The Andromeda Strain

The Andromeda Strain is a 1969 novel by Michael Crichton, his first novel under his own name and his sixth novel overall. It documents the outbreak of a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism in Arizona and the team of scientists investigating it. The book is framed as a report from a secret government project, which the scientists are part of, and contains primarily text-based computer imagery illustrating the results of various tests on the organism. The Andromeda Strain appeared in the New York Times Best Seller list, establishing Michael Crichton as a genre writer, and as an early example of the techno-thriller genre. Plot A team from an Air Force base is deployed to recover a military satellite that has returned to Earth, but contact is lost abruptly. Aerial surveillance reveals that everyone in Piedmont, Arizona, the town closest to where the satellite landed, is apparently dead. The duty officer of the base tasked with retrieving the satellite suspects it returned with an extraterrestrial contaminant and recommends activating "Wildfire", a protocol for a government-sponsored team of scientists intended to contain threats of this nature. The Wildfire team, led by Dr. Jeremy Stone, believes that the satellite—intentionally designed to capture upper-atmosphere microorganisms for bio-weapon exploitation—returned with a deadly microorganism that kills through nearly instantaneous blood clotting. Upon investigating Piedmont, the team discovers the townspeople either died in mid-stride or went "quietly nuts" and committed bizarre suicides. Two survivors—the sick, Sterno-addicted, geriatric Peter Jackson and the constantly bawling infant Jamie Ritter—are biological opposites who somehow survived the organism.