The Andromeda Strain

"This was the first science thriller I ever read. I remember thinking it was the first book to make real science so exciting. The plot is a little village that has been wiped out by a strange illness. Nobody knows what the disease is, and the book examines how scientists solve this puzzle. People die horribly, no one understands the organism responsible and there is a strange creepy factor that it comes from outer space. Simply that he puts more attention on the technology than on the investigation. The illness is medical, but he takes a closer look at how scientists would go about doing the research. There is a behind-the-scenes look at medicine and science that I don’t remember ever seeing before that novel. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He was a tireless researcher when writing. He would spend a couple of years just doing the research before he started to write. I think that’s what gives his books such a sense of authenticity. I do. I try to be as accurate as possible, although everyone makes mistakes. The funny thing about mistakes is that you don’t know what you don’t know. So you put the error down and you don’t stop to look it up, because you assume you know it. That is when you make mistakes. Oh yes! There are some things I am not comfortable with. One of them is details about automobiles. Whenever there is an error in my books, it usually has to do with cars. I have learned to shy away from errors about guns. Now I am very non-specific when I talk about them. When you become too specific, that is when you trip up. I have gone back into the autopsy room to make sure I remember what I learnt in medical school. When I wrote a space thriller called Gravity I spent two weeks with NASA. When a book is highly technical it requires a lot of extra digging. I approached my time with NASA as an anthropologist. When you walk onto a campus like the Johnson Space Center you are entering a different culture, and a large part of translating that into good fiction is getting the culture right. How do these people think? What is their attitude towards science? How do they talk? They have a different language, and nailing that is really important."