The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

        This is suppose to be one of my Sci-Fi month post but I figured it's best if I post it for Throwback Thursday. Let me introduce you to one of my all-time favorite books.

 

Five prominent biophysicists give the United States government an urgent warning: sterilization procedures for returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere.
Two years later, Project Scoop sends seventeen satellites into the fringes of space in order to "collect organisms and dust for study." Then a probe satellite falls to the earth, landing in a desolate area of northeastern Arizona. In the nearby town of Piedmont, bodies lie heaped and flung across the ground, faces locked in frozen surprise. The terror has begun..

My Rating:

Why:

         I've finished this book in under three hours? It's a fairly straight forward novel. Although, it's not your usual storytelling since Crichton used a third person point of view. On his notes for this book, he admitted to thinking about how he would narrate the story if it was real. And that's how he came up with the sort of fact-telling narration that the book is known for. One of the reasons why I love this book is that I believed it was real. It made me feel that the scenario he's describing is happening right now. It was one of those edge of your seat kind of read. The questions that begged to be answered were "what is it?", "what's going to happen now?" and "what are they going to do?" Also, one of the positive things in this book is that even if it has some hardcore science discussion, you won't really feel left out because Crichton tries to explain it in a way that helps us understand. If you like science and feeling stressed out for the duration of reading a story then I highly recommend this book. But if you don't want lengthy explanation of scientific studies/reports then this might not be the book for you. However, I urge you to give it a shot. The Andromeda Strain was responsible for making me fall for sci-fi books. I believe it has the right mix of exciting, educational, and absolutely terrifying.