In Sphere, a case is made for “you can’t predict who is going to go crazy”, for which reason Crichton makes every member an unreasonable asshole.Ĭrichton’s writing is both clever and clumsy. A bit similar to what Jeff Vandermeer would do later with Annihilation (2019). Anyway, as the group starts arguing about things they find on board, the story turns into a psychological thriller about anxieties, group dynamics and caving under pressure.
The characters are really flat and basic, though. They aren’t very professional about it – pushing buttons on a whim and taking stupid risks, but this is by design by Crichton. So, a psychologist, zoologist, mathematician and astrophysicist enter the spaceship and find strange things. The reason for all the commotion is the discovery of a crashed spaceship on the bottom of the ocean, possibly hundreds of years old. Norman Johnson, psychologist, is flown to a remote location in the Pacific Ocean to team up with a small group of other scientists, under the leadership of the US Navy. Sphere is Crichton’s version of a first-contact story, somewhere along the lines of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961) with regard to the inexplicable alien intelligence, but waffle-ironed into the shape of a modern-day archeological sci-fi thriller. These are the books your dad read (alternated with the latest Stephen King). Producing a whole collection of airport novels that were almost invariably opted for Hollywood adaptation before the paper even hit the shelves. He’s basically the father of the techno-thriller (which is SF that involves the President).
Never fully adopted into the science-fiction family, yet immensely popular whist straddling the two worlds of sci-fi and the mainstream thriller.
0 kommentar(er)
