They didn’t come in peace: The
Andromeda Strain
When I first read Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda
Strain, the story thrilled me. When I learned something about the craft of
writing, his ability to write such a wonderful hoax while a medical student,
astounded me. But after researching my initial post in 2012 about an extraterrestrial
virus capable of destroying humanity, I learned that Crichton had served a long
apprenticeship, writing half a dozen earlier novels under pseudonyms.
For his Poe Award-winning mystery, A Case of Need,
he used the pen name Jeffrey Hudson (an historical dwarf who, like Crichton,
would play many roles, among them royal courtier, soldier, slave, and political
prisoner). Most of Crichton’s other, earlier novels, were written as John Lange
(“long” – Crichton was six feet nine), with a final one as Michael Douglas
(co-written with his brother Douglas Crichton).
 |
| image: Arek Socha from Pixabay |
The earliest novels predate Andromeda,
published in 1969, but also reflect Crichton’s interests in science and
suspense. Did he know Andromeda would be the book to make him famous,
the one he needed to put his own name to? It’s another mystery, like his mixing
of real and fictional characters in The Andromeda Strain and other
books, or the elaborately specious document he developed to support his
stories.
Documentation such as the acknowledgement of actual
persons like NASA pilot Roger White in support of fictitious organizations such
as Wildfire, the locked-down facility where scientist Dr. Jeremy Stone and his
colleagues confront the deadly and rapidly mutation organization from space
code named “Andromeda strain.” And where, if the scientists fail to contain the
contagion, they and Andromeda will be – in bureaucratic euphemism – “cleansed”
through nuclear annihilation.
(Having fun yet? The character name “Jeffrey Stone” is
that of a real American scientist later surprised to find himself portrayed in
Andromeda.)
Fortunately for all, we’re still here, Andromeda having
celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019.
***
The ever-newborn lure of the world’s end: Station
Eleven
With post-apocalyptic novels everywhere, what makes a
writer with a solid platform of literary novels and essays like Emily St. John Mandel write a novel, and a highly-acclaimed one at that, about the end of the world.
And why are readers drawn to these “narratives of collapse”? These were among
the questions she addressed during an appearance in Dallas in 2015.
Is it a longing for redemption, the hope that “if the
world is remade perhaps (we) have a chance to remake ourselves? Do we hope that
in a moment of extremity, we will express an inner nobility. . . or do we love
post-apocalyptic novels because there are no more frontiers, now that we’ve
mapped every inch of the world that’s above sea level?”
The last possibility seemed particularly apt for a
writer who is also an unabashed Star Trek fan, and whose theme for her
post-pandemic novel, Station Eleven, “because survival is insufficient” is
drawn from one of the multiple Star Trek spin-offs.
In some ways, Station Eleven is also the
post-apocalyptic world of Mandel’s career. After writing three literary novels
with noir elements, she realized “I was I danger of getting pigeonholed as a
crime writer. I just wanted to write something completely different.”
Setting a story in a world devastated by a pandemic
wasn’t the first thing that came to her mind. But while considering a story
about a theatrical troupe, she began to think about all the things we take for
granted in our modern world. Things as seemingly simple as flipping a switch to
bring the lights on in a building.
“It’s both fascinating and terrifying to think about
the fragility of these systems. What would we miss, what would we hold on to
and try to recreate if all the trappings of civilization fell away? It seemed
to me that one of the things that’s best about this world is the plays of
Shakespeare.”
Now with a theme that combined her original idea about
theater with a post-apocalyptic take, she was left to decide how to bring the
world as we know it to an end.
Nuclear war? Maybe. But her “most unexpectedly
fascinating research” was in the history of pandemics. Shakespeare’s work and
life, filled with allusions to plagues that killed close family members and
closed theaters, leaving his company of players to wander in the countryside,
led her to consider an older, grimmer human fear that war: the millennia-long
dread of disease.
So, Mandel opened Station Eleven with a
performance of King Lear while in the city outside the theater, a
strange disease raged. It would kill 99 percent of the Earth’s population, but
leaves a few, including a child actress onstage in King Lear at moment
zero, to carry the continuity of pre-plague theater to the survivors.
Is it because “survival is insufficient?” Or because,
ironically, the end of the world as we know it is never really the end?
***
Cronin’s journey through apocalpse: The
Passages & beyond
Justin Cronin seemed like a man released from a long
incarceration when he appeared in Dallas in 2016 to discuss the release of the
last book of his Passages trilogy, The City of Mirrors. “I
basically spent the last 10 years locked in a room, he said, finishing what her
termed the “2,000-page novel that his three apocalyptic volumes – The
Passage, The Twelve, and The City of Mirrors – comprise.
Not that seeing publication of the final book of the
series of about medically-induced vampires, the havoc they unleash on the
world, and that world’s ultimate redemption (or not – no spoilers here!)
necessary means the end of the story.
And not that he started out as the writer of books
garnering not only critical and popular accaim but what were rumored to be
multi-million-dollar advances. After writing two very literary, very
grownup-award-winning novels in the early 2000’s, his daughter Iris, then in
the third grade, dared him to write the book she wanted to read. One that would
be about a girl who saved the world. And it had to have a character with red
hair, “because she’s a redhead.”
Although he was then writing another book, Cronin and
his daughter passed stories about this world-saving, red-haired girl back and
forth. When he typed his notes, they came to 30 single-spaced paged that “wow –
looked a lot better than the thing I was writing. . . my agent and I sent it
out under a pseudonym because it was so different.”
Different as in “genre” instead of his previous
“literary” fiction.
“I don’t think genre is a bad term,” he said. “But
there is a difference between work that is constructed mainly to entertain and
a book meant to endure. The difference is in the depth of characters.” (Such
depth that the appendix to The City of Mirrors lists more than 60 named
characters.)
Texas author Larry McMurtry’s magnum opus, Lonesome
Dove, was a great influence in writing “really long books in which a lot of
people die,” as Cronin described his own trilogy. As well as a revelation that
“a book could fall within an established genre and still be a wonderful book.”
***
And there you have it, some reading suggestions to
carry through a few more weeks of our own (hopefully not apocalyptic) pandemic.
Let me know what your personal pandemic favorite reads are, and I’ll be back
with more suggestions about what to do online.
