43 pages • 1 hour read
Michael CrichtonThe Andromeda Strain
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Day 1—Contact”
Prologue Summary
The Prologue briefly establishes that the following story is “classified top secret” (8). Anyone who views the files without the required security clearance could be imprisoned and fined.
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Country of Lost Borders”
Lieutenant Roger Shawn stands by the side of the road near Piedmont, Arizona, on a winter night. He peers through the binoculars at the quiet town and the empty countryside around it. Spotting nothing, he returns to his van. The vehicle is filled with scientific instruments and a technician named Lewis Crane. They discuss the measurements as they search for a Project Scoop satellite. The Project Scoop satellites are mysterious devices containing secret capsules “intended to analyze the upper atmosphere” and then return to Earth (12). Shawn and Crane track down the satellites that return. Their most recent search has brought them to Piedmont, and their instruments suggest the satellite may be in the town. Birds circle strangely over the town buildings. The men joke nervously about the situation.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Vandenberg”
Three hundred miles away, in the Project Scoop headquarters, Lieutenant Edgar Comroe works the night shift but does not like his dull job. He monitors the progress of the men in Piedmont while reading medical journals to keep up with his professional interest in the effects of high-G accelerations on the human body. Per regulation, Shawn radios to say that the van is about to enter Piedmont to retrieve the satellite. Shawn narrates the journey into the deserted town, and Comroe notices the strain in his colleague’s voice. The two men spot bodies on the street. Comroe tells them to proceed to the satellite and presses the button to call for security. The button also locks Comroe and his skeleton crew in the mission control room. He picks up the telephone and calls the chief duty officer, Major Manchek. Crane and Shawn spot one living person, a man in a white robe wandering between dead bodies. The man walks toward them, and the transmission abruptly ends.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Crisis”
Scientific crises are a relatively new phenomenon. In the sciences, less is understood about biology than chemistry or physics. After World War II, great leaps forward advanced humanity’s understanding of biology, “yet there had never been a biologic crisis” until the Andromeda Strain (18).
The book outlines various crises throughout history. English Prime Minister William Gladstone once asserted that all crises are the same. The beginnings of a crisis often occur long before the resolution. The beginning of the Andromeda Strain crisis can be traced back to the advancements made in rocket technology during World War II. Major Arthur Manchek’s arrival on the scene in Arizona marks the first moment in which someone who was “prepared and disposed to consider a crisis of the most major proportions” learned about the strange events in Piedmont (19).
Manchek listens to the recording from Piedmont while smoking a tobacco pipe. He is tired, stressed, and irritable, which causes him to take a slow and careful approach to the situation. Manchek eliminates every possible explanation as his staff lay out everything they know. He orders a plane to fly over the town to perform a scan.
A spy plane passes over Piedmont to take detailed photographs and readings of the ground below. As the plane dips low over the street, pilot Sam Wilson spots the bodies. He makes a second pass to obtain more information but struggles to look away from the terrifying sight below.
Manchek and Comroe meet with the site’s best reconnaissance interpreter, Jaggers. They examine satellite photographs of Piedmont and notice the many bodies in the street. They also notice that one person has moved toward the van containing Shawn and Crane. The men realize that someone in Piedmont is still alive. Wilson arrives and hands over the data he collected, including video footage of the man in the robe. Manchek declares a state of emergency.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Alert”
Manchek makes a secret call. He has been a part of the Wildfire Project for nearly a year. Though he has forgotten many of the project’s details, its aim was to investigate “possible extraterrestrial life forms” on the satellites that returned from space (26). The mysterious project is run by government scientists. Manchek calls the coded number he was given in case of emergencies. The time is “exactly twelve midnight” (27).
Part 1 Analysis
The Andromeda Strain does not have a single main character. Instead, the book weaves together the perspectives of several key individuals. The first two characters introduced are Shawn and Crane, but they are killed in the opening chapters. From this point, the narrative turns to Manchek, Stone, and the other scientists, jumping from character to character. This structure reveals the scope of the crisis: The alien organism is not an issue pertaining to one individual, one town, or one country. The entire human species is potentially at risk from the Andromeda Strain, and the narrative skips between viewpoints to illustrate the breadth of lives affected by the crisis. Additionally, the narrative surveys the chain of command as the crisis worsens. Shawn and Crane are lowly figures in the army, but increasingly important people are involved until Manchek, the president, and Nobel Prize-winning scientist Jeremy Stone are involved. This gradual escalation in rank and importance hints at the true danger of the problem at hand.
The story is not told in a conventional manner. As the brief Prologue made clear, the book is meant to be read as an incident report. This report is phrased in the third person and written in the past tense, but the narrator is not an objective figure. The narrator points out mistakes and errors made by characters, as the eventual consequences of their actions are already known. The narrator can reflect on and analyze the story as it unfolds because the book is framed as a lesson for humanity. The narrator reveals top-secret information and insists the audience must learn from the mistakes of the Wildfire Project. Though the report seems to be a scientific endeavor, the comments on mistakes and errors reveal the innate fallibility of humanity. Even the most intelligent and capable people make errors, but only the very best are able to learn from these mistakes.
Even though The Andromeda Strain is framed as a bureaucratic report, the narrator still includes many literary flourishes. As well as the general sense of foreboding created by the mention of mistakes, the circling buzzards create a doom-laden atmosphere around the town of Piedmont. The narration does not utilise the dry, perfunctory tone expected from a government investigation. Instead, these literary flourishes are included by the narrator almost as though they cannot be helped. However, these flourishes do serve a purpose; the descriptions of circling birds and mentions of cigarettes have a scientific relevance that becomes apparent later in the book. The inclusion of figurative devices in a dull bureaucratic report also stresses that the Andromeda Strain story is highly important, that understanding every detail is key if the characters and the audience are to learn anything from the incident.
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By Michael Crichton
