43 pages • 1 hour read
Michael CrichtonThe Andromeda Strain
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Andromeda Strain
The alien organism is an important symbol in the novel. The Andromeda Strain proves more powerful than the combined intellect of Earth’s best scientists, defying their attempts at containment and analysis. The alien organism symbolizes the limitations of human knowledge. Initially, the Wildfire team treats its existence as a novelty, an intellectual curiosity. They are interested in studying the alien life-form because they believe their understanding of the world will allow them to quickly categorize and deal with the crisis. This assumption is swiftly proved wrong. The scientists struggle to deal with the reality of the situation, and they make mistake after mistake as they fail to come to the correct conclusion about the alien organism. The team’s sheer number of errors and failures sketches out the boundaries of human understanding. A simple, tiny alien life-form defeats a America’s greatest scientists. They never truly understand the nature of the Andromeda Strain; all their diagnoses are based on assumptions and theories, demonstrating the limited intellectual ability of the human race.
One of the main theories presented by the Wildfire Project is that the Andromeda Strain is a messenger from an advanced alien culture that exists on a distant planet. The alien’s role as a messenger suggests that human technology is far, far more limited in scope than whatever else exists in the universe. According to this theory, an alien race has engineered a simple organism that reaches out to distant civilizations. Humans, by contrast, cannot even deal with this simple messenger, let alone the alien race. If the Andromeda Strain is a messenger, then it shows the characters how much they have to learn before they can communicate with an alien race without facing an existential threat.
Finally, the Andromeda Strain emerges as the winner. By the end of the novel, the alien organism is floating above Los Angeles, and the humans accept there is nothing they can do. The organism’s lording position above the city represents humanity’s subservience. The world can do nothing but stare up at the alien organism from below, limiting its technology, grounding its spaceflights, and admitting defeat in trying to understand the universe.
The Birds
When Shawn and Crane arrive in Piedmont, birds circle overhead, waiting to feed on the corpses on the street. Shawn and Crane both notice the birds when they arrive in Piedmont, which demonstrates the extent to which the scientific community is trained to pay attention to the small, seemingly irrelevant details. This is especially true of the members of the Wildfire Project. By the time Stone and Burton arrive, the birds are no longer circling. They are eating the dead bodies. Their descent represents the passage of time between the two teams’ arrivals. Stone immediately calls for the birds to be killed. He is a ruthless, uncompromising man, but his decision represents the stakes of the situation. The birds cannot be allowed to live if there is any chance that they have been contaminated. The crisis demands close scrutiny, from both the grunt sent out to retrieve the satellite and the lead scientist on the Wildfire Project.
The birds also represent the inclusion of literary symbolism in a seemingly dry bureaucratic report. The book is presented as a report on the strange events following the satellite’s arrival in Piedmont, but details like the circling birds suggest that the report is more than just a dull, by-the-numbers account. Circling vultures are a traditional fictional trope that signify looming danger. Their presence represents the idea of death looming over a place or a situation. The birds’ presence in Piedmont is a literary flourish hinting that the story of the Andromeda Strain is more than a simple government report.
The birds also represent the scientists’ ability to make errors. Stone arrives in Piedmont and orders the extermination of all the birds. However, the image haunts him. He is not bothered by the moral quandary of killing animals, but he does worry that the birds’ presence means he has missed an important detail. The thought bothers him as he runs experiments. The birds become a symbol of the way data functions in the real world. Every detail in an experiment is an important piece of evidence that must be understood. Stone thinks about the birds in terms of their physiognomy, wondering whether their tiny bodies and fast heartbeats hold the clue to the puzzle he is trying to solve. Stone never truly solves the riddle of the birds because the Andromeda Strain defies human understanding. Ultimately, the birds serve as an important symbol of the limitations of even the smartest minds.
The Wildfire Facility
The Wildfire facility is one of the novel’s most distinct symbols. It represents the sheer difficulty of the situation facing the scientists as well as the innate flaws in the mission. The facility is located entirely underground. The descent into the lowest, most secure laboratory parallels the descent into hell. The difficult sterilization process, and the complexity of passing from one level to another, mirrors Dante’s journey through the circles of hell in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The colors, the lighting, and the pain endured by the scientists as they make this descent makes the experience particularly arduous, foreshadowing the difficulty of the challenge ahead. The scientists will go throw hell to try and understand the alien. Like Dante’s attempts to understand good and evil, however, the scientists eventually discover that their innate humanity makes such an understanding impossible. All they can do is observe. They cannot combat the alien organism, just as Dante cannot fight back against the demons of hell.
The facility is designed to be the most secure structure imaginable. Its architects adjusted every minute detail to ensure no organism could ever escape from the laboratory. The scientists must be willing to sacrifice their lives for the mission, so a nuclear bomb is placed beneath the structure which can be detonated in case of emergency. However, all the planning goes wrong. The organism escapes, the nuclear bomb threatens to do more harm than good, and key architectural details like the limited availability of key stations nearly undermines the entire project. The facility represents humanity’s arrogance. The scientists thought they knew how to control any alien substance, but they fail at their first opportunity to do so. Like the circling birds and the unknowable Andromeda Strain, the ineffective Wildfire facility symbolizes humanity’s failure to accept its limitations.
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By Michael Crichton
