Eerie, frightening, suspenseful......and (even though the book is overly 50 years old now), in this day & age of the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic, more relevant than ever.
RANDOM STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS:
—p. 19: “At the time of Andromeda, there had never been a crisis of biological science, and the first Americans faced with the facts were not disposed to think in terms of one.” Prescient vis-a-vis COVID-19 novel Coronavirus?
—p. 20: MAJ Manchek is an Army officer, nor Air Force, yet he keeps getting posted at Air Force bases (Wright-Pat, Vandy) and specialises in spacecraft??
—p. 31: “A mathematician once joked that binary numbers were the way people who have only two fingers count.”
—p. 38: “Mrs. Stone was annoyed: she had been raised in official Washington, where one’s second cup of coffee, offered pointedly without cognac, was accepted as a signal to go home. Unfortunately, she thought, academics did not follow the rules.” Ha, absent-minder professors and academic stuffed-shirts!
—p. 44: “Physically, Stone was a thin, balding man with a prodigious memory that catalogued scientific facts and blue jokes with equal facility.” Haha, bully for the blue jokes!
European Economic Community, wow, the predecessor of the EU.
—p. 49: “Barely two years after his letter to the President, Stone was satisfied that ‘this country has the capability to deal with an unknown biologic agent.’ He professed himself pleased with the response of Washington and the speed with which his ideas had been implemented. But privately, he admitted to friends that it had been almost too easy, that Washington had agreed to his plans almost too readily.” Prescient? Is life imitating art now with COVID-19?
—p. 52: “Vandenberg is used for west-to-east orbits, as opposed to Cape Kennedy, which launches east-to-west;” hmmm, interesting, I wonder if this is still true?
—p. 53: Ah, back in the day when the Indian city was still called Bombay and not Mumbai.
—p. 54: “though he could not balance his own checkbook, mathematicians often came to him for help in resolving highly abstract problems.” Haha, sounds like my own Dad (God rest his soul)
—p. 58: “As he grew older, however, Leavitt had stopped traveling. Public health, he was fond of saying, was a young man’s game; when you got your fifth case of intestinal amebiasis, it was time to quit.” Gadzooks!
—p. 78: “It gave him a strange feeling to see the wrist and leg sliced open, the chest exposed—but no bleeding. There was something wild and inhuman about that. As if bleeding were a sign of humanity. Well, he thought, perhaps it is. Perhaps the fact that we bleed to death makes us human.” Yep, as opposed to octopus, squid, and cuttlefish, which evidently don’t bleed no matter how thoroughly you slice ‘n’ dice ‘em.
—p. 95: “A guard in the corner was making a telephone call; he had a machine gun slung over his shoulder.” Um, as in submachine gun or automatic rifle? Because a true full-sized machine gun is not meant to be casually slung over one shoulder unless you’re built like Hulk Hogan.
—p. 100: “Hall found himself looking at nine of the largest German shepherds he had ever seen.” Okay, but were any of them solid black GSDs? 🐺
—p. 107: “Stone was there, standing stiffly erect and alert, as if he had just taken a cold shower.” Um, any double-entendre intended?
—p. 109: Hudson Institute!
—p. 116: “Then Stone lay down on one of the couches and fell instantly asleep. It was a trick he had learned years before, when he had been conducting experiments around the clock. He learned to squeeze in an hour here, two hours there. He found it useful.” Hmmm, similar to Demo Dick Marcinko’s concept of the “combat nap?”
—p. 181: “‘He’s a book-learning fool, you know. Lawyer. Talks real big, but he hasn’t got the sense God gave a grasshopper’s behind.’” Haha, good one!
—p. 191: Um, a Major is supposed to address a Colonel as “Sir,” not the other way around.
—p. 192: “Goddard Spaceflight Center, outside Washington.” Hey, some kind of good omen job-wise, perhaps?
—p. 243: “SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL ONCE SAID that ‘true genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.’”
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Popular Highlights in this book
A crisis is made by men, who enter into the crisis with their own prejudices, propensities, and predispositions. A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored.Highlighted by 818 Kindle readers- And yet there had never been a biologic crisis. The Andromeda Strain provided the first.Highlighted by 348 Kindle readers
- Leavitt’s Rule of 48 said simply, “All Scientists Are Blind.”Highlighted by 240 Kindle readers
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Please try again later.Top reviews from other countries
Cheerioh
très scientifique mais vraiment prenant, un peu désuet dans le style mais toujours efficace
Reviewed in France on June 29, 2020Joe Canuck
Well written mainstream sci fi based on 50 year old bio tech
Reviewed in Canada on March 9, 2023Marcos
O que dizer do cara que inventou o techno-thriller?
Reviewed in Brazil on May 17, 2023
