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Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

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Название:
The Andromeda Evolution
Автор:
Майкл Крайтон
Издательство:
HarperCollins
Жанр:
Фантастика и фэнтези / Триллер / thriller_medical / на английском языке
Год:
2019
ISBN:
нет данных
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The Andromeda Evolution: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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**Fifty years after The Andromeda Strain made Michael Crichton a household name --and spawned a new genre, the technothriller--the threat returns, in a gripping sequel that is terrifyingly realistic and resonant.**
“The Andromeda Strain,” as millions of fans know, described the panicked efforts to stop the spread of an alien microparticle that first turned human blood to sawdust and then dissolved plastics. (Spoiler alert: Humanity survived.) For half a century, a mutated strain has floated harmlessly in Earth’s atmosphere while a special team of watchers maintained Project Eternal Vigilance.
When “The Andromeda Evolution” opens, a drone spots a metallic-looking shape growing up out of the Amazon jungle, “the whole of it gleaming like a beetle’s waxy shell in the rising midday sun.” Situated along the equator, this giant structure is located far from any development, deep in an area inhabited only by tribes who have never made contact with modern civilization. Mass spectrometry data taken by military satellites indicates that the quickly swelling mutation is “an almost exact match to the Andromeda strain.”
(HarperCollins)
A scientist announces, “There is an alien intelligence behind this,” which I have often thought when I clean out the refrigerator. “We are facing an unknown enemy who is staging an attack over the gulf of a hundred-thousand years and across our solar system and likely the cosmos. This is war.” The ability to fathom this threat is not as crucial as the ability to deliver such lines with a straight face.
Wilson suggests that a nuclear strike is problematic because the anomaly is on foreign soil, though such diplomatic awkwardness probably wouldn’t matter if we’re all dead. But the bigger problem is that the anomaly feeds off energy, which a nuclear explosion would provide in abundance. Given that predicament, humanity has just one hope to avoid what the military calls “the ‘gray goo’ scenario” that would kill everyone on Earth: Project Wildfire.
The elite Wildfire crew will trudge into the jungle and try to keep the planet from being infected. In accordance with the requirements of the inevitable movie version, the Wildfire team consists of a small group of contentious scientists who are dangerously ill-equipped to trudge into the jungle. Their leader is an interesting character: a woman who rose from the slums of Mumbai to become a world-renowned expert in nanotechnology. But alas, the rest of her crew are drawn from a fetid petri dish of stereotypes: a handsome white man with a tragic connection to the first Andromeda crisis; an Asian woman with a “keen intellect and piercing black eyes” who should not be trusted; and an older black man who offers our hero sage counsel before, sadly, perishing. Naturally, there’s also a villain with special needs motivated by deep-seated rage at her crippled body.
Predictable as this group is, their adventure is at least as exciting as Crichton’s original story — and considerably more active. The jungle provides an ominous setting for some spooky scenes. And the episodes set in outer space are particularly thrilling. (Rereading “The Andromeda Strain” last week, I realized that I had forgotten how cramped the story is.)
But “The Andromeda Evolution” genuflects appropriately to the 1969 novel that instantly infected pop culture. With little genetic decay, Wilson replicates Crichton’s tone and tics, particularly his wide-stance mansplaining. Each chapter begins with a quotation by Crichton selected, apparently, for its L. Ron Hubbard-like profundity, e.g. “There is a category of event that, once it occurs, cannot be satisfactorily resolved.” And the pages — sanitized of wit — are larded with lots of Crichtonian technical explanations, weapons porn, top-secret documents and so many acronyms that I began to worry Wilson had accidentally left the caps lock on.
As you might expect from a guy with a PhD in robotics, Wilson throws in lots of cool gizmos, too. A slavish flock of miniature drones plays a crucial role in the plot, and a massive technological breakthrough eventually takes center stage. But at other times, Wilson plays too fast and loose with the biological laws of his own pathologic crisis. For instance, as the science team prepares to move deep into the infected jungle, their leader says, “Tuck your pants into your boots and wear gloves” — the same precautions I would take to build a snowman.
But who cares? These various lapses may be irritating, but ultimately they don’t derail what is a fairly ingenious adventure. As the story swings from military jargon to corny implausibility, the fate of the Earth hangs from a thread of rapidly mutating cells. Finally, our hero says the words we never tire of hearing: “Technically, it’s doable. It’s insane. But it’s doable.” That portentous claim launches one last spectacular scene that would make Crichton proud.

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—SHERRI CRICHTON

References

Listed below is a selected bibliography of unclassified documents, reports, and references that formed the background to the book.

DAY ZERO

1.Crichton, Michael. The Andromeda Strain. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1969. Print.

2.Cuvington, P. “Civilizational Self-Destruction: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.” Journal of Anthropological Philosophy 11, no. 4 (2007): 81–89.

3.Diaz, K., et al. “Unmanned Aerial Mass Spectrometry for Sampling of Volcanic Plumes.” Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry 24, no. 2 (2015): 210–26.

4.Herbert, N., R. Dejong, and J. Qin. “Marvin: A Vision-Based Rapid Aerial Terrain Mapping Algorithm.” GIScience & Remote Sensing 38, no. 1 (2013): 26–51.

5.Holland, R. J., and B. Moore. “A Practical Experience of the Law of Large Numbers.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 31, no. 2 (1947): 25.

6.Jax, Renaldo, and Martin C. Williams. Automated Logistics and Decision Analysis (ALDA) . No. TR-87. MIT Operations Research Center, 1973.

7.LeBlanc, Jerry. “The Strain of Michael Crichton.” Southwest Scene , May 1971, 18–23.

8.Lee, R. S., B. Waldinger, W. Dorn, and U. Mitchell. “Ultra-Wideband Synthetic-Aperture Radar Interferometry.” Computer Graphics and Image Processing 14, no. 1 (1998): 22–30.

9.McCallum, B. “Geo-Printing: Using Ultra High-Resolution Optical Imaging to 3-D-Print Highly Accurate Terrain Models.” Journal of Geoscience Education 42, no. 1 (2014): 156–78.

10.Pavard, F. “Intergenerational Discounting and Inherited Inequity.” In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Social Economics , 226–32. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1982.

11.Singh, A. L., R. Bishop, and A. Nilsson. “Tactile Spatial Acuity: Discrimination Thresholds of the Human Lip, Tongue, and Fingers.” Journal of Neuroscience. 11, no. 8 (2016): 7014–37.

DAY ONE

1.Wise, Robert, dir. The Andromeda Strain, featuring the documentaries “The Andromeda Strain: Making the Film” and “Portrait of Michael Crichton.” Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2000. DVD.

2.Chaloner, J. B. “Forensic Analysis of Skylab Initial Ascent: What Went Wrong.” In Proceedings of the Tenth Lunar and Planetary Science Conference , 143–57. Houston: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979.

3.Heitjan, U., et al. “Classifying Emotions using FCM and FKM.” International Journal of Computers and Communications 1, no. 2 (2007): 21–25.

4.Koza, D. E., M. Teller, and T. Wright. “Hall Thrusters for High-Power Solar Electric Propulsion.” Physics of Plasmas 8, no. 5 (2001): 2347–54.

5.Kroupa, B. and V. Williams. ISS Cupola Window TCS Analysis and Design . SAE Technical Paper No. 1999–01–2003, 1999.

6.Liu, Bo, and P. Etzioni. “Adaptive Super-Resolution Imaging via Stochastic Optical Reconstruction.” Science 222, no. 4853 (2010): 610–13.

7.Puri, M., A. Goldenberg, and N. Serban. “Advances in Treatment of Juvenile Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: A Review.” Acta neuropathologica 104, no. 3 (2012): 359–72.

8.Smith, S. “Emergency Debris Avoidance Strategies.” AIP Conference Proceedings 595, no. 1 (2001): 480–92.

9.Stender, K., and T. Reddy. “The Mental Prosthesis: Assessing Juvenile Adoption Success of the Kinetics-V Brain-Computer Interface.” IEEE Transactions on Rehabilitation Engineering 8, no. 2 (2000): 144–49.

10.Vedala, Nidhi, et al. “Demonstration of a Metamaterial with Zero Optical Backscatter.” Nano Letters 11, no. 4 (2017): 1606–9.

DAY TWO

1.Bramose, R. O., et al. “Robonaut: NASA’s Humanoid Telepresence Platform.” IEEE Intelligent Systems and Their Applications 14, no. 5 (2000): 47–53.

2.Odhiambo, H. An Introduction to Modern Xenogeology . Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

3.Rezek, John, and David Sheff. “Playboy Interview: Michael Crichton.” Playboy Magazine , January 1999, 73–75.

4.Stone, J. “CANARY: Towards Autonomous, Self-Charging MAV Swarms for Environment Mapping over Extended Loiter Times.” Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems 51, no. 1 (2016): 329–43.

5.Taplin, John. Robber Barons of the Jungle: A History of the Amazon Rubber Boom . New York: New York University Press, 2010.

DAY THREE

1.Besag, Ixna. “Traditional Mythology of Amazonia: Tupi-Guarani Family Lore.” Ethnohistory 37, no. 2 (1998): 299–322.

2.Dawid, Stephan. “Gesture-Enhanced Universal Language Translator System.” US Patent Application No. 11/342,482.

3.Heitjan, W., et al. “A Bioactive Paper Sensor for Discriminative Detection of Neurotoxins.” Analytical Chemistry 71, no. 13 (2009): 5272–83.

4.Novick, S., and R. Lindley. “An Oral History of Traditional Medicines in the Javari Valley River Basin.” Fitoterapia 60, no. 2 (1999): 124–29.

5.Odhiambo, H. “Adaptive Cancellation of Rhythmic Vibration across Distributed Seismic Data.” Geophysics 46, no. 10 (2013): 1577–90.

6.Pole, Christopher. “Flight Testing of the F/A-18 E/F Multirole Fighter Aircraft Variants.” Proceedings of the IEEE 7, no. 19 (2001): 198–204.

DAY FOUR

1.Harville, D. “Parallel Microhydroelectric Power Generation in Off-Grid Environments.” Power Technology and Engineering (formerly Hydrotechnical Construction ) 17, no. 10 (2013): 495–99.

2.Lonchev, M. “Pillion: An Image-Based Architecture for General Intelligence.” Artificial Intelligence 44, no. 1 (2017): 1–64.

3.Long, A. C. “Assessing Intuition: Exposing the Impact of Gut Feelings.” Human Relations 54, no. 1 (2011): 67–96.

4.Pittman, Rachel. “Delay of Gratification and Anticipatory Focus: Behavioral and Neural Correlates.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 16 (2011): 13288–300.

DAY FIVE

1.Diehl, Digby. “Man on the Move/Michael Crichton.” Signature Magazine , February 1978, 36–37.

2.Drayson, V. L. “Does Man Have a Future?” Tech. Rev. 119:1–13.

3.Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin. Dreams of Earth and Sky. Moscow, 1895.

About the Authors

MICHAEL CRICHTON(1942–2008) was the author of the bestselling novels The Terminal Man , The Great Train Robbery , Jurassic Park , Sphere , Disclosure , Prey , State of Fear , Next , and Dragon Teeth , among many others. His books have sold more than 200 million copies worldwide, have been translated into forty languages, and have provided the basis for fifteen feature films. He wrote and directed Westworld , The Great Train Robbery , Runaway , Looker , and Coma , and created the hit television series ER . Michael Crichton remains the only person to simultaneously have the number one book, film, and television series in a given year.

DANIEL H. WILSONis a Cherokee citizen and author of the New York Times bestselling Robopocalypse and its sequel, Robogenesis , as well as ten other books. He recently wrote the Earth 2: Society comic book series for DC Comics. Wilson earned a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as master’s degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. He lives in Portland, Oregon.