Published by Harper on November 12, 2019
I read The Andromeda Strain a few years after its 1969 publication, when I was still relatively young. The novel, the first that Michael Crichton published under his own name, is generally credited as the first technothriller, or at least the first that was widely read. The novel purports to assemble information from reports, transcripts, and other official documents that intermix with narrative storytelling in the voice of a documentarian who recounts a crisis narrowly averted. Crichton produced an uneven body of work during his career but The Andromeda Strain stands out both as his best novel and as an important contribution to science fiction.
The Andromeda Evolution is written as a sequel. It adopts the same quasi-documentary storytelling technique as the original. Unlike the original, the story has little credibility, fails as a thriller, and isn’t nearly as inventive as the work Daniel H. Wilson has published under his own name. Of course, Crichton’s name appears in a much larger font than Wilson’s on the cover, despite Crichton’s death more than ten years ago.
The original Andromeda infection involved a microorganism of extraterrestrial origin. The microorganism is deadly but the novel creates a medical mystery as scientists try to understand why an alcoholic and a ceaselessly crying infant survived exposure. The answer to that mystery provides a plot point that creeps into the ending of The Andromeda Evolution.
The novel begins with something that looks like a structure rising from the Amazon jungle. The military scientists who are keeping an eye out for evidence of the original Andromeda infection decide that the phenomenon is Andromeda related. The original team of Andromeda scientists was led by Dr. Jeremy Stone. His son, James Stone, is a last-minute addition to the team of scientists who are sent into the Amazon to investigate the phenomenon. It turns out to be related to the original microorganism, although its evolution accounts for the novel’s title.
Meanwhile, on the International Space Station, a disabled astronaut named Sophie Kline is doing work in a secret lab involving the original microorganism. The notion is that the microorganism, should anything go wrong, will be unable to bother anybody if it is in orbit. Somehow none of the people who vet astronauts noticed that Kline is completely bonkers. She has cooked up a wild plan that involves the phenomenon in the Amazon. The outcome of her scheme would be devastating for the human race and probably not all that good for terrestrial nonhumans. That she would get this far in implementing her scheme without anyone noticing is mind-boggling.
The intrepid scientists and some military types begin a plodding adventure through the jungle that will not end well for most of them. Their deaths are not particularly clever and thus don’t do much to stir the reader’s sense of dread. Unfortunately, the only character I liked — the only one who struck me as being an interesting and credible scientist — is fated to die.
Along the way, the team picks up an indigenous kid named Tupa whose parents and tribe are presumably wiped out by the evolved Andromeda thing. The rest of the novel is primarily an Indiana Jones-style adventure story as Stone and his partner-in-science-and-romance, Nidhi Vedala, battle against the creation they discover in the jungle before taking on the batty Kline aboard the space station.
How the scientists get to the space station is one of the aspects of this novel that stretch credibility beyond the threshold of my willingness to suspend disbelief. Since the story seemed more like a cartoon than a credible thriller, it had me leaning back in the Barcalounger rather than sitting on the edge of my seat.
I imagine the novel’s ending is meant to be heartwarming, but it is so predictable and unbelievable that heartburning might be a better description. The novel sets up the potential for a third book in the series that really doesn’t need to be written. With no particular attachment to the characters and no reason to overcome my skepticism about the plot, I can’t recommend The Andromeda Evolution, despite my admiration of some of Wilson’s other work.
NOT RECOMMENDED