The Andromeda Strain

The Andromeda Strain is the Chinese translation of The Andromeda Strain, a 1969 science fiction novel by the American writer Michael Crichton, and the work that made his name. The book imagines that a satellite launched to probe for extraterrestrial microorganisms crashes near a small desert town in the western United States; when rescue workers reach the town, they find almost all the residents dead with no visible wounds, and only an old man and an infant survive. A crisis involving an unknown pathogen that could sweep across America unfolds from there. The U.S. government immediately activates a top-secret contingency plan called "Wildfire," sending the survivors and samples into a sealed laboratory five levels underground in the Nevada desert. A team of scientists must identify the nature of the pathogen, understand why it killed nearly everyone in the town yet spared these two, and find a solution before the pathogen mutates and escapes. The book is interspersed throughout with memos, project proposals, charts, and laboratory procedures, presenting every stage of scientific decision-making in a near-documentary style. The title "Dead City" comes from the devastation of the town; the work was adapted into a film of the same name in 1971 and won the Seiun Award in Japan for Best Translated Long Fiction.