Michael Crichton eventually wrote about it in an essay about AIDS: In the early years of AIDS the virus was often referred to as an Andromeda Strain, and the novel was erroneously cited as predicting such new strains. The term became synonymous with any potential pandemic: marburg, ebola, bird flu, and so on. In the years after the novel’s release, any newly-discovered biological agent tended to be referred to as an Andromeda Strain.
Major technological crises proceed with complete indifference to personalities. A skilled leader-one that is more technically trained, or smarter, or quicker-acting-is unlikely to be able to deal with an oil spill better than anyone else. We tend to think that crises can be resolved by good leaders, but technological crises often cannot be influenced at all. These crises, he said, occur irrespective of the particular people involved, and their particular personalities. Once it starts, it will run its course and little can be done to alter or modify it. He argued that we need to understand there is a category of technological error-an oil spill is a good example-that is best dealt with by never letting it happen in the first place. He intended to give a fictional example of a particular kind of scientific crisis-one that, once begun, can’t be satisfactorily ended. Thus the pattern of political controversy that would follow much of Michael Crichton’s work was established very early.īut as Michael Crichton repeatedly explained, his purpose in writing had nothing to do with politics. In the US, many critics drew the opposite conclusion: its Harvard-trained author was located firmly in the establishment, and many questioned whether Michael Crichton was acting unethically, by giving the military new ideas for biological weapons. Politics, not science, was the reason the novel was viewed as a radical left-wing, anti-American, anti-militarist work. But I didn’t know that when I was writing the book. After a while I stopped telling people that I had made it all up, because it turned out that it was based on true things. When Bob Wise set out to make the movie, his researchers assumed that everything was true, too, so they went out and found all the things the book talked about - the underground laboratory, the computer programs, the biometrics security. When the book was published, lots of people thought it was true. (I did not yet know how rare good editing is.)
I began to feel persecuted by these demands, which seemed interminable, and increasingly nit-picking. And after that, he would just call me every few days: rewrite the beginning of this chapter. It yielded a very cold, detached book that was also weirdly convincing.Īfter I sent Bob Gottlieb the rewritten manuscript, he called up and said I had done very good work, and therefore I only had to write half of it all over again. And I began to imitate that factual, non-fiction writing style. Where would I have gotten the information? How much would I know? And in what style would I write it, if it were true? I began to look at science non-fiction writing by people like Walter Sullivan, who wrote for the New York Times. But he started me thinking about what The Andromeda Strain would look like, if the story were true. I wasn’t really sure what that meant I had read New Yorker profiles and found they varied widely. So I gulped, and said I would rewrite it according to his directions.īob said that the novel should read like a New Yorker profile, that it should be absolutely convincing. I was twenty-five at the time, and Bob was only in his early thirties, but he had a very large reputation as an editor because he had edited Catch 22.
Bob said he would not even consider publishing it unless I was willing to completely rewrite it from beginning to end. Simpson inserted an uncharacteristically lighthearted footnote saying that organisms in the upper atmosphere had never been used by science-fiction writers to make a story.Įventually I finished a whole draft and sent it to my new editor, Bob Gottleib, at Knopf. The story itself was originally suggested by a footnote in George Gaylord Simpson’s scholarly work The Major Features of Evolution. And all because I was so fond of the title I couldn’t abandon it.
I worked on draft after draft, never completing one, obsessing about the project. I thought The Andromeda Strain was a great title, but for many years I had no book to go with it.