Aaron's Book of the Week :: The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

The Book of the Week is The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, in honor of Mr. Crichton, who passed away last week at the age of 66.

Michael Crichton was a Harvard-educated doctor who found fame and fortune as a writer. His books have sold well over 100 million copies, and an even greater number have seen the films and television shows he wrote, directed, or produced. Crichton enjoyed success with suspense stories set in the corporate world (Rising Sun, Disclosure), historical fiction (The Great Train Robbery, Eaters of the Dead [filmed as The Thirteenth Warrior]), and medical dramas (Five Patients, TV's ER), but throughout his career science fiction has been his bread and butter. Among other SF premises, Crichton has given us a deadly disease from outer space (the BOTW), berserk robots and nanomachines (Prey, the film Westworld), an alien spaceship on the ocean floor (Sphere), cloned dinosaurs (Jurassic Park, Lost World), a time travel story (Timeline), and a politically charged thriller about global warming alarmism (State of Fear, famously denounced by Al Gore in Congressional testimony).

The Book of the Week is the first paperback printing of The Andromeda Strain (1969). The story was adapted to film in 1971, and again as a miniseries in 2004. The Andromeda Strain is often described as Crichton's first book, but in fact, Crichton had previously published a mystery novel and a series of sexy thrillers under pseudonyms. You will see one of those next week.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad

The Book of the Week is my recently acquired first edition of Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad, published in 1969 by Walker & Co., cover art by Jack Gaughan. A classic example of near-future social science fiction published within the SF genre (and almost entirely unknown outside the genre), Bug Jack Barron tells of the clash of wills between an immensely popular TV talk show host and a billionaire monopolist. This will remain science fiction satire until the day Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates get really angry with each other.

Bug Jack Barron was a deliberately outrageous and controversial example of the 1960's "New Wave" of science fiction. The first edition of Bug Jack Barron proudly includes a cover blurb from renowned editor Donald A. Wollheim, denouncing the book as "depraved, cynical, utterly repulsive and thoroughly degenerate." The British New Wave magazine New Worlds published a shortened version of the novel, prompting a debate in Parliament over whether to withdraw government support for the magazine.

Bug Jack Barron was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel of 1969. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five was also a nominee for the awards, but both novels lost out to our last Book of the Week, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

The Book of the Week is the first printing, paperback original of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin (cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon).

I couldn't bear to have BOTWs about Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing without mentioning Ursula LeGuin. One excuse often heard for excluding an author like Atwood from the science fiction genre is that her books are really about social issues. In fact, social science fiction has long been an important sub-genre of SF, and since the 1960's Ursula LeGuin has been its greatest practitioner.

First published in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness is perhaps the best example of LeGuin's unique brand of social / feminist SF. (Next week's BOTW will be another interesting example of social SF from 1969.) The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel of 1969. It is set on the planet Gethen (also called Winter, because it is perpetually cold), whose people have no gender most of the time, becoming either male or female for only a few days each month. Everyone is alternately male or female in different months and anyone can thus be a father and/or a mother. The result is a society absolutely devoid of sexism or gender barriers. The novel is told from the point of view of a visiting envoy who is a "normal" human, and begins with the immortal opening line: "I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination."