The Andromeda Strain

Vintage Hardcover Novel - PREY Michael Crichton 1st Edition ...

Michael Crichton was a wildly successful novelist–The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, just to name two of his many books. But one of those books, Prey, suggests to me that he never came to terms with his own religious impulses.

We Are Not in Control

Try as he might, Crichton could not let go of the notion that human beings are destined to control their environment (“Ye shall be as gods”). We have no need of God: we will eventually learn how to iron out the rough spots.

But it was those rough spots that Crichton wrote about; and he never shook off the observable truth that people–even scientists!–make very inadequate gods. The promised utopia never gets past the breaking-the-eggs stage.

Prey made me pity Crichton. The man had too much integrity to set up phony-baloney fictional utopias. Reality kept crashing in.

He had the courage to face it, but not the wit to answer it.

Image result for images of life science fiction movie

Hey, we saw a cool science fiction movie yesterday, a nice and scary one–Life, which we rented from amazon.

The ideology of unbelief dictates that life be found on other planets. Somehow that’s supposed to prove there is no God. You’d have to ask them how that works. Although I wouldn’t bother.

But if there were… this movie shows you what might happen.

“Oh, boy, Martian soil samples! Why, look at that–a little tiny organism… let’s see if we can wake it up…” Cue to Colin Clive in Frankenstein, screaming exultantly, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

Actually, messing around with alien organisms seems like it would be a very bad idea. Somebody on that space station should’ve read The Andromeda Strain. But they do screw around with it, they just can’t help themselves, they give it a cutesy-poo nickname–and of course it winds up loose, and sets about killing everybody there. It’s sort of a half-octopus, half-starfish that gets bigger and bigger and smarter and smarter with every victim it devours.

And everything goes wrong. They should’ve watched Jurassic Park before they left earth. All these carefully thought-out protocols and procedures, all the bright ideas of scientific whiz kids–well, the Martian monster doesn’t know and certainly doesn’t care about any of that.

I really didn’t notice who was in the cast. All the characters were too busy trying to stay alive, and had no time to devote to personal issues. I can say the film was well-acted, well-directed, fast-paced, and with a straightforward cinematography that didn’t make my wife seasick, watching it. A very effective study in suspense punctuated by frantic action.

Again and again the movies we make tell us that our science isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and warn us to proceed with caution. On some level, we know this!

And yet we never listen. It’s not Martian monsters that devour us, but bright ideas and clever societal innovations dreamed up by blockheads hailed as sages.