurassic Park, the Andromeda Strain...

The book was fantastic.

And one of

Rob's favorite ones, Andromeda Strain, I think is a Michael Crichton.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was running through my head.

I'm like, have I read that? I did just reread Andromeda Strain.

Fantastic book.

Boring movie.